This is a biggie. Just fresh off all the device announcements, Nokia have announced RAW support for its premiere photography products – the Nokia Lumia 1020 and the just launched Nokia Lumia 1520. Both the devices will be getting support for capturing a pure RAW image in the DNG format that can simultaneously be taken along with a JPEG, just like before, yet the full resolution too was in JPEG. This is actually excellent news for photographers who want COMPLETE control over the images they take. For example, any one who is serious about Pro photography will always have a RAW sample of their photos. Think of it like a negative that you can process anytime in Lightroom and Photoshop and produce an image, or many images out of it. Providing this functionality on a mobile phone is something amazing, and really sees the potential of the Lumia 1020 and the 1520’s cameras.
What RAW support means is, the phone will take a DNG image with no compression and save it on your phone, and you can manually edit it later with an appropriate tool. You naturally get so much flexibility to alter your image and change it to whichever way you want, and the details are perfectly preserved, unlike JPEG which uses harsh compression algorithms. This feature is very popular on DSLRs but having this on a mobile phone is just a boon for serious photographers who want some professional quality images from a little phone. A step in the right direction, and it seems that they have revamped the algorithms too with the Nokia Black update for the Lumia Windows Phone 8 devices, so we might be seeing better JPEG performance too, for all those are not fussed with RAW.
Images via TnkGrl and Stephen Quin