This video shows the power of Apple ProRAW and Night Mode combined

Iphone 12 Pro Pacific Blue Iphone 11 Midnight Green Side By Side Black
Iphone 12 Pro Pacific Blue Iphone 11 Midnight Green Side By Side Black (Image credit: Christine Romero-Chan / iMore)

What you need to know

  • Apple has added its ProRAW photo format to iOS 14.3 beta 1.
  • Matt Birchler recorded a video showing what ProRAW and Night Mode can do when enabled together.

Apple's recent iOS 14.3 beta release brought with it our first chance to test its new ProRAW photography feature. In simple terms, Apple ProRAW will combine the editing capabilities of the standard RAW format, while also allowing the use of computational photography like Night Mode. And the results are pretty impressive.

While this is still only the first beta release of the new ProRAW feature, things are looking positive. Sure, apps have let us capture in RAW before, what that meant things like Night Mode were disabled. This video by Matt Birchler illustrates that point brilliantly by comparing an image taken in Apple ProRAW and another taken in standard RAW using the excellent Halide app.

Check it out.

The results speak for themselves. The standard RAW images are unusable, while the ProRAW ones were already pretty great. A little tweaking here and there and things improved yet further.

There's no telling when Apple ProRAW and iOS 14.3 will be available to the public but this is already shaping up to be the go-to feature when the update lands. Especially if you're going to be taking photos in the dark!

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.