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Indigo RAW + ColorPerfect in Practice
I’d like to begin by showing several images processed with Indigo RAW + ColorPerfect.
The results genuinely surprised me:
• very natural color reproduction
• extremely wide and usable dynamic range
• smooth tonal transitions without harsh sharpening
• an overall “camera-like” rendering rather than a typical mobile look As a landscape photographer who enjoys mountaineering and long hikes, this combination has fundamentally changed how I think about equipment. Carrying heavy camera bodies and lenses into the mountains has always been a trade-off between image quality and physical burden.
With iPhone + Indigo + ColorPerfect, I’m now achieving results that, in overall image impression, often rival—or even surpass—what I get from most traditional cameras, especially when weight, flexibility, and shooting conditions are considered.
Even when using ColorPerfect’s generic camera profile, the output quality is already extremely high. While some colors still benefit from minor manual refinement, the baseline is remarkably strong.
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Comparing the RAW Pipelines on iPhone
To better understand where this performance comes from, I’ve been working with three distinct RAW pipelines on the iPhone, each with different design goals and trade-offs.
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1. Apple ProRAW (48 MP and 12 MP)
Apple ProRAW provides very wide dynamic range, but it is deeply intertwined with Apple’s computational photography stack (Smart HDR, Deep Fusion, tone mapping, sharpening).
From both third-party analyses and my own observations, ProRAW appears to use different internal pipelines depending on output resolution:
• 48 MP ProRAW appears to allow sharpening to be fully disabled in Lightroom by setting sharpening to zero.
• 12 MP ProRAW, however, still shows visible residual sharpening even when sharpening is set to zero, suggesting that some sharpening may be baked into the data.
I am not a RAW pipeline expert, so I would greatly appreciate confirmation or correction on this point. If these two ProRAW resolutions indeed follow different processing paths, there may also be additional differences (noise reduction, tone mapping, spatial processing) that are not immediately visible.
For this reason, I plan to submit both 48 MP and 12 MP ProRAW ColorChecker captures, clearly labeled and separated.
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2. Standard RAW (DNG – ~12 MP only)
Standard RAW provides the most physically direct representation of the sensor output. The rendering is honest and natural, but image quality is limited by the intrinsic capabilities of the small mobile sensor—particularly in terms of noise control and usable dynamic range.
It is also important to note that Apple does not expose a full-resolution 48 MP Bayer RAW path via the standard RAW API. As a result, standard RAW output is limited to approximately 12 MP.
This format reflects the sensor’s true baseline performance without heavy computational intervention.
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3. Indigo RAW (~12 MP only)
Indigo RAW represents a very interesting middle ground.
Technically, Indigo continuously captures Bayer RAW frames via Apple’s RAW API and, at the moment of capture, aligns and stacks up to 32 frames before outputting a linear DNG. This approach prioritizes signal accumulation over aggressive spatial noise reduction or sharpening.
In practice, Indigo RAW offers:
• exceptionally wide dynamic range
• significantly reduced noise through multi-frame stacking
• restrained sharpening with natural texture retention
• smooth, camera-like tonal transitions
Although Indigo RAW is currently limited to ~12 MP (due to the same Bayer RAW API limitations), its perceived detail often rivals much higher-resolution ProRAW output because fewer sharpening artifacts and less texture destruction are present.
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Long Exposure and Manual Control: A Key Difference
A particularly important capability is that Indigo can output RAW in a true long-exposure mode while still allowing manual control of exposure parameters (ISO and shutter time).
By contrast, Apple’s native camera can produce RAW using long-exposure / Night-mode style processing, but the exposure decision is essentially automatic, without photographer-style manual control of shutter speed and ISO.
To my knowledge, Indigo is currently the only non-Apple camera app on iOS that can produce RAW under long exposure while still letting the user manually set shutter speed and ISO.
This specific combination is extremely valuable for real-world work such as astrophotography.
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Request: Supporting iPhone 16 Pro Max RAW Pipelines
Based on these findings, I would like to request support for the iPhone 16 Pro Max across:
• three rear camera modules (each treated as an independent camera), and
• the following RAW pipelines:
• Apple ProRAW (48 MP and 12 MP)
• Standard RAW (DNG, ~12 MP)
• Indigo RAW (~12 MP)
I am currently preparing ColorChecker captures for all three camera modules across all formats, under controlled daylight conditions, and will submit them clearly labeled and separated.
Given the results already achievable with a generic profile, the potential with proper characterization feels extremely promising.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this, and for all the work that has made workflows like this possible.
