RAW Power is developed by Nik Bhatt, the former Senior engineer in charge of the photo apps group at Apple while Aperture was in development. RAW Power comes for OSX and iOS and works through the photo’s library on iCloud so everything syncs similar to Lightroom. Further, the interview with Nik Bhatt exposes some interesting details about how iOS deals with RAW files. Apparently, iOS doesn’t allow you to edit RAW data by default, but iOS does have a RAW engine. So Apple’s Photo App simply allows you to edit a JPEG file inside of imported RAW files, while RAW Power allows you to manipulate your RAW files with Apple’s RAW engine.
RAW Power’s solution seems to be simple and elegant from the above video and hopefully, ON1 delivers a similar solution in the future since they are already working on an iOS app. Unfortunately, it sounds like Luminar won’t develop an iOS app unless they hear from more photographers that want one, but I believe that the future is being able to edit your library on any device you have with you. Mobility will be key going forward as photographers move away from traditional computers.
Microsoft made this a lot easier with their surface devices and Windows 8/10, which allowed them to jump ahead of Apple in many ways, but Microsoft didn’t completely succeed with their phone. Apple also made steps towards merging iOS and OSX with the release of iOS11, but we are probably still a few years off from a unified OS for Apple devices so an iOS companion app is significant to compete with Lightroom in my opinion.
List of iOS 11 cameras supported by RAW Power (Fujifilm files must be uncompressed)
