Photos RAW engine is aggressively smoothing and ruining RAW images
I know there's a lot of unjust controversy right now about iPhone XS skin smoothing (actually, it's just aggressive noise reduction). Well, it turns out the Apple Photos RAW engine is guilty of the same thing.
Compare these 100% crops from both Apple Photos and Lightroom. Both are 100% unedited. No noise reduction applied by me. The camera is a Sony a6000 at ISO 4000 and RAW only, not RAW+JPEG. Both images exported out of their respective applications as uncompressed TIFF files.
If you select both files and A/B them using QuickLook, the difference is shocking. The Photos version literally looks like a bad JPEG. You might be thinking that this is indeed just Photos own JPEG preview, but no, it looks this bad in Edit mode too. The ISO noise is *gone*, and with it, most of the fine detail. That should be MY decision to make. Please Apple, honor the original sensor data. Also the color detail from Photos is poor.
I wish I had figured this out *before* uploading 700GB of RAW files to iCloud and paying $9.99 for the 1TB plan. My own dumb fault. Guess I'll be cancelling that plan immediately.
Lightroom TIFF (50MB)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/idrpccppvfe8bej/raw_adobe_lightroom.tif?dl=1
Photos TIFF (22MB)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mpjfd9flf95gmuh/raw_apple_photos.tif?dl=1
Original RAW (25MB)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nf74fm94ceu9cj1/DSC00944.ARW?dl=1
I've submitted feedback to Apple. Just thought I'd post my findings here to see if anyone else has experienced this.
