How raw is “raw”? If you take a long exposure in a dark room with a recent iPhone you can see the long exposure shake being removed and the picture coming out a lot sharper than it should. Would a “raw” version of that photo be a traditional long exposure or would it be the clever stacked image but with less post sharpening etc? Or is the raw even a short video sequence? (that would actually make the most sense)

I have an iPhone11 but not sure that has the raw option.

If you use a third-party app like Camera+ to shoot RAW, then it is the raw, completely unprocessed sensor data as a DNG file, like any DSLR. Shooting RAW on the ultra-wide camera in a dark environment results in a completely unusable image.

If you use the iOS camera on an iPhone 12 or newer and enable the "ProRAW" option (which is shown as just "RAW" in the camera), you get a processed image, but with the data used as a base for the processing intact for re-processing when you edit it.

It wouldn’t make any difference in this instance, all the computational stuff still happens.

I just took a long exposure on my 12 Pro and purposely moved the camera around a bit and my phone produced a sharp RAW image.

That's the definition of a non-RAW image.

Recent iPhones (and many Android phones) have optical image stabilization; an element in the lens moves to compensate if the phone shakes during the exposure. Very new iPhones (and some Android devices) also have sensor-shift image stabilization, which moves the image sensor.

These features are also available on many dedicated cameras and interchangeable camera lenses.

I don't have an iPhone but I've always been shooting RAW on my phones and then processed the photos in LightRoom. As soon as I use one of the "lenses" on my phone (like "night shot" or "panorama" or even "wide angle"/"tele") I only get a JPG. The RAW file is only created when I shoot using the basic camera. This is the case for my current OnePlus but also previous phones (Google, Nokia).

You actually can't. The RAW an iPhone will give you is highly, highly processed.

RAW just means uncompressed, unlike JPEG or HEIF. You can still manipulate a RAW image.

>RAW just means uncompressed

This is not accurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format

A) I'm not sure what nit you are picking, RAW formats are typically not compressed, and if they are (I haven't encountered any personally) they would be losslessly compressed. They certainly aren't quantized.

Edit: ok here's some lossless and lossy compression of RAW. IMHO, "lossy compressed raw" is an oxymoron. https://photographylife.com/compressed-vs-uncompressed-vs-lo...

B) the context is whether a raw photo can be "manipulated" in any way. The answer is a resounding yes. See: Darpa MediFor project. Search for work by Siwei Lyu (I'm on mobile and don't feel like digging through the links, there's tons of published work out there)

> I'm not sure what nit you are picking

RAW photos are not “just” uncompressed versions of the JPEGs your camera usually gives you. That would be a TIFF. Rather, they contain raw sensor data.

Yes I'm aware, I've had to debayer imagery from industrial cameras and worked on media forensics. I think we are on the same page but commenting past each other.

The problem is vendors all seem to have their own definition of what RAW means nowadays. But the typical meaning is one with the raw pixels via color filter array (eg bayer8), and need debayering (to get the usual rgb8).

You can have raw/Bayer Tiffs, I've worked with them. So the file format is not enough, you gotta know the image encoding.

"RAW just means uncompressed" yes that is technically wrong, but the point I'm addressing is "You can still manipulate a RAW image" and "without the painting-like qualities of its default image processing." It does not matter what the color encoding is, you can still do painting-like processing. I've literally worked on detectors that detect manipulation of RAW, Bayer array images. This is not theoretical.

I guess what I am saying is, Apple giving the user a raw/.dng file is not a guarantee you are actually getting the ADC output straight from the sensor.

Really, the operant question is "what is the processing provenance of this image".