Gentlemen coders recently released Raw Power Version 3.0. I've been interested in this application for a while, and I've been following its development. Raw Power is a Raw editing application that lets you take advantage of the capabilities of Apple's RAW engine, that is otherwise unavailable to the user. It's not perfect by any means, but with each release, they've added more and more capabilities. Version 3 adds a fascinating new ability if you're running it on Catalina, and if you're an Apple Photos user looking to get more power out of your RAW files, then this might be a solution for you. Read on to find out more.

Note, this isn't a full review, but rather some brief thoughts on the new release. If you want to try it for yourself, the company has a trial version on their website.

I've reviewed earlier versions of Raw Power before on the blog way back in 2017. If you haven't seen it before, RAW Power is an application created by former Apple Aperture programmers. It gives you more power over RAW conversions using Apple's Raw conversions engine in macOS than you can get in Photos. In particular, it gives you access to some of the parameters of the raw conversion engine that are usually hidden if you use Photos. If you have used Aperture before, then you will undoubtedly be familiar with some of RAW Power's controls.

New Features

There are a good few new features in the latest version. I won't go into them all, but there are two I want to focus on. First of all, they have added support for LUTs. While many people may or may not be interested in this, for Fuji shooters, they've added LUTs for most of the Fuji film simulation modes. I haven't done a detailed analysis of these to determine how accurate they are, but they seem reasonably in the ballpark. I'm sure they're not 100% accurate, and they probably won't satisfy everyone, but its better than not having them.

The other significant feature is the new Photos library browser if you're running Catalina. This is a game-changer for the application, in my opinion. The new Photos Browser allows you to see, edit and work with your entire Photos library. This is a new feature of Catalina that allows third-party applications to access the system photos library, much like the camera roll in iOS. It means that you can basically use Raw Power as a more advanced editor for Photos but still use your photos library, and it will still sync and behave like the regular photos library.

While Raw power has always had a Photos extension, the extension workflow in Apple's Photos application has always been cumbersome. This is much better, for the most part. It's a much smoother workflow, with one exception. The annoying thing about using the Photos browser is the fact that it asks permission before saving. I suspect that this is entirely Apple's fault, but it's kind of ridiculous. You have to grant permissions to open the Photos library in the first place, but then it also asks you every time you go to save changes to a file. A single permission request for editing the library should be all you need. Asking permission almost every time is incredibly annoying.

It's also kind of buggy. Sometimes, you would load a raw file, and it won't give you any RAW controls. You can usually fix this by closing and reopening the edit controls.

Still, despite these issues, it represents a much better raw editing experience than Apple's own, especially if you work with RAW+Jpeg - as it defaults to the RAW files.

Overall Impressions

Since I originally reviewed the application, it has come a long way. It's still not perfect by any means. While you can forgive more advanced features such as selective editing, given the price, it has a few glaring omissions compared to other RAW processing applications, including some that may be dealbreakers for some users:

First of all, it only corrects for lens distortions if the original was taken with a fixed lens camera, as that is all the Apple RAW engine supports. However, I wish they would add a proper lens correction engine on top of this. I know there are some open-source lens correction databases and technologies out there, so surely this isn't impossible, even for a tiny company.

Secondly, chromatic aberration correction is still manual. In 2020 this seems quite dated. All other major editing applications automatically corrects for chromatic aberration now, and so there should be some kind of auto-correction here if they want to compete with the big guns in this space. Not only that, but in many cases, eve the manual corrections don’t fix the aberration. For me this is the most serious issue with the software.

Significant Chromatic Aberration, which can’t be fixed by the software

Thirdly, there is no external editing functionality. If you wanted to do further edits on your image, you would have to export it and then manually open the exported file in another application.

In terms of quality, it's pretty good. The results you can get from the Apple RAW engine are pretty good when you have an application that can take advantage of it. My only gripe, aside from the issues mentioned above, is that highlight recovery isn't great, especially compared to Lightroom or Capture One. There is a recovery slider, but it doesn't recover everything, and you have to tweak the exposure and adjust the shadows to compensate, to bring some highlights back. It can also leave a little halo around edges in recovered areas, that looks like a bad artefact.

Conclusion

If you're an Apple Photos user who wants a step up but doesn't want to change to something like Lightroom or Capture One, it is worth giving this a look. I've had this question from quite a few readers lately, which is partly why I'm writing this. It's come a long way since I first tried it out, and the direct integration with the Photos library is a huge time saver, even if the constant dialog boxes are annoying and it is a bit buggy - but these are things that can be ironed out.

As someone who used Aperture for many years until it was discontinued, using RAW power has reminded me of the application. While it misses many of Apertures features, you can see options slowly come back. I don't know what resources the company has, but if they could add some of the key omissions to bring it up to the standard set by Lightroom and Capture One, they could be a real contender. They definitely have the beginnings of something here. It does what it sets out to do admirably, but it also has great potential, should they develop (pardon the pun) it further.

(Note, they also have an iOS version of this application)

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