One of the things that is truly impressive about the Pixel Phones, is the camera, and the Pixel 8 has taken a step further with an upgraded camera setup and AI capabilities. In a world where iPhones have been the go-to standard for mobile photography, Google’s Pixel lineup has been making great in-roads and today, they are in a position to offer stiff competition to its iOS peers.
If you have a Pixel 8 phone and you love taking photos and editing them, there is some good news. Adobe has announced that their suite of photo editing apps will now accept RAW images taken from Pixel 8 phones. Alright, why is this a big deal?
Earlier, when you would take a photo on your smartphone, it would be stored in the ‘jpeg’ format. While this format optimised the storage size, it did so by taking out a lot of details from the image itself, so when you took that image into your image editing software, you would not have the full quality at your disposal. This meant lesser details, slight loss in saturation, etc.
Today, there are many smartphones that are able to shoot images and save the RAW file. In comparison to the usual formats, RAW image files retain the image as it was taken from the phone’s camera sensors. This means you have every little detail that has been captured, at your disposal. In case of the Pixel 8, these RAW images presented incredible details, but the catch was that the format in which these RAW images were saved, were not compatible with Adobe software, until now.
Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and After Effects will be the software that will accept DNG files (Pixel 8 RAW image files), directly, and will accept these images as long as they are taken by the selfie camera, wide angle lens, or the main rear camera sensor. If you have a Pixel 8 pro, you can upload RAW images that have been captured by the ultra wide lens as well.
There are a few limitations to this, and while it is nothing drastic, you should be mindful of the following –
- Camera Matching profiles, a feature that mimics the unique colour customisations implemented on the camera, will not be available to Pixel 8 users. Adobe will address this in a future update, but at the moment, only Apple’s ProRAW format is supported for the aforementioned feature.
- Speaking of updates, the Adobe apps on your Pixel 8 device must be running the latest build.
This move by Adobe will open up a world of possibilities for Pixel users who are avid photographers. What this also means is that other developers will surely follow suit, and we will likely see a lot of competitor software also accepting DNG files for direct editing.
