Mobile RAW editing. Is it OK?

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Hello All

Looking for advice here on the validity of editing on my phone. I will say up front that I'm by no means new to Desktop Editing, having been using photoshop for years. So I'm highly familiar with a lot of the photo editing principles. However, I have just moved to a Lumix GX9, and I am quite impressed with how easy it is to transfer my RAW and JPG files to my iphone. The iphone knows it has a RAW file and can happily edit it with the same options I get with JPG.

So I'm looking for general advice around that scenario really, where I want to edit and publish a photo, on my phone, on the go. Has anyone got any recent experience with a modern iphone? Is there an app that's more suitable than what comes with the phone? Is it better to finish the shot in camera and export as JPG? Is the phone even using all the extra RAW data or does it just flatten it and edit the output (without telling you that's what it's doing)?

Of course detailed editing, or anything complex I would do on desktop, but if it's just a matter of finishing the RAW and cropping, or maybe even adding a filter? What's the quality like on phone?

P.S. It's an iphone XR on the latest IOS.
 
I've been playing around with Lightroom on my mobile and am reasonably impressed. Both for phone shot raw files and "proper" photos, it seems to do a nice job. And it's nice to have the photos ready for me when I get back to the main computer too...
 
Shugpug said:
I've been playing around with Lightroom on my mobile and am reasonably impressed. Both for phone shot raw files and "proper" photos, it seems to do a nice job. And it's nice to have the photos ready for me when I get back to the main computer too...
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Ah great. Perhaps I should look at lightroom for IOS. Presumably it's the same core product as for desktop and so should be equal in quality.
 
Shugpug said:
I've been playing around with Lightroom on my mobile and am reasonably impressed. Both for phone shot raw files and "proper" photos, it seems to do a nice job. And it's nice to have the photos ready for me when I get back to the main computer too...
Click to expand...

Lightroom on mobile is pricey! Is it that much better than the native IOS software?
 
Pin said:
Lightroom on mobile is pricey! Is it that much better than the native IOS software?
Click to expand...

Lightroom is a subscription service now, has been for years. If you're going to use it then yes it's well worth a tenner a month. I mainly edit on my iPad now but it's nice to have my entire LR catalog available on my Android phone, iPad and Windows laptop so I can edit on whichever device I want.

In answer to your original question, yes mobile editing of Raw files is absolutely fine. Phones and tablets are more than powerful enough to handle Raw photo editing now. My laptop is a few years old now, but still a Core i7 with 16Gb of RAM and an SSD. Both my phone and iPad absolutely run rings around it for photo editing performance.

That said, a phone is not the ideal environment to be doing anything but a quick edit or crop, the screen is just too small for anything else. But you could run an entire Raw editing workflow from your phone now if you really wanted to.
 
RichardC27 said:
Lightroom is a subscription service now, has been for years. If you're going to use it then yes it's well worth a tenner a month. I mainly edit on my iPad now but it's nice to have my entire LR catalog available on my Android phone, iPad and Windows laptop so I can edit on whichever device I want.

In answer to your original question, yes mobile editing of Raw files is absolutely fine. Phones and tablets are more than powerful enough to handle Raw photo editing now. My laptop is a few years old now, but still a Core i7 with 16Gb of RAM and an SSD. Both my phone and iPad absolutely run rings around it for photo editing performance.

That said, a phone is not the ideal environment to be doing anything but a quick edit or crop, the screen is just too small for anything else. But you could run an entire Raw editing workflow from your phone now if you really wanted to.
Click to expand...

Oh wow. I learnt photoshop on version 5 on a Pentium 2 running at 233MHz and 32MB RAM. Granted it wasn't the quickest experience.
Until recently I've been shooting on a Nikon D50 (quite old) which because of it's size was losing out to my phone more and more, and I've been editing on photoshop elements on a Windows 10 laptop with only 4GB RAM. These applications just get hungrier and hungrier!

p.s. thanks for the info, very useful and reassuring.
 
I have the Subscription service, so have Lightroom on my iPhone 11 and iPad. I find editing on my phone an absolute breeze. I think it’s a great app.
 
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After hearing great reports about Lightroom here I’ve given it a go. It seems perfectly easy and provides decent output. But I still can’t really tell how it’s different to the native photos app on IOS. I do like that it provides a separate ‘place’ for my cam photos rather than snapshots.
 
Pin said:
After hearing great reports about Lightroom here I’ve given it a go. It seems perfectly easy and provides decent output. But I still can’t really tell how it’s different to the native photos app on IOS. I do like that it provides a separate ‘place’ for my cam photos rather than snapshots.
Click to expand...

Just following up on this comment. I took a few country snaps at the weekend, playing about with shutter speeds in shutter priority just to get a feel for things. Went as high as around 0.5s shutter and found there was quote a bit of chromatic aberration on the edges of tree branches. The camera did a good job of reducing that on JPGs, but there was some loss of detail. In IOS, editing RAW, I cold not balance the light whilst minimizing CA. However lightroom seemed to deal with it much more easily and I was able to bring out some shadowed detail in the branches without the CA becoming apparent. It's otherwise an awful photo so I'm not sharing it :LOL:
 
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