I take a lot of photos. Usually I pack either a Sony A7R2 or a Leica M—two cameras with massive sensors and brilliant lenses. But lately, I’ve been shooting exclusively with the iPhone X, and have found it absolutely excellent. I am the design half of the team that makes the iPhone app Halide, which is a camera app with manual controls and, most importantly, RAW capture. RAW is a file format that holds an incredible amount of information. We’ll get into the details later, but first let’s show what you can do with it. RAW affords you editing freedom. Absolute freedom to change the colors and white balance of a photo, or recover too-bright highlights and too-dark shadows. However, as awesome as RAW is, it’s important to know RAW isn’t a magic “enhance” button. Some of our users sometimes reach out with confusion about their RAW images looking worse than a regular capture from the stock camera app. It’s helpful to understand how a RAW file is fundamentally different than JPEG, to fully understand the tradeoffs. So What’s a RAW file? Think of the process of taking a photo as three steps: 1. A sensor captures light 2. Software translates..