Apple Photos incorrectly processes RAW files from Fujifilm X-Trans sensors

I am trying to process raw files from my old Fujifilm X-T10 in Apple Photos. I usually shoot raw+jpeg pairs so I'm able to compare in-camera and external processing.


Attached are two crops, one is from a jpeg file, the other is from a raw file processed by Photos. As you can see, there are quite a lot of green/magenta artifacts in the processed image. To my understanding it looks like Photos does not take X-Trans sensor structure into account and applies incorrect demosaicing algorithm.


Even when the processed images have no obvious artifacts they still look noticeably blurrier even with sharpening applied which indicates that some high-frequency details have been lost due to unnecessary debayering stage.


The Fujifilm community has been dealing with this issue for quite a long time and there are multiple software solutions of varying quality and price point that correctly process X-Trans RAF files, but I'd like to be able to use iCloud Photos as my sole photo processing and organizing tool -- for example, it's very convenient to import new images from SD card right from the iPhone with camera connection kit straight to the photo library and get them on all devices within my iCloud account without extra steps.


I am able to provide this raw+jpeg pair to the software engineering team for the purpose of refining the algorithms, please contact me directly if needed.


And yes, I know there are ways to convert RAF to correctly demosaiced DNG files before importing them to Photos. I don't want to do this because it introduces an extra step in the process and works only on the Mac and not on the iPhone or iPad.


MacBook Pro 14″

Posted on May 24, 2024 5:02 AM

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1 reply

May 24, 2024 12:01 PM in response to naorunaoru

Update: after banging my head for half a day and a phone call with an Apple representative I arrived to the conclusion that the issue is not directly related to Apple Photos. My assumption about incorrect demosaic algorithm was apparently wrong, because even RawTherapee which is supposed to work correctly with X-Trans sensors is giving me the same artifacts.


The only free tool that gave me the best results was Silkypix which is supplied with the camera by the manufacturer and even it showed some fringing which was fixed by moving "Color distortion" slider to the right.

Apple Photos incorrectly processes RAW files from Fujifilm X-Trans sensors

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