1. The new (2012) iPad with the Retina display is looking good for photographers. Anand Lal Shimpi over at Anandtech has got hold of an early copy, and put its new Retina display through its paces. Page three of his review makes for encouraging reading. Specifically, Anand reports that the gamut of the new Retina display is approximately sRGB. For the non-photographers reading this, gamut is about how wide a range of color a display can show. Wider gamut gives more vivid, colorful images that are closer to reality.

    Anand views the gamut as good news because this means that the Retina display's gamut is considerably larger than the gamut of the old iPad and iPad 2. He's right on that being good news, but the near-sRGB gamut is also good news for technical reasons. Ironically, the near-sRGB gamut is good news for photographers because of something Apple left out of the iPad - color management. It's not well known outside of the relatively small group of people that have actually written imaging code for the iPad, but iOS essentially has no color management. There are color management functions documented in technical reference manual, but actually they do nothing(!). And no, I'm not kidding.

    Now if you don't have color management, then what you need is for the color space of your image to be a match to your display's color space. With the new Retina display, the 2012 iPad is a lot closer to that ideal than the previous iPads - good news for photographers.

    There have been some reports of the new iPad having a "yellow tint". Not everyone agrees with that, and some sources on the net are suggesting that the tint, if it exists, goes away as the adhesive in the display cures. No doubt the yellow tint question will become clearer over time.

    And yes, for those interested, a new version of PhotoRaw (3.4.0) is already available on the App Store, optimized for the new Retina display. So you can now display and edit your raw files at 100% full pixel-by-pixel size, and with the full benefit of the new Retina display's wider gamut. The new version of PhotoRaw is, of course, a free upgrade for existing users.
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  2. Taking a look round the photography forums recently, two things are clear:
    • Using iPads and iPhones for image editing is getting more and more popular - the introduction of iPhoto on the iPad by Apple seems to have got a lot of people interested, but
    • There is a lot of confusion about what the various iPad based photo editing apps actually do, and very few recent reviews that compare them.
    Now this isn't a review - as the author of PhotoRaw, I'm hugely biased. But I do think it would be helpful to a lot of potential buyers to understand the categories of apps out there. Right now, there are a lot of people trying to compare vastly different apps, and getting frustrated. I'll only be focusing on "serious" apps - so not the "what would you look like if you had red hair and vampire teeth" type apps.

    One of the biggest reason for many photographers being confused about iPad photo editing is that unlike the PC/Mac market, there aren't really any single products that do everything that a photographer might want, such as Photoshop. As of March 2012, the way the market has developed, there are really three categories of "serious" photo editing apps out there:

    The mainstream JPEG editing apps. These are apps that will edit JPEG images, either from an external camera connected via the Camera Connection Kit, or the iPad's internal cameras. Typically, they have fairly good basic editing capabilities, as well as a number of special effects. In addition, they usually have good social media integration e.g., with Facebook, Flickr, etc. The best know of these apps are Snapseed, Adobe's Photoshop Touch, and Apple's new iPhoto for iOS. From the perspective of the serious photographer, there are two things to be aware of:
    1. These apps are typically limited in the image size that they can handle - e.g., according to Apple, iPhoto for iOS can do up to 19M pixel.
    2. More important for serious photographers, they don't process raw files. What these apps do with raw photos is to extract the preview images embedded in the raw file by the camera. These preview images can be anywhere from full size to very small. Typically they are around about 25% of the full size - for example, on the Sony NEX 5 that I have, the preview is 1616 x 1080, well short of the NEX's full 4592 x 3056 raw resolution. On a Leica M8 the situation is even worse - the preview is tiny, at only 320 x 240 pixels.
    Apps that do raw conversion. These are few and far between, but can take raw images, and deliver full resolution JPEGs from them. They also usually decode the full range of EXIF and GPS information to be found in raw files. The caveats are that they are quite slow to import raw files on the iPad, and have only basic editing abilities (exposure, contrast, hue, saturation, white balance, etc) - no effects. The most popular by number of downloads is PhotoRaw (my app!) . Practically, most people tend to use both a raw conversion app and one of the JPEG editors in tandem. Before you buy one of the raw conversion apps, you should try one of the free evaluation versions - given the relatively slow import times, they're not for everybody. PhotoRaw Lite is free, and will give you a good feel for import speed, etc.

    Apps that integrate with desktop image editing software. These apps allow you to do some initial work, usually sorting and evaluation, on the iPad before you edit on a desktop machine. They aren't intended to produce final results on the iPad, just to speed up the selection and editing process later. The best know of these is PhotoSmith.

    What you should buy depends very much on what your needs are and what your workflow is. For example, if you're never going to want full resolution images on your iPad, then any of the raw conversion apps are a probably a waste. But for the moment, it's unlikely that serious photographers will be able to get by on just one photo editing app on the iPad - you'll be buying at least two, maybe three. However, bear in mind that most of these apps cost less than $10 (Photosmith, at $17.99, is the only exception) - about what you'd spend stopping off for coffee on the way to a shoot.....
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  3. As soon as iPhoto for the iPad came out this week, the obvious question was "can it handle raw files?"

    The answer is no, there's no raw file support in iPhoto for the iPad - I did some playing with iPhoto on an iPad 2 as soon as it came out, and it clearly doesn't do raw conversions. Raws from Leica M8s and Sony NEX cameras came up as preview size. In the case of the the Sony it shows as 1616 x 1080, well short of the NEX's full 4592 x 3056 raw resolution. The Leica is a lot worse, only a 320 x 240.

    Apple have now confirmed that iPhoto for the iPad only reads the previews from raw files, not the raw data itself, in this support article.

    What this means for you depends on your camera - some cameras, including many Nikons and Canons, embed quite large previews, occasionally even full size. If your camera does this, or has a control for preview size, you might be able to effectively use iPhoto for the iPad directly with your raw files. However, if your camera writes smaller previews, then you have a problem.

    The good news is that there is a solution - this makes PhotoRaw the perfect companion for iPhoto on the iPad. You can use PhotoRaw to convert raw files at full resolution, then use all the editing and social media integration built into iPhoto on the converted files.
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