iPhone 14 Professional comes with a 48-megapixel wide-angle rear lens for the primary time on an iPhone. It’s the primary improve in megapixels because the iPhone 6s in 2015, which got here with a 12-megapixel rear digital camera. Nonetheless, the one option to take a 48MP photograph with iPhone 14 Professional is to make use of ProRAW or third-party apps – however I want I may take compressed 48MP images utilizing Apple’s Digicam app.
How the iPhone 14 Professional makes use of its 48MP digital camera
You could ask your self: If the iPhone doesn’t take 48MP footage by default, how does it use the brand new lens?
To place it merely, Apple makes use of a course of referred to as “pixel binning,” which mixes knowledge from 4 pixels into one. It is because utilizing all 48MP requires way more mild, which is usually a draw back for images in low mild situations. With pixel binning, iPhone makes use of the 48MP sensor to take a 12MP image with higher high quality and fewer noise.
The corporate has additionally launched a brand new 2x zoom within the iPhone 14 Professional’s Digicam app that crops the unique 48MP picture to end in a 12MP zoomed photograph. This enables customers to digitally zoom in with out shedding definition and with out having to change to the telephoto lens with 3x zoom.
Since picture recordsdata with 48MP decision are a lot bigger than these with 12MP decision, Apple has restricted how customers can take footage with the brand new sensor. Should you actually need to take a 48MP image, you could allow Apple ProRAW within the Digicam app.
RAW vs. non-RAW
For these unfamiliar, a RAW photograph is mainly the unique picture captured from the sensor, with minimal or no post-processing. It comprises all the info about issues like brightness, shadows, and colours that may be edited later in picture enhancing software program like Adobe Lightroom. Due to this, a RAW picture file will be 15 occasions bigger than a compressed picture.
Whenever you don’t have RAW enabled, the digital camera takes the image after which removes a few of this knowledge to end in a smaller file that takes up much less house.
Many iPhone fashions can take RAW images with the assistance of third occasion apps. Because the introduction of the iPhone 12 Professional, Apple has applied this characteristic natively within the iOS Digicam app with Apple ProRAW. Now with iPhone 14 Professional, Apple has determined to tie the 48MP decision images with ProRAW.
The issue, as you’ll be able to think about, is that these images take up lots of house within the iPhone’s inner storage. Apple says that every 48MP RAW file will be roughly 75MB. After all, solely actual “professional” customers find yourself enabling this feature, however everybody ought to be capable to make the most of the total 48 megapixels of the iPhone 14 Professional digital camera.
48MP compressed images
I actually want I may take 48MP images with out bloating my iPhone’s storage as a result of the one option to simply achieve this is by enabling ProRAW. However why does it matter? Properly, I did some experiments to indicate you all how images taken with 48 megapixel decision are noticeably higher, even when compressed.
You possibly can see among the outcomes beneath. The pictures have been cropped so you may get a greater have a look at the small print:
Right here’s one other instance that exhibits the extent of element in a 48MP photograph, even after compression:
For that, I used a Shortcut created by developer Gabriele Trabucco (through Vadim Yuryev) that rapidly converts ProRAW 48MP images to the HEIF (Excessive Effectivity Picture File Format) compressed format. HEIF is a codec formally supported by Apple that’s able to preserving the nice high quality of photos in a lot smaller recordsdata.
Whereas every 48MP RAW file in these examples is about 60MB, the HEIF-compressed model is barely 3.2MB – lower than the three.3MB of the 12MP JPEG picture.
For movies, iPhone customers can select between taking pictures in 720p, 1080p, or 4K. So why not supply the identical possibility for taking images? I’m positive that lots of customers would select to take footage in 48MP decision regardless of the compression.
Plus: I need to do away with Good HDR
Since I’m speaking concerning the iPhone digital camera, right here’s one other factor that annoys me so much: Good HDR. It is a characteristic launched again in 2018 with iPhone XS that makes use of AI to reinforce images by making quite a few post-processing changes. Keep in mind the “Beautygate” of the iPhone XS? That was Good HDR’s fault.
However again then, Good HDR wasn’t as aggressive as at the moment, and customers may nonetheless flip it off. Since iPhone 12, Good HDR can now not be turned off by customers. Whereas Good HDR tries to enhance images, it finally ends up ruining a few of them by making them extraordinarily unnatural.
I’ve seen lots of people just lately complaining about footage taken with iPhone, and even I now not like among the footage I take.
YouTuber Max Tech has made a terrific video displaying how iPhone 14’s Good HDR lags behind in comparison with the post-processing of the just lately launched Google Pixel 7 Professional.
I perceive that post-processing is essential to compensate for the restrictions of the {hardware} (on this case, the small digital camera lenses and sensors), nevertheless it has reached some extent the place a few of this post-processing is simply an excessive amount of.
If somebody from Apple is studying this, please convey again the choice to show off Good HDR. I don’t need to need to take RAW footage simply to make the most of the 48-megapixel decision or to keep away from this extreme post-processing.
However what about you? Do you suppose Apple must convey extra choices to the native iPhone Digicam app? Let me know within the feedback beneath.
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