Shooting raw lets me save a few percent of photos where exposure is a little wrong. This is huge on its own, and you mention it.
It also lets me stretch things and make scenes work which would otherwise exceed the dynamic range of the exposure and the built in tone mapping would guess wrong.
Storage is cheap these days. If you're not doing something boost-shooting/burst intensive, why not shoot raw? Most of the time the result will be the same, and occasionally it will let you do much more.
And, here, IMO, the rant is particularly off base. A big part of ProRAW is being able to have big linear HDR stacks, which is immensely powerful and absolutely will let you do things you couldn't do any other way.
So of course RAW doesn't make for better photos, but for original input data to do your own edit on. If you don't know how to edit, you're probably better off with the experience/work that the manufacturer put into the in-camera presets.
In my opinion the main advantage is that RAW files save the full color-depth info _and_ RAW files are not gamma-mapped (i.e. linear encoded), that enables all of your use-cases above. You would still get 90% of that advantage if you were to demosaic, color correct to a profile-connection-space but keep the linear encoding and original 12-16 bit depth, even if you were to compress that data via DCT/JPEG to save space. That's sort of what ProRAW is.
- Sharpen/noise reduction: If you want to avoid over-denoising and over-sharpening you need RAW, there's no way around it. I find Apple's rendering (and most other phone makers) distasteful. Anything above ISO 800 is just trash on JPG but pretty good on RAW. It's the reason I left my Canon G10 and later S100 on the drawer years ago when the iPhone started shooting RAW.
- Dynamic range (latitude, for old folks like me). If you want detail on the sky and on the shadow under the rock on a sunny day, you need RAW. Also, no other way around it. Magic-AI-Smart-Auto-HDR+ can sometimes help but it's comical at most others. Distributing the tones is part of the creative process.
>Camera gear and RAW are just tools and will not make your pictures better
Oh yes, they will. That camera doesn't matter motto never dies, it seems. Tools are extremely important. They don't work on their own, of course, but are definitively part of the equation.
Since we're on HN, a good analogy would be that because all computers are Turing Complete, they are all equivalent and you shouldn't worry with specs, OS, languages, editors, compilers, etc.
While one can make an interesting sports event shot with a pin-hole you can't use it to freeze someone in mid-air, etc, etc. I think you get the point :)
I've attended a lot of photo meets, and if I had a dollar for every shooter who showed up with the latest and greatest gear, only to post poorly composed, poorly lit, overprocessed dreck weeks later...
I think a better analogy is bicycles. You can have the fanciest, lightest racing bike in the world, but if you're not a trained athlete it's not going to help you much. If you are a trained athlete, you can crush nearly any amateur with a $150 bike from Walmart. All other things being equal, gear matters. It's rare that all the other things are equal, though.
Fancy cameras on phones are awesome, but what I really wish they'd give us is the ability to control off-camera lighting.
Getting out with friends meant having to go back home after the first jump (usually less than a kilometer away) because the chain derailed, the brake will block and so many horror histories.
When I went to the bikes workshop to fix it,just looking at the weak frame they refused telling me that if they did fix it, it will break again and be responsible. So I had to fix it myself. In practice it meant replacing the entire bicycle part by part.
I bought an expensive bicycle later that never derailed or blocked or anything in its entire life using it every day.
Sometimes expensive gear can save you an enormous amount of time.
Obviously, if a camera is defective and it prevents you from making shots you may want a more costly, reliable camera that will not fail on you when you need it.
But I can assume that at some point, when you add to the cost of a bike, you no longer buy reliability. You may even reduce reliability as components are getting lighter and more frail and difficult to replace/repair.
All else being equal, I like reading books printed on good paper. But good paper will not make the story interesting and the story will still be interesting even if printed on crap paper.
Of course, if you are an author you would like to make the experience pleasurable for your reader.
BUT.
If you are obsessing with the quality of the paper that you will use to print your book to the point that it detracts you from your work, before the story is even written yet, before you even learned to write interesting stories, you are completely misplacing your focus.
Depending on the kind of work you do you may not need to obsess over your tools and that obsession may actually hinder your creativity, when a base level of “fine” would do.
But that doesn't mean tools don't matter. They very much do, at everything that can be called craftsmanship.
This is basically a scene-referred workflow, but without any standardization (like ACES). Because all the files conform to the same transfer function, you can grade ("create a LR preset", which is just like grading just worse UX) once to create a look and then apply that look to all footage ("photographies") at once to get a very consistent look. I've said it before, I'll say it again, the movie industry has this figured out, they got standards (ACES) and tooling for this. (And, movie tools are far, far superior to any photo tool I've seen yet when it comes to color. All the photo editing tools seem to be stuck in some kind of moronic hellhole were half of them get disqualified from the start for being destructive editors and the other half has bad UX and is basically limited to an operational vocabulary straight from a darkroom).
Apart from stuff like this there are some scenarios in which RAW might still result in a better overall IQ but the JPEG engines in cameras are really, really good and for practically any scene they're fine, and even for most very high contrast scenes (like shadow + oncoming sun) they'll still produce fine images.
My understanding of is that brain works in a different way when interpreting moving and still images. In a moving image the differences from reality are much more easily picked up by the brain and so color or image distortion problems stand out much more.
Also, I think, brain is trained to some particular standards of how the moving image is shot and processed. We can easily recognize "movie" or "television" shooting and processing methods and this is starkly visible when somebody is messing with it. For example, The Fellowship of The Ring looked very strange to me the first time I watched it because of how smooth it was due to higher framerate, but at the same time I did not find it out of place for television.
Of course, using an iPhone camera for photography is always going to have limits. But I find the camera good enough for most day-to-day use cases.
This is pretty hard to do with the stock iphone camera app.
If you think your pictures are better, you are deluding yourself the same way audiophiles moan about qualities of their high end, thousand dollar per feet audio cables.
I use RAW files and full manual because I have an actual workflow where I shoot a bunch of photos in similar setting and want to be able to create Lightroom preset and apply to all photos shot with same place, lighting and exposure.
It also sometimes saves me because when I am super clumsy and forget to calculate and adjust exposure I may get a photo that is under or overexposed a lot but for some reason I still want to keep it.
No, it is not going to let you make better pictures. If you want to make better pictures here are some things that are infinitely more productive to achieve that:
- try to do some exercises like trying to move about, compose and visualize your shot before taking the photo,
- try another exercise and for 6 months only take a single photo whenever you see an occasion to make photos,
- try another exercise and for 6 months only go about with a single primary lens (I have used original Fuji X100 to not be tempted, with great results),
- try to learn zone system. Learn to evaluate highlights and shadows and adjust your exposure without any meter. Use it to make pictures you want in lighting with extremely high dynamic range,
etc.
Camera gear and RAW are just tools and will not make your pictures better.