How Two Photographers Transformed Raw Photo Support on MAC
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Two photographers improved raw photo support on Mac, enhancing the user experience for photography enthusiasts.
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If you're shooting RAW it's because you want to edit the photos in the kind of tool that will never be natively included in the OS. Otherwise shoot JPEG (or whatever format the iPhone shoots because universal standards are never good enough for Apple)
Raw photos probably are shot in DNG. DNG "images" are popular for raw images because theyb can be losslessly converted from to the camera raw formats like the Nikon's, and DNG is open source and royalty free.
JPEG is almost as outdated as SMS.
JPEG is good enough, not encumbered by IP concerns, and universally supported. That makes it better than an alternative that is "better" in a less important dimension but worse in broad support.
The article says:
> photographers can take full advantage of Apple’s fantastic RAW engine, even when Apple itself does not support a RAW file, which is, unfortunately, a common problem for photographers using macOS, of which there are many.
And I’m also curious about how this RAW engine is fantastic even when it doesn’t support a RAW file. I guess people who actually shoot RAW can answer that. (I shoot JPEG on my camera.)
Every camera manufacturer has their own RAW format. Apple produces a general-purpose RAW engine that can process many of those formats, but not all of them, and with a few notable misses, as noted in the linked article. The RAW engine is considered pretty good, fast/efficient, but overly aggressive on some of its defaults (noise reduction to the point of detail loss). The native Photos app also doesn't have many advanced RAW tools for editing the RAWs.
I posted my current workflow in a sibling - basically, I use Photomator for edits (Lightroom competitor, now owned by Apple) and Photos for library management and sharing. Works fine for me as a enthusiasts, but unlikely to work for a professional (and probably not for enthusiasts who like tinkering with their photos more than I do).
Currently, I'm using Photomator alongside Apple Photos. Workflow is roughly... - Import photos from camera into Photos - Edit photos in Photomator - Share photos to Shared Library in Photos
Wife will also share her photos via Shared Library so I can edit.
For non-professional this works well. Native file library integration (including shared library and shared albums), edit across all OS variants (iOS, iPadOS, MacOS), and Photomator is as close to native as you can get today (they're owned by Apple).
Select files in Finder, option + double click on them, and you have many photo files accessible in a single Preview window.
Finder supporting thumbnails for newer cameras is a pain but it's not all that normal to browser your archives in Finder either.
https://home.camerabits.com is a commonly used tool for browsing photographer/files and editing metadata. I've used it for ingesting and selects since 2005. Almost everywhere I've ever worked has used it to some degree.
After ingestion, you would import to Lightroom or Capture ONE for processing and finally you export to jpg or a generic usable format and size.
I’m a long-term Nitro user, picked up a new camera (Pana S5iix) a few weeks ago and found myself really disappointed with the quality on one specific shoot. Daylight, low ISO - technically super “clean” raw files, but Nitro was struggling with detail and weird artefacts in the shadows.
I never expect DeepPRIME or Topaz level processing from it - but something about the image seemed off. Fired up an alternate software and sure enough, even with 0 corrections applied, side-by-side Nitro looked noticeably worse.
I much prefer the local-first workflow, and I split my time editing roughly evenly between my M1 iPad and M4 Mac. Nitro was an absolute game-changer for my workflow as I could dump photos to my iPad right after a show, cull and get preliminary edits delivered in the cab home, then seamlessly switch to my “big” setup. Guess I need to buy a laptop now :(
I think the sweet spot for both the camera manufacturers and photographers are JPEG XL and other newer, standardized formats. They allow the camera to „bake in“ the secret-sauce color science while retaining headroom for editing thanks to 16-bit channels and such.
Both the apps + people (Nik & Shan) are new to me. I like supporting indie devs and their apps, and seeing their success, so I might support them. Esp. with Adobe and their yearly subscription for PS / Adobe CC (groan).
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