About The Shot – Reeflex RAW

This photo of a dock at the local boat launch is, well, really not that exciting, but as a test of how good Reeflex is at capturing a RAW photo, it’s very exciting to see the result. The photo was shot in ProRAW, which applies Local Tone Mapping (LTM), or the computational stuff that Apple adds to their image pipeline. That means SmartHDR, Deep Fusion and Noise Reduction were added to the DNG file to produce a photo that would need little to no editing, or as Apple said when they presented ProRAW to the world in 2020, it gives us a head start in the editing process.

When editing a ProRaw file in an app that is capable of doing so, you have the option to decrease the LTM, or dial it down until it’s completely removed from the image. In the case of this photo, I turned LTM off and worked with the DNG file as it was shot. This took the image from a wall exposed shot to one that was considerably darker so I had to drastically increase the exposure to the point where it was maxed out, which happened to be right where I needed it. I then did some very subtle adjustments to colour, contrast, highlights and shadows, finishing off with a very slight bit of sharpening and noise reduction and there you see the final result.

There is detail throughout the whole tonal range of the image and no indication of any “halo” effects as a result of sharpening. The photo may look grey, but that’s the way it looked out there when I took it. The cloud cover was heavy and it was very cold – not exactly a beautiful day.