Sebastiaan de With

Freelance designer, photographer, motorcycle

traveler. Designer of Halide.
Feb 1 · 17 min read

The Power of RAW on

iPhone, Part 2: Editing RAW
This is the second in a series of posts on RAW
photography on iPhone. I previously wrote
about what RAW is by explaining a little on how
cameras work, how you can use RAW, and what
some key tradeoAs of using RAW are. New to
this series? I suggest you start there.

I’m the design half of the team that builds

Halide, a camera app for iPhone. As a result, I
take — and edit — a lot of photos on my iPhone.
This guide will walk you through the basics of
RAW editing and adjustment. Most of these
pointers also apply to editing RAW Iles from
other cameras, but some parts focus on iOS edit-
ing workMows and how to transfer your RAW
Iles from your iPhone to your Mac or PC.

Most of Halide’s (and other iOS RAW camera

apps’) RAW shots come out fairly ‘Mat’, as they
are basically designed to give you maximum
editing freedom instead of looking punchy right
out of the camera. My workMow is typically to
edit them a bit and share them:

You can get instant, dramatic results out of editing

RAW Bles. They really allow you to bring out the shot
you wanted to get.

Editing RAW Iles can be done right on your

iPhone, or on your Mac or PC. But we’re getting
ahead of ourselves: the editing process starts as
soon as you are done taking photos and start re-
viewing your shots.

Before you edit

You’re about to jump into a creative
process where your options rapidly
multiply to millions of possible
outcomes.
Since editing is time-consuming, whittle down
your shots Irst. Select your best photos, then go
through that selection again, more critically. Are
these really the best shots? Great. Let’s get start-
ed.

Before I start editing a photo, I like to at least

commit to a certain mood I’m trying to nail
down.

Let’s take this shot from the Irst article. I asked

myself, “Why are you editing this shot?”.

In my case, I was walking down to get dinner

when I was surprised by some really beautiful
sunset colors in the sky. I saw orange and purple
light casting over the entire city, and looking
left, the sheer warmth and vibrancy of twilight
struck me.

Unfortunately, my image came out of my iPhone

looking dull and overexposed in the highlights 
— the sky was very bright.

That’s not how I saw it. I wanted to edit it to look

more like the way I saw it when I walked down
the hill, and also slightly exaggerate the eAect to
better convey how beautiful it was in person.

The result:

I skewed the white balance a bit towards purple,

and applied some split toning to get the same
impression I got when I was standing there tak-
ing the photo. Therein lies the parallel between
image editing and acting: it’s best to slightly
overdo it, as long as it doesn’t overtly distract
from what you’re trying to communicate.

Know thy Edits

When editing photos, there’s a slew of sliders,
knobs, buttons and levers. We can break these
down into three basic groups.

Brightness and Contrast

The Irst thing I tend to edit in an image is get-
ting the exposure right. It’s important to get ex-
posure right when you are shooting*, but
nobody’s perfect, and there is more to exposure
than just the amount of light on the sensor.

In an image, I consider the ‘true exposure’ to be

the image roughly as I saw it. The human eye
has an impressive dynamic range, which means
that it can see lots of detail in bright areas while
still being able to see details in the shadows.
Digital cameras haven’t quite caught up yet, but
that’s nothing our tools can’t Ix.

*more tips on how to shoot and camera settings in

a future article.

A good Brst step of editing is to adjust the image so it

corresponds more to the dynamic range our eyes are
accustomed to.

Some people go as far as to do multiple expo-

sures and merging them into what’s called an
HDR image (HDR stands for ‘High Dynamic
Range’). Your iPhone occasionally does this as
well, when you are shooting a subject against
some backlight. It’ll automagically merge several
shots to get more details in the highlights and
the shadows.

For our RAW edits, we won’t go into that; the

tools we have work plenty well without addi-
tional shots.

Let’s bring up this image:

With a slight exposure correction, it looks a bit

better. But we’re losing some detail in the back-
ground here.

We can adjust the light levels in speciIc regions

of the greyscale image. They’re Blacks, Shad-
ows, Midtones, Highlights and Whites. Adjust-
ment of these can be done individually with
sliders, or on a continuous curve, which is called
a Curves adjustment. Your editing app might
have both!

Here, we push down the highlights and whites

while pushing up the shadows. Be careful with
pushing up the shadows excessively: not only
can it look jarring, it will also bring out a lot of
unwanted noise. Pushing up the blacks can give
it a very washed out look — fun for stylistic pur-
poses at times, but not what we want now. I Ind
the noise kind of cool looking in this shot, so
we’ll go all-in on boosting the shadows.

Here we go, with color adjustment:

As we are pushing the limits of what we can recover

from shadows, noise starts to become bothersome. I
don’t mind it in this case; it looks nice. But the more
you boost shadows, the more prominent noise
will become.

Contrast to the original image, and you can see

we got something closer to what I saw in the Irst
place. 90% of my edits are simply making the
image look more like what the naked eye can
see.

