Mobile photography is complex. Point and shoot is still the practice of the vast majority of users, but professional functions, apps that allow you to get more out of your camera, and even accessories that will improve the end result are becoming increasingly popular.

One of the functions that is already available even in the middle range is the RAW format. I meet more and more users who find an easy workflow by shooting in this format and then moving the photos to free applications like Lightroom. There, you just apply a LUT to make the image come to life.

Apple is one of the manufacturers most committed to RAW, introducing the ProRAW format for its iPhones. The problem? A 48MP RAW can take up 75MB of space. The solution is obvious: JPEG-XL. We already guessed how it works in our iPhone 16 Pro review .

The problem with RAW. Unless we’re going for the most expensive option, storage is often an issue even on high-end phones. There’s a big trade-off to shooting in RAW: photos take up a lot more space, especially if we’re shooting at 48 megapixels.

Specifically, photos taken in ProRAW usually take up more than 60MB, a figure multiplied by the hundreds of photos we can take with the phone. The raw ones are usually deleted after editing, but they can become a problem if we do not keep the gallery up to date.

JPEG-XL to the rescue. When we take photos in RAW format, the resulting file has a .DNG extension. When we shoot in automatic mode, the iPhone shoots in HEIF format, but there is also the option to shoot in JPEG format. We usually understand JPEG as the photo.jpeg extension.

In this case, JPEG-XL is not the final format of the photo, but rather the way Apple now compresses DNGs. So, the DNG is the container, and the JPEG-XL is something inside it that allows the file to be compressed.

With JPEG-XL, we can shoot DNG files that take up a third of the space of the original photo. It’s a great way to shoot lots of RAW photos without sacrificing storage space.

ProRaw JPEG-XL Lossless | ProRaw JPEG-XL lossy.

Default ProRaw | ProRaw JPEG-XL lossless.

Apple wasn’t the firstJPEG-XL has gone unnoticed on iPhones and is a somewhat hidden option in the ProRAW settings. What you may not know is that this technology is already used on Android phones.

Specifically, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra was the first model in its family to launch this format. Photos taken with Expert RAW, Samsung’s processed RAW, use JPEG-XL for better compression.

Image | Xataka

On Xataka | The iPhone camera had been disappointing me for years. Until 48 megapixels came along