iOS 14.3 Quietly Turns the iPhone 12 Pro Into a RAW Camera

Apple pushed out iOS 14.3 on Monday, and buried in the changelog is the update a chunk of iPhone 12 Pro owners have been waiting on since launch day: ProRAW.

If you’re not steeped in photography terminology, here’s the short version. Normal iPhone photos are JPEGs (or HEIFs) that have already been through Apple’s computational-photography pipeline — Smart HDR, Deep Fusion, noise reduction, all baked in before you ever see the file. That’s great for convenience, but it leaves you with very little room to push exposure, color, or detail around in post without the image falling apart. A RAW file, by contrast, captures much closer to the sensor’s actual data, which is why photographers have leaned on RAW workflows for years.

ProRAW is Apple’s attempt to have it both ways. It’s a RAW file, so you get the wide latitude for editing that professionals want, but it still carries over some of the multi-frame computational processing — the kind of thing that makes an iPhone photo look good in the first place — instead of handing you a totally untouched sensor dump. The format is limited to the iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max for now, which tracks with Apple positioning ProRAW as a prosumer feature rather than something every iPhone owner needs.

The rest of the update

ProRAW is the headline, but 14.3 isn’t a one-feature release:

• AirPods Max pairing — support for Apple’s new $549 over-ear headphones, which shipped the same week.
• Fitness+ — Apple’s subscription workout service is now live for anyone who wants Apple Watch-integrated classes.
• App Store privacy labels — developers submitting or updating apps now have to fill out the “nutrition label” style privacy disclosures Apple announced earlier this year. This is the first update where it’s showing up in a meaningful way for users browsing the Store.

None of these are individually huge, but stacked together they cap off a genuinely packed month for Apple — the M1 Macs landed in November, AirPods Max and Fitness+ both went live this week, and now the camera software on the flagship phones got a real upgrade too. It’s a lot of surface area shipped in a short window, even by Apple’s usual end-of-year cadence.

Practically speaking, if you own a 12 Pro and shoot anything you plan to edit — real estate, product shots, landscapes — ProRAW is worth turning on today. The files are considerably larger than standard photos, so don’t be surprised if storage fills up faster than usual. For anyone editing in Lightroom or similar apps, this is genuinely the biggest photography-relevant iPhone feature since Night Mode. Whether third-party editing apps handle the format cleanly out of the gate is the open question — early adopters will find out over the next few days.