iPhone 16 pro RAW and Affinity Photo 2.6.2 [split]

[Barryt4226]

Apple MacBookAir M! and iPhone 16 Pro:

My workflow is to Airdrop the DNG (ProRaw) photos from my phone to the desktop. It's actually faster than when I import from the memory card in my old DSLR camera. That method gives me DNG files that I can open in Affinity Photo (When you use Affinity Photo to open a file from the Apple Photo library, they come in as JPEGs). Once in the Develop persona, I have changed my settings  in Develop Assistant Settings to Tone Curve: Take no Action (see the screen shot below). The photo still does not appear right to me, so I've created a preset for my ProRaw pictures in which I adjust the Contrast and Clarity to bring all of these photos to a good place. Of course, I can then make any other adjustments necessary in Develop persona. 

The biggest drawback at this point is that once you develop your DNG file, it will output only to a pixel layer. You cannot embed or link to the original RAW file. I would hope that Canva/Serif/Affinity will fix:

1. Affinity should be able to open the ProRaw files directly from the Apple Photo Library as DNG files (not change them to JPEG).

2. Do a better job on how the picture looks when opening in the Develop persona with the Default setting. There should be no need to have separate preset for my iPhone photos.

3. Enable us to embed or link the original RAW (DNG) picture once we "develop" the RAW picture and enter the Photo persona.

[Ldina]

@Barryt4226 Welcome to the forum. I feel your frustration and was disappointed that all my iPhone Pro RAW images opened as huge pixel layers instead of as linked images. 

I'm not sure this is really an Affinity issue, though it might be (partially, possibly fully, but I don't think so). Apple is doing a lot of unusual, proprietary things with their iPhone 16 Pro RAW files. They usually take multiple exposures, merge them as HDR composites, use some machine learning, noise reduction algorithms, encode them in a special way, etc. That's part of why the newer smartphones can get decent images out of such a tiny camera sensor...they rely on a lot of special algorithms, AI, machine learning, etc. If they didn't, those images would probably be garbage. Much of what Apple does is not well documented (last I checked), but I don't believe these iPhone DNG files are RAW files in the traditional sense. DNG file format is a very flexible container format that can have other file formats inside...TIFF, JPG, JPEG-XL, multiple versions, video, etc. I was playing around with it for a while after I bought my iPhone 16 Pro, but haven't experimented recently. 

A traditional RAW file is basically a table of linear light intensity values at each pixel location, encoded as corresponding voltage levels for each of the Red, Green and Blue channels in the Bayer matrix, plus a lot of extra metadata written by the camera, and probably some data tweaking by the camera OEM. Those are true RAW files and can be opened from the Develop Persona as Pixel layers, Raw Layer Embedded or Raw layer linked. I suspect iPhone DNG files have been modified pretty heavily and are encoded in a format that loses the ability to export from the Develop Persona to Photo as anything but Pixel Layers. For all I know, they aren't really "RAW" in the normal sense of the word. Some of this is speculation based on my own experiments or things I have read, so take it with a grain of salt. 

I stopped digging into Apple RAW a while back, so I'm sure others have deeper knowledge on this subject. 

[Barryt4226]

Thanks Ldina, this is good to know. My practice with my DSLR photos is to always keep the original RAW files and also the Jpegs that I develop from the pictures I like. So, for my iPhone photos, I'll just have to keep my DNG files and developed JPEG or Jpeg XL files  separately --not much different from what I'm doing now, but it'll take an additional; step.

Your great explanation about Apple's DNG processing explains why the DNG files don't look so great without any processing when I open them in Affinity Photo. Again, just an extra step in my workflow for iPhone pictures. I've got 2 new presets that I use on my iPhone DNGs; one or the other gives me a great start in post processing most of my iPhone pictures.

I wasn't getting rid of my DSLR, but the iPhone is much lighter and convenient for long walks and tours. I'll experiment and be switching back and forth to compare.

[Ldina]

@Barryt4226 Glad that was helpful (and hopefully it was mostly accurate).

Depending on your iPhone camera settings, HOW you capture and bring iPhone images into APhoto, you can get some wildly different behaviors. JPEG-XL compression was added to the DNG Spec not all the long ago (DNG v1.7?). At least with AP, JPEG-XL compressed iPhone DNG files open directly in AP as a pixel layer, rather than in the Develop Persona. If you use standard JPG compression, (larger iPhone DNG files), they open in the Develop Persona first. HEIC files always open as pixel layers.

If you import from Apple Photos, Preview, ColorSync, etc, you could end up with 8 bit, 16 bit, TIFF, JPG, P3 or sRGB encoded files, depending on the approach. You can also "Open" the exported original iPhone DNG directly in Photo. Much of this confusion has to do with the way Apple is handling their files, which is about as clear as mud, at least to me. I think Apple would prefer if you stayed within their ecosystem and avoid all other 3rd party apps.

Like you, I use my iPhone when I don't have my DSLR along, or sometimes for other reasons. I try not to maintain HUGE duplicate files, so I've mostly reverted to using Apple Photos to edit my iPhone files to get them close, using JPEG-XL encoding to reduce file size and save iPhone storage. Editing in Apple Photos helps avoid duplication of large files. If I want to do more specialized work on my iPhone RAW DNG file, I export the "Apple Photos edited" file to AP and work on it there. This, of course, is usually a large file, since you cannot Link to the iPhone DNG file. Once happy with my edit, I often export from AfPhoto to my desired file format (usually JPG, JPEG-XL or PNG). If it's an involved edit or something I know I will want to revisit, I may save my AfPhoto file for future access and tweaking, but if not, I just delete it. Full sized iPhone 16 bit images are pretty large, and I already have the original iPhone DNG file, so to avoid doubling down, I trash it (or convert to 8 bit and save the AfPhoto file). Another option to reduce large 'duplicate' files is to delete the original iPhone file and just keep the edited AfPhoto file. You can keep both, of course, but those files are large and eat up storage space. l I know this workflow is not going to work for everyone. 

Over time, I am hoping Apple becomes more transparent and explains exactly what's going on in their iPhone files, how they're encoded, what Apple Photos is doing, etc. Also, HDR is still evolving, so things haven't completely settled out yet. Hopefully, this will give you some ideas to play around with.