When planning for extensive highlight and shadow recovery in post-processing, why does capturing an image in ProRAW format offer a significant advantage over a standard JPEG or HEIF file?

Capturing an image in ProRAW format offers a significant advantage for extensive highlight and shadow recovery in post-processing due to its superior data depth and unprocessed nature compared to standard JPEG or HEIF files. ProRAW, a format developed by Apple, combines the flexibility of a standard RAW file with the benefits of computational photography applied by the iPhone, but in an editable, non-destructive way. A standard JPEG or HEIF file records an image using 8 bits of data per color channel, meaning it can represent 256 distinct tonal values for red, green, and blue. This results in a total of approximately 16.7 million possible colors. However, during the process of converting the raw sensor data into a JPEG or HEIF, the camera's internal software applies irreversible processing steps such as white balance, sharpening, noise reduction, tone mapping, and lossy compression. This processing discards vast amounts of information, especially in the brightest (highlights) and darkest (shadows) areas of the image, leading to a phenomenon called clipping, where highlights become pure white with no detail or shadows become pure black with no detail. Once this data is discarded, it cannot be recovered. In contrast, a ProRAW file captures image data at a much higher bit depth, typically 10 or 12 bits per color channel. This means it can record 1024 (10-bit) or 4096 (12-bit) distinct tonal values per channel, resulting in billions of possible colors. This significantly greater amount of tonal information means the file retains a much wider dynamic range, which is the range of light intensities from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights that the camera's sensor can capture. Crucially, ProRAW files contain the unprocessed, or minimally processed, raw sensor data before the destructive processing steps are applied. While ProRAW incorporates the iPhone's computational photography processes like Smart HDR and Deep Fusion, it does so in a non-destructive way, embedding this processing information within the file so that it can be adjusted, modified, or even completely undone by the user in post-processing software. This means that when recovering highlights, the software has access to the full range of captured light information that was present in the overexposed areas, allowing it to pull back detail that would have been clipped to pure white in a JPEG or HEIF. Similarly, for shadow recovery, the software can extract detail and texture from underexposed areas without introducing excessive noise or banding, which are common artifacts when trying to lighten severely underexposed areas in an 8-bit compressed file. The expansive data in ProRAW provides much more flexibility to adjust exposure, contrast, white balance, and color with significantly less degradation, enabling extensive highlight and shadow recovery while maintaining image quality and smooth tonal transitions.