The 48-megapixel ProRAW photos on the iPhone 14 Pro are changing the rules of the game

When you look at this photo, your first reaction may be that it was taken with a camera with a wide-range zoom lens. It has a lot of detail, and it’s obviously a close-up, so you might think it was shot on a periscope lens if it’s a smartphone or a zoom camera.

But what if I told you this photo was taken with a 24mm wide phone camera, and not just what if I show you that it’s actually just a small snip of the original photo that actually looks like this:

We cut out a small part of the original photo

Holy cow! Yes, it actually is the new iPhone 14 Pro, and in the last few days I’ve been messing around with the new 48MP ProRAW files and I’m delighted with the amount of detail you get. This new 48MP resolution quadruples the standard 12MP files, and you should definitely give it a try. While other companies have been using even higher resolutions for years, I’ve noticed that in many photos, the 48MP files from the iPhone actually looked better than the 108MP it jumps out of its biggest competitor, the Galaxy S22 Ultra.

The difference may vary depending on what you’re shooting and how you do it, but it seems like 48 megapixels on an iPhone can sometimes give users more detail than 108 megapixels on other phones (and let’s not forget that Motorola has just shipped a 200MP camera phone, and we’ll be covering this topic in more detail soon.) We are not yet going to compare it in more detail with Samsung’s Expert ProRAW program, but it was impressive enough to note it.

But if you’re already in the iPhone camp, you probably don’t care too much about other phones, you want to see what that means to you, and whether you should start taking 48MP ProRAW with each photo now.

Well, let me give you some examples that convinced me that 48MP is an absolute must-have for those exceptional photos that you want to remember. The above images could also make you consider the option of blowing up iPhone photos for printing and hanging them at home, which was not possible with the 12MP resolution we’ve had so far (iPhones, however, were able to capture high definition panoramic photos). good for printing for years).

Compare iPhone 12 MP details versus 48 MP ProRAW (in cropped images):

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I must admit that I was not expecting this kind difference, but the image above speaks for itself.

But while I want you to start recording 48MP RAW now, I have to warn you there is a bit of a learning curve. Put simply, ProRAW is a bit of a hassle. First, each captured photo is approximately 80MB in size (we have several photos that are 120MB, movie size). This is about 10 times the size of a regular JPEG file, and most people won’t want to keep these files around, and if you want to share them with the world, you’ll need to process them first, which takes extra time and effort.

I have my own routine which I have perfected and it is very fast. Here’s my process: I run these files through the popular VSCO camera app which supports the Apple ProRAW profile (Lightroom, Halide, and the others do this too, and they’re just as great). After importing a 48MP file into VSCO, I can just export it instantly and in seconds you get a very detailed JPEG file or you can start tweaking it, but remember you don’t really have to as ProRAW’s built-in profile does it for you already.

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And because I was delighted with the results, I continue my mission to convince you that ProRAW 48MP file recording is absolutely it’s worth it now and will never go back to making 12 megapixel JPEG files.

The faces of the girls sitting in the cafe are proof in themselves, but also look at the blades of grass and how much more detail you get with these files. It’s like shooting it with a completely different camera.

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As any RAW shooter will tell you, the details in the ProRAW file below may be a bit soft, but you can fine-tune them easily by sliding the slider and get a nice and sharp photo, just with as much detail as you will never download a JPEG file to your iPhone about 12MP resolution.

However, please note that you can only record 48MP files in 1X mode. ProRAW files at other focus distances come out as 12MP images and do not use high resolution.

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One of my pets has been teasing iPhone cameras for years has been the artificial over-sharpening that manifests itself as a kind of glow around the edges of objects in photos, and look at this, the new 48MP mode gets rid of that as well.

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Even in low light, the benefits of a high resolution file are enormous. While there is a slight grainy noise from time to time, the sheer amount of detail in these files more than compensates for it.

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However, if your models aren’t as still as this statue, you should be warned that 48MP files process for about a second or two after you press the shutter button, enough to make you miss that one special moment or that one cool move.

And that would probably be the second reason you might want to stick with 12MP photos (the first is obviously the hassle of RAW processing). In the regular 12MP mode, you can simply fire up Burst Mode, taking dozens of photos in the time it takes for your iPhone to process just one RAW file.

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Here is one more example that will convince you of the power of the new camera mode in the iPhone 14 Pro.

So what do you think about it? Are you ready to dive into ProRAW files now that the 48-megapixel resolution really makes it worth it, do you think it’s too much of a problem?