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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

He's shooting in raw, if you do that you _have_ to post process because otherwise it'll look flat and listless because raw is capturing as much information as possible so that you can choose later how you want it to look.

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They probably mean the best image you can get without human intervention, or perhaps the image you get in your "viewfinder".

Maybe in the future photo reviews would also include the photo in the raw format?

I'm curious as to what value would that provide most end users of the content? If you're a photographer perhaps you have software for processing the raw file and you want to see what you can do with a raw file; however I still feel that for most end users this would be useless. I would be one of the few I think that may play around with this.

Wouldn't help much for a "camera review". The raw would just be a black-and-white mosaic that would look awful. What you want is the processed jpeg out of the iPhone along with the edited ProRAW. I'm not sure if the iPhone can do this but a lot of cameras can shoot in RAW+JPEG mode.

Traditional RAW* wouldn’t be a black-and-white mosaic. It just would be data. RAW’s need to be demosaiced to be seen visually, which makes it dependent on software (or algorithm).

* I don’t know about Apple’s ProRAW.

My dslr did that - every photo had a .raw and a .jpg but it rarely ended up close to what I’d get processing the raw

Sorry If I’m misunderstanding something, but aren’t both of the things you mentioned already a reality? I thought RAWs included jpeg already, and Bridge already has an option to prefer that.

RAW formats can/usually have a thumbnail/preview embedded. I convert all of my Nikon RAW files to Adobe DNG (Adobe's RAW format) and I have a Leica camera that uses DNG natively. When I convert, I can chose to have a full-sized preview embeded. This makes certain software give a faster preview.

to be clear, he's shooting in ProRAW, Apple's proprietary RAW format.

A ProRAW photo is a DNG file, using the new features added to DNG 1.6. It isn't proprietary.

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