In another blog I explain everything about my settings and how to shoot the best looking photos with the iPhone 16 Pro. Now in this entry I will explain how to extract the best colors and contrasts from your iPhone RAW images and get stunning final images.

For the sake of this blog I will edit the photo from scratch but I have presets available on my website that can serve as very solid starting points. I will also show you how I would edit the photo using presets in a second stage.

The first thing I do is switching the profile to Adobe Color which is my standard for creating edits and presets that I can apply to photos coming from any camera. Also the Apple ProRAW profile includes some of the Apple computational photography weirdness giving you not a pure RAW file to work with but what Apple thinks ‘looks best’. They make the photos very HDR with lift up shadows and compressed highlights. I prefer having full control over them in the basic settings that we’ll cover now.

I use the basic settings to extract and maximise the information to work with. I don’t do contrast with the basic settings, this will be taken care of in the Tone Curve. The most important in the basic settings is setting the exposure right so it should be the first slider you move (or decide not to move). I choose a reference point in the photo, where I want my exposure to look the best and use the other settings to rebalance the photo. Here I wanted the tools on the bottom right corner to be my reference so I increased the exposure by +0.30

Next the highlight areas were a bit hot so I reduced them to -40.

Then I lift up my blacks to have a bit more details in the darker areas without having an HDR look which happens when raising shadows too much over blacks. +25 looked fine.

I raised my shadows by +5 and reduced a bit my whites by -10

In the presence section I only moved down the clarity to remove the digital edge and have a nice natural glow in the highlights. This is a great way to mimic the effect of a mist filter.

Before moving to the tone curve and dealing with the contrast I moved down the contrast slider to give me even more range of motion in the tone curve. -30 is a good starting point.

In the tone curve I created several points and adjusted them to my liking. Basically creating a bit of a S curve with finer adjustments in the brighter areas. I also moved down the exit point to crush the white and have a more filmic highlights roll off. Then I moved to the parametric curve to further darken the darker areas and to mattify my highlights even more.

After the basic settings and contrast adjustments in the tone curve I moved to colors, starting with the HSL. No crazy adjustments there. I wanted to reduce a bit the luminance and saturation of the blues. Increasing the density of the reds also by reducing the luminance and did other minor tweaks as shown on the picture.

Next I went to the calibration tool and boosted the saturation of the blue. It is affecting the blue pixels all over the frame, not only blue elements and it adds a very nice vibrancy to all the colors across the photo. I also slightly adjusted the red and green sliders.

After that I quickly went back to the basic settings to boost the vibrancy, and saturation. +25 vibrancy and +5 Saturation looked great.

Final steps on colors is the Color Grading tool. I cooled than a bit the shadows with the greenish blue. I wanted some warmth in the midtones so I used a yellow/orange hue at +10 and finally a bit of green in the highlights. I covered that with a touch more warmth on the general wheel affecting all the tones.

The final steps are a bit optional but I dialled my sharpness sliders to have a sharper image given that I shot this one with the 2x lens which is just a cropped into the main 24mm lens. These settings gave me good results without looking over sharpened. This is subjective but I like a bit of grain on my photos, not too much. It helps making them look more natural and less digital. I think it is especially relevant with iPhone photos.

And last I use the heal tool to remove some distracting elements and we got the final image!

The second example is with one of my presets I am working on for the next pack. This photo is a good example to show how much computational photography is embedded in the Apple ProRAW format. With a natural RAW profile we had a very contrasty and underexposed photo that needed important adjustments especially in the exposure and highlights sliders.

When I reduce the highlights that much I like to rebalance that by increasing the whites.

I moved my clarity slider from -20 to -10

As for the darker tones I increased the blacks by +25 and reduced a touch the shadows to -5

I did very minor adjustments in the HSL but I was already very happy with the results of this preset. Then I dialled the sharpness and added some grain since no adjustments on them are included in the preset. Finally I moved up a bit the vibrancy and saturation, respectively to +50 and back to 0

And voilà!

I hope this blog was helpful and that you can take inspiration from it. Don’t forget to check out the store where I have preset packs, LUTs and digital zine if you want to support my work.

Thanks for reading :)

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