Adobe today announced that Adobe Camera RAW support is coming to Photoshop on the iPad, which will allow Photoshop iPad users to import, open, and edit RAW files. The upcoming feature was highlighted in a demo video that Adobe shared on YouTube, but no details on when it will launch were provided.
According to Adobe, RAW support will work with file types ranging from DNG to Apple ProRAW, which is the RAW file format available on the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro models.
RAW files can be edited like any other image, with users able to adjust aspects like exposure and noise and use Photoshop's non-destructive editing and auto-adjustment tools.
Photoshop for iPad is part of Adobe's Creative Cloud plan. Access is available priced starting at $9.99 per month for the Photography plan.
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RAW is a particular way of shooting that captures "raw" data from the sensor of your camera. This means that there are _tons_ of "formats"... they are essentially different for every camera maker (and sometimes between cameras).
RAW files are _not_ "images". They are _data_. To make an image you have to "develop" the RAW into an image. Traditionally, this has been done using a RAW workflow that first included an app like Adobe RAW to do the original "developing" of the RAW... then you would go to Photoshop to touch-up / add to the photo. It's only been relatively recently that Photoshop on PCs allowed direct importing of RAW files.
Personally, I use Adobe Lightroom for importing all of my RAW files and developing them. It has an iPad version (I won't get into how the new Adobe Lightroom is different from "Classic" - it's somewhat like the debate about FCPX vs FCP) that has worked awesome for _years_ for developing RAW files... and you can open what you develop in Photoshop.
So: there hasn't been a problem with having a RAW workflow on the iPad for a while now. All this is doing is making it so that if you want to go directly to Photoshop with a RAW you can.
Now...
I suspect that Photoshop on the iPad is getting this capability precisely _because_ of the M1 macs. They added it to photoshop on the M1 macs - so it made it easy to add to their iPad app. This same thing has been happening to Lightroom and Photoshop since the M1 macs debuted... the iPad versions continue to gain parity with the Mac versions.
As another poster pointed out: the iPad UI is very different... so there will always be pieces that are iPad only.
If you are serious about photography then you already have a RAW workflow - even on the iPad. Photoshop is generally not the first place to start with a RAW file.
Yep.
Working on _photos_... which are "developed" from RAW data files in another app (like Lightroom).
Ridiculous. I've been using an iPad as one of my main photography productivity devices for about 5 years now (since Lightroom came out for iPad). It's actually an awesome platform for photography. Adobe's apps are fast and have a great iPad UI.
Also how do you edit large files on an iPad with tiny storage? Can you attach a USB hard drive, or does that only work on the iPad Pro that happens to have a USB port?