Tested Apple’s Huge Update to RAW Photography Coming Soon to MacOS 27 Golden Gate

I always keep an eye on the annual Apple developers conference (WWDC), in case there is anything whatsoever of interest to photographers, and the vast majority of the time I am disappointed.

This year however, there was a demonstration from David Hayward on the Core Image team of an update to Apple’s built-in RAW photo processing library, leveraging the Apple Neural Engine to improve RAW demosaicing, noise reduction, sharpness and colour rendering. In this demonstration, they showed vastly improved AI denoising and sharpening on regular RAW files taken on regular cameras.

If the results they showed proved to be an accurate demonstration of the power of RAW 9, it meant that Apple was about to make a serious dent in the market for expensive commercial AI denoising tools like DxO PhotoLab and Topaz Photo AI, and bring AI denoising firmly into the mainstream.

So I decided to test it.

One caveat before we start: MacOS 27 is currently a beta release, so the operating system and RAW 9 could well change or improve before it ships this autumn. Bear that in mind if you’re reading this some months down the line.