Photography is one of my hobbies and with the new 12 MP camera in the iPhone 7 Plus I was eager to try it out. Usually I haul my Nikon D810 full frame DSLR but sometimes you just want to bring something light and convenient. With the ability to shoot RAW images I have more flexibility later on when editing images and that is what this post is about.

I assume you have read everything about the iPhone 7 already so I won’t go into a big review mode here. What I will do however is to show you what you can get out of the RAW files if you are up to some editing.

Shooting RAW files with your iPhone requires a third party application such as RAW from 500px (my portfolio there BTW) or Lightroom Mobile. The built in camera app won’t shoot RAW files for you.

The first three photos was shot using Lightroom Mobile, the rest was shot using the app called RAW from 500px. After that I used the desktop version of Lightroom to edit these photos. I used the same technique as I normally do when editing images from the DSLR.

Reduce highlights & increase shadows.

Add contrast and some clarity.

A little vibrance.

Noise reduction & sharpening.

Lens corrections.

This is my basic editing workflow, the images was shot hand held.

iPhone 7 Plus Photos Edited From RAW files

These are 100% jpegs exported from Lightroom. Click on them to get the full size. Scroll down to download the original DNG files .zipped if you want to try your hand at editing yourself.

Download original iPhone 7 Plus RAW files

If you want to check out the unprocessed RAW files yourself I made a little .ZIP file for you with all images shown on this page. Download away and play with them if you want to.

iphone7-plus-raw-image-originals – 140MB

iphone7-plus-raw-image-originals-part2 (three first pics) – 40MB

Final Verdict

The camera in the iPhone 7 is not bad at all but it cant compare to a real DSLR of course. What surprised me was how much I could adjust in post processing. I didnt think that the RAW file had that much dynamic range.

If you print some of these images, hang them on a wall you wont see much difference. If you pixel peep you will see that the iPhone 7 camera still have a long way to go compared to a real DSLR. It is very noisy in my opinion. I will take noise over JPEG artifacts though.

With that said, I am impressed.

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