Quick Summary
Apple has announced an upgrade to the engine that handles RAW photography, with big improvements on the cards.
These will come with RAW 9 as part of iOS 27, and were announced as part of a developer session at WWDC26.
Apple has overhauled the engine behind RAW photography on iPhone, and the before-and-after examples shown during a developer session at WWDC 26 (via 9to5Mac) suggest it could outperform what dedicated professional cameras produce straight out of the box.
Shooting in RAW means the unprocessed data is saved straight from a camera's sensor rather than a compressed JPEG, which allows photographers to push exposure, colour and white balance much further in editing without the image falling apart.
Apple builds this processing into the operating system itself via its Core Image framework, and the pipeline already knows how to handle the quirks of nearly 800 different camera models, from third-party mirrorless bodies to iPhones’ own sensors.
That pipeline is getting its ninth rework with iOS 27, arriving alongside macOS 27 and iPadOS 27 later this ‘fall’. Apple engineer David Hayward introduced RAW 9 during the session "Enhance RAW image processing with Core Image," describing it as the company's biggest step forward yet in this area.
You can watch the full session on the Apple Developer site should you wish to, but in a nutshell, RAW 9 will see a single machine-learning model handling both sharpening fine detail and stripping out noise, running on the iPhone's Neural Engine chip.
What will RAW 9 be able to do?
The session had some examples to show what RAW 9 would be capable of too, including a Canon 5D Mark III image of a crayon box captured at ISO 51,200, a setting that usually leaves colour data a bit of a mess.
Apple's outgoing RAW 8 engine salvaged the scene to some degree, but RAW 9 cleanly separated out each individual crayon colour, right down to capturing the shine on their surfaces.
In a second example, embroidery yarn shot on a Fujifilm X-T5 presented sharper lettering and far cleaner texture under the RAW 9 system.
That’s not even the best news though. RAW 9 will work with existing RAW photos already sitting on your phone, so when iOS 27 lands later this year, those photos will be able to be reprocessed and you might be surprised with how much better some shots could become.
