Quick Summary
Apple has introduced an improve to the engine that handles RAW pictures, with large enhancements on the playing cards.
These will include RAW 9 as a part of iOS 27, and had been introduced as a part of a developer session at WWDC26.
Apple has overhauled the engine behind RAW pictures on iPhone, and the before-and-after examples proven throughout a developer session at WWDC 26 (by way of 9to5Mac) recommend it may outperform what devoted skilled cameras produce straight out of the field.
Shooting in RAW means the unprocessed information is saved straight from a digital camera’s sensor relatively than a compressed JPEG, which permits photographers to push publicity, color and white stability a lot additional in modifying with out the picture falling aside.
(Image credit score: Apple / Future)
Apple builds this processing into the working system itself by way of its Core Image framework, and the pipeline already is aware of how one can deal with the quirks of practically 800 totally different digital camera fashions, from third-party mirrorless our bodies to iPhones’ personal sensors.
That pipeline is getting its ninth rework with iOS 27, arriving alongside macOS 27 and iPadOS 27 later this ‘fall’. Apple engineer David Hayward introduced RAW 9 during the session “Enhance RAW image processing with Core Image,” describing it as the company’s biggest step forward yet in this area.
You can watch the full session on the Apple Developer site should you wish to, but in a nutshell, RAW 9 will see a single machine-learning model handling both sharpening fine detail and stripping out noise, running on the iPhone’s Neural Engine chip.
What will RAW 9 be able to do?
The session had some examples to show what RAW 9 would be capable of too, including a Canon 5D Mark III image of a crayon box captured at ISO 51,200, a setting that usually leaves colour data a bit of a mess.
Apple’s outgoing RAW 8 engine salvaged the scene to some degree, but RAW 9 cleanly separated out each individual crayon colour, right down to capturing the shine on their surfaces.
In a second example, embroidery yarn shot on a Fujifilm X-T5 presented sharper lettering and far cleaner texture under the RAW 9 system.
That’s not even the best news though. RAW 9 will work with existing RAW photos already sitting on your phone, so when iOS 27 lands later this year, those photos will be able to be reprocessed and you might be surprised with how much better some shots could become.