p.1 #1 · Apple's new RAW decoder and denoise engine rivals DxO's PureRAW
Apple’s new RAW decoder and denoising appears to be as good as DxO’s RAW denoise - and it works great with the A7R6 files (any format) and apparently support the A75 files as well.
If you have a Mac running macOS 27 and want to try it out you can download my RAW app - its a bit clunky because I broke some of the UI elements and haven’t got around to fixing them until I figured it would be worth doing - and given how good the App RAW denoiser seems to be I will probably put a bit more effort into fixing it up. It is also a bit slow with the new raw decoder so be patient if you do try it - don't click onto images too quickly or you will clog up the graphics pipeline as currently it does not handle cleanup of the pipeline properly. I will have to optimises the graphics by tiling the images - but up until now it hasn’t been worth it. One thing that is impressive is how the Apple engine caches the intermediate ML results - when you go to export the image it takes less than a second !!
However bear in mind that the app currently has some bugs that cause things to grind to a halt after processing a few images. Restart the app to fix that More clean up required to smoothing things out - hopefully Apple release Aperture v2 so I don’t have to bother! Alternately look for the app called RAWScope on the App Store which I believe is also using Apple version 9 decoder.
https://duncangroenewald.com/files/Software/RAW.zip The app is a little counterintuitive in that you need to select a folder with RAW files and then import the files - the app just reads the files metadata and saves then in a database along with any adjustments. It is non-destructive so does not alter the original RAW files in any way. Send me a message and I can dig out the instructions if necessary.
A couple of examples below - I think it is on par with DxO in terms of retaining the details and slightly better overall at removing noise - it seems to produce slightly more subtle results.
Obviously there are many functions in PhotoLab that are not available in my app but it is nice to see a really excellent RAW decoder from Apple - they must be serious about providing a full suite of Photo/Video applications in future.
Unfortunately there are currently only a limited set of Cameras that are supported by the Version 9 RAW decoder - the Canon R1, Sony A7riii, A75 and A7R6 being some of them. No A1, A1ii or A9iii as yet.
p.1 #2 · Apple's new RAW decoder and denoise engine rivals DxO's PureRAW
I'm curious to try this, but can't seem to get any images to load into the app. I created a folder with three raw files from the a7Rvi and tried to add it, but nothing happens. What am I doing wrong?
