iPhone Now Shoots RAW. Here’s What a Portrait Photographer Thinks.

Picture this: you’ve picked the location, met up with the model, and you’re ready to shoot — and then your camera dies. There’s probably nothing more soul-crushing. As a photography enthusiast, maybe you’re not in the habit of doing a gear check before heading out, and you don’t have the budget for a backup body. So what now? Why not give your phone a try?

Take the iPhone, for example. Apple’s recent iOS 10 update now supports RAW-format shooting and image processing on the iPhone 6s and newer. I downloaded the wildly popular Camera+, an app capable of capturing RAW files with incredibly detailed manual parameter controls.

Every photo in this article was shot on an iPhone and post-processed entirely in Lightroom Mobile.

Tips

Plenty of ambient light. Due to the size limitations of a phone sensor, high-ISO performance is terrible. So when picking a shooting location, go for daylight and outdoor settings with abundant ambient light. Shooting RAW in a dim indoor space is a waste of your phone’s storage — it’s utterly pointless.

Manually set your parameters. Even though the iPhone’s native camera only shoots in auto-exposure mode, it tends to blow out highlight detail every time.

For me, the priority is avoiding clipped highlights and preserving highlight detail. Since I’m almost always shooting in bright sunlight, this demands a “high shutter speed + low ISO” combination.

RAW files processed in Camera+, VSCO, or the more professional Adobe Lightroom Mobile, then exported as JPEGs — the results are genuinely impressive. So how do you actually pull it off? Once the RAW file has been processed in your editing app, the exported JPEG takes a moment to save into your Camera Roll. Keep your battery topped up, and be patient — we’re talking about the difference between a 20MB file and a 1MB file.

Speaking of file sizes, it goes without saying: you’ll need plenty of storage. I shot 400 photos, and it ate up 6 GB.

Once you’re done shooting, if the photos need serious retouching, transfer them from your iPhone to the desktop version of Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop via a USB cable. Once imported, you can go ahead and delete them from your phone.

As you can see, to preserve highlight detail, I have to minimize exposure as much as possible — “underexpose rather than overexpose,” and yes, this rule applies to phone photography too. Maintain a certain level of contrast in your composition while shooting.

The iPhone camera’s specs: actual focal length 4.15mm, fixed aperture f/2.2. I can only control ISO and shutter speed. When shooting outdoors, as long as I avoid including the sky in the frame, the dynamic range usually stays within manageable limits.

Indoors, stick to the “low ISO + long exposure” rule to keep the image clean. That said, in harsh direct sunlight, highlight clipping is inevitable.

Here’s an example of a high-contrast scene: the RAW file looks very dark straight out of the camera, but it faithfully preserves the highlight detail on the skin. Shooting in an industrial environment, you can push the blues slightly and lean into a moody, dark atmosphere.

One last thing — about filter presets. I’ve saved some free presets at natephotographic.com. Of course, everyone has their own taste, so go ahead and save some of your own presets too.