1. They're not raw, they're aligned and merged and denoised and sharpened just like this iPhone photo (they're just linear so you can adjust white balance and recover shadows, working with them the way you could a real raw file)
or
2. They look like total garbage, noisy as heck and horribly soft, because the sensors are tiny and the lenses are simultaneously limited by diffraction and refractive error.
The raw mode for these wouldn't be a single image. It would be a video with lots of low-quality frames. Then your "raw processing" would be deciding how to align and Marge the frames, which to drop...
I think the idea that raw is a 2d array of pixels is outdated by the way modern cameras, especially smartphone cameras work.
How do I get this? Sick of seeing oversaturated landscapes. Edit: why is this downvoted? honest question... I'm on iOS and didn't see anything in settings.
Some models of iPhones the "PROs"[1] support something they call "Pro Raw" which isn't actual RAW images: "Apple ProRAW combines the information of a standard RAW format along with iPhone image processing, which gives you more flexibility when editing the exposure, color, and white balance in your photo."
So it's better than JPEG but not as good as RAW.
Anyhow apparently Apple supports quasi raw at the system level but doesn't always get exposed to the user. but 3rd part apps can take advantage of this even for non "PRO" Apple telephones.
Lots of details here. [1] Basically, things changed when Apple released the iPhone 12. Earlier phones have regular RAW, and later phones have ProRAW, which is processed. It sounds like you can still get access to the regular RAW files on newer phones, but it's not simple.
