Who Do We Blame for This?

You tell me. Because I really want to know.

I used iPhone 13 Pro to take the Featured Image, this afternoon in San Diego’s Hillcrest neighborhood. The gas station is located at Fourth and Washington. Vitals: f/2.8, ISO 32, 1/699 sec, 77mm; 1:18 p.m. PDT.

The original is Apple ProRAW—a DNG format—that I exported to my 16-inch MacBook Pro and tweaked in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic. The unedited photo looks fine to me, but I wanted to see how RAW from the phone would process; quite nicely BTW.

I can see why Apple makes the user choose RAW before shooting. File sizes are quite large; for this one, 31.3MB as captured but 6MB after being cropped from 4032 x 3024 pixels to 3836 x 2557 and exported as JPEG.

The companion photo is for context. Vitals: f/1.5, ISO 50, 1/4630 sec, 26mm; 1:18 p.m. The original is 36.2MB; the exported JPEG is 9.1MB and 3708 x 2781 pixels.