What is the primary advantage of shooting in Apple ProRAW over HEIC when planning extensive color grading and exposure adjustments in post-production?

The primary advantage of shooting in Apple ProRAW over HEIC when planning extensive color grading and exposure adjustments in post-production is its significantly greater retention of raw image data, particularly dynamic range and color information. Apple ProRAW is a hybrid image format that combines the unprocessed flexibility of a standard RAW file with the sophisticated computational photography benefits of Apple's image processing, such as Deep Fusion and Smart HDR. Unlike HEIC, which is an 8-bit highly compressed, processed, and lossy image format, Apple ProRAW captures and stores data directly from the camera's sensor as a 12-bit file. This means ProRAW captures approximately 68 billion colors (4,096 distinct tones per Red, Green, and Blue color channel), whereas 8-bit HEIC captures only 16.7 million colors (256 tones per channel). This vastly superior bit depth provides immense 'headroom' for color grading, allowing for smooth, natural-looking transitions and precise adjustments to colors, white balance, tint, and saturation without introducing color banding (visible abrupt shifts between colors where there should be a smooth gradient), posterization (a similar effect where continuous tones are represented by a limited number of steps), or unnatural color shifts, which are common artifacts when heavily pushing an 8-bit image. Furthermore, ProRAW retains a much wider dynamic range, which is the difference between the lightest and darkest areas a camera can capture. By preserving more data in both the highlights (bright areas) and shadows (dark areas), ProRAW enables extensive non-destructive recovery of detail in these regions during post-production exposure adjustments. For instance, details in an overexposed sky or in deep shadows that would be irretrievably lost in a compressed 8-bit HEIC file can often be recovered and adjusted in a ProRAW file without introducing excessive digital noise, loss of detail, or color degradation. While HEIC applies computational photography enhancements destructively by baking them into the final image, ProRAW incorporates these enhancements non-destructively, preserving the raw sensor data alongside Apple's processing instructions, which can then be modified or even reverted by the user for ultimate control over the final image.