Notice that this can all be done in greyscale, if

you prefer. This Irst step of editing is all about
getting the basic shadows and highlights to the
right place before we move on to color.

Addendum: some apps o6er more 7ne-grained

adjustments of contrast than just a global contrast
slider. There’s a lot of di6erent names for this:
Clarity and Structure are among the popular
terms for it.

Essentially, Clarity is an adjustment of local con-

trast: it adjusts the contrast where a dark area of
the image meets a lighter area. Sometimes these
tools can be used to give the image a stronger ‘pop’
or bring textures forward. Use them sparingly: ex-
cessive local contrast adjustments produce halos
around dark objects, leading to jarring results:

This embedded content is from a site that

does not comply with the Do Not Track
(DNT) setting now enabled on your
browser.
Learn More about Medium's DNT policy

SHOW EMBED

There’s a great subreddit about images like this:

/r/shittyHDR. Let’s all makes sure that none of our
images end up there, OK? OK.

Color
Color might seem like a minimal adjustment. Ei-
ther your colors are more vivid, or they’re less
vivid. There’s far more to editing colors than
that.

As I mentioned in the Irst post, the big advan-

tage of shooting in RAW is the freedom of adjust-
ing white balance. The white point in an image
determines the cast of all the colors in a shot, so
being able to customize it gives enormous cre-
ative freedom.

The a RAW Ble (left) straight out of the iPhone with

two diNerent white balance settings; warm and cool.

In this sample image, the camera captured the

image slightly warm. Most cameras have a bias
towards cool or warm; the newer iPhones bias
slightly warm. This tends to look more pleasant,
so I often skew warm in my edits as well.

White balance and color adjustments make the mood.

On Instagram.

In this shot, I pushed it towards cool a bit, while

also moving the white balance from pink to
green a bit more. It helps establish the mood in
the shot, and mirrors the lighting conditions; the
Muorescent bar lights are fairly cool.

I also slightly adjusted saturation and vibrancy.

Vibrancy is a clever tool: not all apps have it. Es-
sentially, vibrancy adjusts the intensity of muted
colors that are not already highly saturated.
High vibrancy will bring out those muted colors
more, while leaving saturated colors alone pre-
venting over-saturation.

Two other creative color tools I use are selective

color adjustment and split tones.

Selective Color. We’ll use Lightroom for Mac in

this example. Lightroom’s selective color adjust-
ment panel is called ‘HSL / Color / B&W’. HSL is
short for Hue, Saturation and Lightness, and it
lets you adjust individual colors in the image
along those axes. We’ll stick to the HSL tab for
now.

In this image, I adjusted the hues of red, orange

and yellow to make a warmer looking image,
and saturated them a bit more. I then comple-
mented it with boosted blues. I left the lumi-
nance alone.

You can shift a color substantially, but not to a

completely diAerent shade. I tend to only shift it
slightly; for crazy color swaps you’ll need a tool
like Photoshop. Also, keep in mind that pushing
the luminance of a color down increases its satu-
ration, and pushing it up reduces it. You’re es-
sentially pushing that shade closer to white
light.

Remember how I mentioned 90% of my edits are

just to make the image look like what I perceived
with my naked eye? Selective color adjustments
are perfect to let you tweak individual colors so
they look ‘right’. Don’t get too caught up in wild
adjustments; try to make it faithful to the mood
and look of what you shot.

Split Tone is an interesting tool that many

novice users are blown away by. Once you have
used it, you can’t help but see it everywhere: in
major motion picture color grades, in graphic
design, and in almost every nicely edited photo
you come across. Excessive split-tone editing
was the basis of some of Instagram’s early Ilters,
giving it the signature aged Ilm look.

A moody capture, made stronger by enhancing colors

with split tone. On Instagram.

With a split tone adjustment, you assign a tint to

the highlights in your image and a tint to the
shadows — preferably contrasting tints like yel-
low highlights and blue shadows. This gives the
image a color contrast, which is visually interest-
ing and pleasing. It changes the entire look!

I’ve pushed the saturation of the split tone to the

extreme in the leftmost shot to illustrate how
split tone adjustments color the scene.

Split tone exaggerated for educational purposes. Don’t

try this at home, kids.

With split tone, I was able to tint the light inside

to a cooler tint while giving the light outside a
warm purple tint. It reinforces the emptiness of
the scene, and works with the warmer light
sources of the street lights and the blueish laun-
dromat lighting.

As usual, be conservative with this edit. You can

usually control the power of the split tone ad-
justment as a whole, and you should be careful
not to make it obvious. The best edits are the
ones that people don’t notice at all.

Addendum: There’s a lot of companies selling

packs of presets you can use to instantly get a par-
ticular ‘look’. If you enjoy these, try recreating
them now that you know about these particular
tweaks. It’s fun, and you can often get better re-
sults since you are the best judge of what your im-