iPhone RAW photos are *way* too dark in OS Photos

Go to photo settings on your iPhone and turn off ‘View Full HDR’ and you’ll see all your RAW photos darken to the equivalent they would on other devices or when exported to JPEG.

My suspicion is that apple adds their computation (ie different exposure settings shot at once, then added together into one photo) to make it look great.

Once we open the pictures in any editing software it just gives us the „main picture“. So that one exposure setting it used for the majority of the picture.

My (hopefully just temporary) workaround is for now to create a editing profile in Lightroom and just throw that over all the ProRAW pictures I take.

It works quite well (in most cases even better than the iPhone processing) but I would really like to not have to do this arguably time consuming step every time I want to take a great picture with my iPhone.

So Apple: it’s a problem that came up with iOS 17/MacOS Ventura/… please at least give us an option to keep your computation.

This issue has been driving me nuts since I bought the iPhone 15 pro max in September 23.

If you are importing into Lightroom, and perhaps other processing programs, in the Develop section, you need to change the profile from Apple Embedded Color profile to Apple ProRaw. Your image will now display a perfectly exposed image as taken by the camera. They were not underexposed by about 2 stops after all.

What a relief!

[Edited by Moderator]

Yes - Lightroom for iOS (with Adobe Creative Cloud)

Another workaround is the „HEIC Max“ Setting in the Camera since iOS17.

It gives you the full 48MP but not the RAW Format.

Meaning, there’s less data saved in the picture but it still gets the sharpness of 48MP.

Also not as good as ProRAW as it was before but at least a good „middle path“ (also saves a lot of memory).

You're not looking at a raw. Nobody does. A Raw is a sensor dump from the camera. What you see is the jpeg preview built-in to the raw. The point of shooting raw is to process them and make images better than the Jpegs your camera creates. If you're not doing that why are you shooting raw?

I took a ProRAW photo on my iPhone 15 PRO (actually the first PRO model I have gotten as I wanted to play with the telephone lens and the ProRAW files), it was uploaded to my iCloud Photo Library and both the original version and the one I edited on my iMac look exactly the same as far as brightness/darkness. From what I have read elsewhere the ProRAW files have additional information appended to a standard Adobe DNG file (yes Apple uses Adobe DNG as the basis of their RAW and ProRAW files) so perhaps that is what other apps can't properly read. I would assume that uploading/downloading from iCloud Photo Library as opposed to using AirDrop fro one Apple device to another would not make any difference.

The answer is to process your raws. If you're not doing that then just stick to shooting jpegs.

In Settings you can make HEIF Max the default „Pro Mode“ then that’s just a click away in the camera app.

Because the ProRAW Mode on the iPhone is the only way getting the full 48 Megapixels of the Pro Camera. The details are so much better than in 12MP Jpg mode.

Also one does want to edit these pictures in more detail than possible with JPG - however from the baseline the iPhone gives me, not the underexposed one.

I hope this gives you some context in which you can be helpful and help us solve the issue ant hand instead of giving unasked for and unconnected advice on how to use the iPhone.