Apple ProRAW and Affinity Photo for iPad

[1wayofdoingit]

Hi everyone, my first post. I’m looking to purchase Affinity Photo for iPad, but there’s one thing I need to know before I do, and that is — will the app be updated to support Apple ProRAW and if so, when? I’ve checked the list of changes in the fifth build of Affinity Photo 1.9 for iPad but couldn’t find anything which referred to Apple ProRAW.

[DM1]

I’ll be interest in the mods answer too. I'm guessing that as Affinity Photo already utilises apples raw engine decoder, if Apple enable decoding of proraw using their own raw decoder then  Affinity Photo  will also be using it. A quick look suggests it’s just another dng raw format containing more data and larger file size.

[Lee D]

Hi @1wayofdoingit,

Welcome to the forums.

Apple ProRAW files can be opened in the current version (1.8.6) Affinity Photo for iPad as our app uses the RAW engine that Apple includes in iPadOS. I've seen a couple of posts that report that some of the files are opening over exposed but not all and as it's a RAW file it can be adjusted.

[1wayofdoingit]

Thank you for the welcome 👍.

I’d noticed that apps such as Darkroom, Pixelmator Photo and RAW Power have recently had updates to add support for Apple ProRAW and just assumed that Affinity Photo for iPad would be no different. I must admit that I am a little bit puzzled as to why the aforementioned apps have all required an update but Affinity Photo for iPad apparently does not?

[DM1]

10 hours ago, 1wayofdoingit said:

. I must admit that I am a little bit puzzled as to why the aforementioned apps have all required an update but Affinity Photo for iPad apparently does not?

Probably just a marketing strategy on their part. Apple are updating their Raw engine all the time to cater for new cameras. I'm guessing Affinity just loads up that 'updated' engine when needed.

[Carson]

The new ProRaw format did come with new editing tools with iOS 14.3. In the native editing app one is called Brilliance which is called Tone Map in Raw Power raw engine. Same with ProCamera editing. Tone map didn’t appear before 14.3. It opens up shadows and brings back blown highlights in an amazing way. There are other tools too. Talking to Gentlemen Coders, some of these ProRaw editing features are proprietary Apple algorithms and are used by third party apps with permission I guess. 

Yes, I can open a ProRaw in Affinity Photo and edit it but it starts out very off. An update like other apps have gotten should fix this. Affinity is different than any other mobile apps I’ve used so there might be more to it. We’ll see but for the current it is much harder to get stellar results in Affinity than another editing app for me for the initial raw edits.