How two photographers transformed RAW photo support on Mac | Hacker News Reader

How two photographers transformed RAW photo support on Mac

petapixel.com

64 pointsgeorgesbgt38 comments

> “The only thing I have is Preview, and I have to look at one photo at a time,” Shan says. “It’s crazy. I got fed up with it so I looked at different apps.”

Select files in Finder, option + double click on them, and you have many photo files accessible in a single Preview window.

This also works in quicklook. Highlight the photos (command-A for all of them), and press the spacebar. Then there's a "tile icon" that will show you all of them.

That functionality may exist, but I’m learning it from this comment. That is very nonintuitive and hard to discover.

I don't understand the appeal here. When Microsoft added some RAW support for Windows, I've never used it for anything except thumbnails in File Explorer.

If you're shooting RAW it's because you want to edit the photos in the kind of tool that will never be natively included in the OS. Otherwise shoot JPEG (or whatever format the iPhone shoots because universal standards are never good enough for Apple)

I thought iOS exported DNG…

iOS shoots HEIF natively I think.

Raw photos probably are shot in DNG. DNG "images" are popular for raw images because theyb can be losslessly converted from to the camera raw formats like the Nikon's, and DNG is open source and royalty free.

Natively it’s coming off the sensor like everything else, raw 8-16bit values. The OS then takes that stream and packages it into whatever, which on iOS can be a DNG, optionally pre-debayered with ai stuff in it (proraw), or just a standard, bayer mosaiced DNG, or JPEG, or HEIF, or JPEG XL.

Depending on the RAW, a conversion to DNG may not be lossless.

And unless I missed something, the default Camera app doesn't support "unprocessed DNG" - you need an app like Halide. Camera app only does JPG/HEIC or ProRAW. And as the sibling comment says, it's a confusing UX, split between the Settings app and the Camera app. Not that it matters to most users, who only need/want the default HEIC.

The OS supports it is all I was saying.

The iOS camera format control is one of the most confusing UIs in iOS. It first asks you to select between high efficiency and most compatible (HEIF vs JPEG). Then it asks you whether you want ProRAW. Then under ProRAW it asks whether you want JPEG lossless, JPEG XL lossless or lossy. That doesn’t even include the in-app control of JPEG Max (which AFAIK is just 48 MP JPEG).

It’s capable of doing so but is not the default for the built in camera app

> because universal standards are never good enough for Apple

JPEG is almost as outdated as SMS.

Old doesn't mean outdated. TCP is ancient and we still use it for a bunch of stuff.

JPEG is good enough, not encumbered by IP concerns, and universally supported. That makes it better than an alternative that is "better" in a less important dimension but worse in broad support.

JPEG only supports up to 8 bit color. It has much worse compression than more modern standards. It doesn't support alpha transparency. It doesn't support many of the modern smartphone image embedding functions (image sequences, derivatives/edited images, small movies embedded in the image).

You could make the same arguments about any of the wide variety of outdated video formats. This sort of thinking leads to a lack of progress in the industry.

8 bits and no transparency is good enough for many 9s worth of the photos people take.

I have a calibrated HDR monitor. I have a camera that can shoot in 12bit color. And what HDR support does is just cause me pain. I don't find it beneficial in games. I find it to have limited utility in video. I never need more than 8 bits when sending photos to friends or having them printed. The extra support other formats offer gives me no value.

If you want transparency you want some other format, but no camera I know of records an alpha channel.

Transparency is useful immediately for any editing. Why is that so hard to have support even if it’s unused?

Also, the other formats are useful and provide value: if you send a photo to people, the “live” portion of the photo is sent automatically for compatible receivers. It’s only beneficial.

If that’s not enough, why wouldn’t you want similar compression quality at half the file size? That really, really adds up with tons of photos.

> 8 bits is good enough

> And what HDR support does is just cause me pain. I don't find it beneficial in games. I find it to have limited utility in video.

Oh boy. You must either be using Windows or never seen photographs/video taken on modern phones/cameras and viewed side-by-side on a good modern display (such as an iPad Pro or MacBook Pro) vs. a random "gOoD eNoUgH" display.

I regularly edit (RAW) photos from a Nikon Z8 on both a M2 Macbook Pro and a Windows Machine (either desktop with good monitor or Surface Laptop Studio 2) and do not notice a difference.

A JPEG takes 1.5ms to encode and decode on my CPU, a WEBP 20ms and an AVIF 60ms.

And? Much like more modern compression algorithms for video take longer to decode/encode, this problem is largely solved by just adding accelerators since it’s basically guaranteed to be used. We do it for HEVC. I see little reason why you couldn’t do the same, especially since the HEIC encapsulated content for iOS stuff is derived/very similar to HEVC.

I’d rather them take longer to encode and take up half as much storage. The encoding time is barely noticeable, a full device is a headache.

