Shooting RAW
When you shoot with the standard iPhone camera, the phone silently makes thousands of decisions on your behalf. It combines multiple frames into a single image for better shadow recovery. It makes the sky a little bluer, brightens faces, and smooths out grain. It decides how much to sharpen and how aggressively to compress.
None of that is bad and it often produces a great-looking photo. But those decisions are baked into the JPEG before it ever reaches your camera roll. There's no undoing them, and there's no going back to ask "what if I'd processed this differently?"
Your Digital Negative
Analog photographers keep their film negatives. Not just the prints. Because the negative is the original. Everything you develop from it is a choice, and you can always go back and make a different one.
RAW files are the digital equivalent. The term DNG stands for Digital Negative, and that's exactly what it is: the raw sensor data from your iPhone which is untouched and waiting to be developed however you like. Halide has always worked in DNGs, and the Photo Lab we introduced in Mark III is built entirely around unlocking what's inside them.
What RAW actually gives you
A RAW file leaves all of those decisions to you. It captures more information than your iPhone screen can even display - details l that would be clipped in bright highlights, textures that would be lost in deep shadows, and color data that a JPEG simply can't replicate.
Blown highlights? They're often recoverable. Slightly underexposed? Pull it up in the Photo Lab without reducing the image quality. Want to apply a completely different Look to a shot you took last week? You can, because the original data is still there.
The RAW toggle
The RAW toggle lives in the toolbar on the left side. When it's on, every shot saves a DNG alongside a preview JPEG. You don't get two separate shots in your camera roll; they're stored together. When the toggle is off, you get a JPEG only: smaller file, no negative to develop later.
Our recommendation is to leave it on. Storage is cheap, and you can't go back and add a RAW after the fact. The one time you wish you'd kept the negative will more than justify the extra storage space.
The RAW toggle. When enabled, Halide saves a DNG alongside every shot, stored together in your camera roll. No digging through menus is required.
Process Zero and the Looks
When Halide develops your RAW file, it uses Process Zero as the foundation. Process Zero is Halide's own minimal processing engine, designed to produce a beautiful result from raw sensor data without the heavy-handed smart edits of the standard iPhone camera. Think of it as the equivalent of a well-made optical print from a film negative. It's accurate, detailed, and free of any artificial enhancements.
All of the Looks you explored on Day 2 are built on top of Process Zero. Each one starts with that foundation and layers a distinctive character on top of it. This is why Halide's Looks feel different from standard photo filters: they're not applied to a JPEG that's already been processed. They're developed directly from the raw data.
ProRAW and the Apple Look
If you're shooting with the Apple Look on an iPhone Pro, Halide captures a ProRAW instead of a standard Bayer RAW. ProRAW is Apple's own format. Unlike a standard RAW, it's not raw sensor data. Instead, it's closer to a processed image - it combines multiple frames with Apple's smart edits already applied. What makes it special is that it keeps significantly more data than a JPEG, so you can still adjust white balance, exposure, contrast, and more in the Photo Lab. It's the best of both worlds: Apple's computational photography but with room to develop the result yourself.
Lesson 4: We'll open the Photo Lab and walk through the Quick Edit pane. This is the fastest way to develop a RAW straight from capture.