Apple iOS 10 to provide support for RAW shooting

We were quite impressed with Apple’s iOS 10 announcement at WWDC this year and it was easy to tell that many of the features did come from a number of other mobile operating systems as well. Apple went big with 3D Touch support and even went open with many of its apps and services. Still then, the rushed presentation left many looking for unannounced features, some of which began to surface online after the SDKs and developer firmware were released. Now, CNET reports that Apple has added RAW support to its iOS-powered devices as well. Not much has changed with the iOS 10 camera, except for a couple of elements being reshuffled to different parts of the camera viewfinder’s interface. The source however points out that things have changed under the hood as the programming interface now lets camera apps retrieve RAW photo data from the camera hardware. This does not mean that Apple may enable a RAW shooting mode on its iPhones and iPads when the final version of the software launches in September. But it does provide third-party app developers to obtain RAW data from the camera hardware, which means that they can come up with a RAW shooting mode in their apps. This would be a move similar to iOS 8 where Apple opened up developer access to hardware camera settings like manual focus, ISO and more, which have now been implemented in many third-party camera apps. RAW images do allow users to tweak the sharpness levels and more, to their liking as compared to an photographs processed by Apple’s standards. But then there are problems to do with space as RAW files are much heavier compared to processed JPEGs from the standard Camera app. And this is more to do with Apple devices since most of them come with limited internal storage. Google began supporting RAW photography from Android 5.0 Lollipop.