Being locked in to TCP due to network effects doesn't mean that TCP isn't outdated.

And yet there are still use cases for JPEG specifically, because there has never been a replacement with 100% parity.

I think Apple still has aspirations to include professional-level photography in their OS so a photographer could do advanced RAW edits with just the OS.

The article says:

> photographers can take full advantage of Apple’s fantastic RAW engine, even when Apple itself does not support a RAW file, which is, unfortunately, a common problem for photographers using macOS, of which there are many.

And I’m also curious about how this RAW engine is fantastic even when it doesn’t support a RAW file. I guess people who actually shoot RAW can answer that. (I shoot JPEG on my camera.)

Apple bought Pixelmator/Photomator last year, though I have no idea what their roadmap looks like or if they plan to turn those into native apps or OS features.

Every camera manufacturer has their own RAW format. Apple produces a general-purpose RAW engine that can process many of those formats, but not all of them, and with a few notable misses, as noted in the linked article. The RAW engine is considered pretty good, fast/efficient, but overly aggressive on some of its defaults (noise reduction to the point of detail loss). The native Photos app also doesn't have many advanced RAW tools for editing the RAWs.

I posted my current workflow in a sibling - basically, I use Photomator for edits (Lightroom competitor, now owned by Apple) and Photos for library management and sharing. Works fine for me as a enthusiasts, but unlikely to work for a professional (and probably not for enthusiasts who like tinkering with their photos more than I do).

Well they shouldn’t have shitcanned Aperture then

I occasionally shoot RAW, use Apple's OSes, and primarily shoot with an OM-System mirrorless camera.

Currently, I'm using Photomator alongside Apple Photos. Workflow is roughly... - Import photos from camera into Photos - Edit photos in Photomator - Share photos to Shared Library in Photos

Wife will also share her photos via Shared Library so I can edit.

For non-professional this works well. Native file library integration (including shared library and shared albums), edit across all OS variants (iOS, iPadOS, MacOS), and Photomator is as close to native as you can get today (they're owned by Apple).

I am too worried about ballooning icloud storage to add raws to apple’s photos, but the workflow appeals to me.

Yeah, that's a problem for sure.

I mitigate by shooting JPG most of the time, only going to RAW for shots I think will need the sort of editing RAW enables. So, maybe 10-20% of my shots are RAW, at most.

And for most of those, after edits, I'll export back into Photos as a new file, and remove the original RAW. Obviously, this is destructive, so it might not appeal to you, but it does side-step the RAW storage conundrum.

OM-System provides a software to edit RAWs

MacOS only. I usually travel with an iPad.

If you're shooting RAW you probably have a processing pipeline in mind.

Finder supporting thumbnails for newer cameras is a pain but it's not all that normal to browser your archives in Finder either.

https://home.camerabits.com is a commonly used tool for browsing photographer/files and editing metadata. I've used it for ingesting and selects since 2005. Almost everywhere I've ever worked has used it to some degree.

After ingestion, you would import to Lightroom or Capture ONE for processing and finally you export to jpg or a generic usable format and size.

It's always cool to see new options for processing. Anything to bypass the Adobe overlords.

Nitro is an awesome piece of software - but the RAW demosaic is sadly far behind other solutions.

I’m a long-term Nitro user, picked up a new camera (Pana S5iix) a few weeks ago and found myself really disappointed with the quality on one specific shoot. Daylight, low ISO - technically super “clean” raw files, but Nitro was struggling with detail and weird artefacts in the shadows.

I never expect DeepPRIME or Topaz level processing from it - but something about the image seemed off. Fired up an alternate software and sure enough, even with 0 corrections applied, side-by-side Nitro looked noticeably worse.

I much prefer the local-first workflow, and I split my time editing roughly evenly between my M1 iPad and M4 Mac. Nitro was an absolute game-changer for my workflow as I could dump photos to my iPad right after a show, cull and get preliminary edits delivered in the cab home, then seamlessly switch to my “big” setup. Guess I need to buy a laptop now :(

I think the RAW philosophy is starting to show its age. RAWs were only ever intended for the manufacturer‘s first party software (AFAIK). But that software is usually junk and supports few platforms (none support mobile).

I think the sweet spot for both the camera manufacturers and photographers are JPEG XL and other newer, standardized formats. They allow the camera to „bake in“ the secret-sauce color science while retaining headroom for editing thanks to 16-bit channels and such.

Do these tools support Nikon's "high-efficiency" compressed NEF files? I suspect that they're encumbered by patents.

They do, yes.

Thanks for posting this.

Both the apps + people (Nik & Shan) are new to me. I like supporting indie devs and their apps, and seeing their success, so I might support them. Esp. with Adobe and their yearly subscription for PS / Adobe CC (groan).

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