By Graham K. Rogers

When I wrote about the update to Pure Shot yesterday, although version 5.0 had been announced it had not yet arrived here. My information was on the previous version and what that would do, including the ability to produce quite large images. I now have the latest version of Pure Shot and the text below has been updated in the light of the update.

One of the things I like about iPhones is the number of good photo apps available. There is a lot of rubbish too, but there have been some gems out there right from the beginning. The recent addition of RAW capabilities to the iPhone has produced a number of good apps. There was an interesting example I found this morning in Filmborn which allows users to choose from a selection of film types. I will be looking a this in more detail later, but as a free app, this is worth playing with.

The developer Michael Hardaker (Jaggr) has a number of apps that emulate film format cameras, like 6x6 and 6x7 and it was his 645 Pro that had me looking seriously at film again, to the extent that I bought an older Hasselblad camera and started using film again seriously.

Before 645 Pro I had been using Jaggr's Pure Shot ($2.99), which has a similar interface but does not allow for the more sophisticated selection of film-type emulations of 645 Pro. That is not in any way a negative comment as the Pure Shot interface allows a user to set up the camera operation in many ways. One of the attractions of Pure Shot and 645 Pro was that I could save images in TIFF format rather than the standard JPG of most iPhone camera apps.

I had expected that 645 Pro would be the first to take advantage of the new RAW capability of iPhones, but earlier today Pure Shot was updated and it is possible to set this up to save images in high quality RAW files.

Currently, the settings in Pure Shot call this a dRAW Tiff format. In Photos on the iPhone files are identified as TIFF images.

With the update of Pure Shot to version 5.0, as well as the previous file types there are now several file-saving options:

• Hi-Quality JPEG
• Max-Quality JPEG
• TIFF
• Camera RAW (DNG)
• RAW+HI
• RAW+MAX
• RAW+TIFF

The update appeared to introduce an anomaly in a lack of either visible or tactile feedback from the orange camera button, but I had muted the phone (that button on the side) while in a class. When that was changed, the sound was perfect, however shutter animation is not working but a fix is on the way.

Before I was able to install the update, the way I had the screen set up (5:4) along with the TIFF file saving gave me images of 35 MB at a resolution of 4032 x 3024. Other resolutions available are 1:1, 4:3, 3:2 and 16:9.

After the 5.0 release, I changed the settings to give me RAW (DNG) images and a number of test shots produced files on the iPhone of just under 10MB although with that same 5:4 format the resolutions seemed low at 852 x 640. Although I changed the settings using the onscreen controls, both 1:1 and 16:9 gave me images with the same resolutions because the camera does not crop the RAW images.

I am told that "The iPhone's internal system can only read the preview JPEG, and it reads the file size off that; [the] metadata tool does give . . . the master file size too."

When the images appeared in Photos on the Mac the same metadata was shown, but transfers to Aperture gave a different view, with those images showing a size of 4032 x 3024 (12.2 MP) but still with the same file size of a little over 10 MB.

When I exported one of the images from Photos to the Desktop as a TIFF image, it had the same size as the one I had exported from the previous version of Pure Shot. If the original DNG image is 852 x 640 and the exported version 4032 x 3024 at 72 pixels/inch, a rough calculation suggests the apparently small file on the iPhone has a resolution of approximately 340 pixels/inch.

As before, whenI exported the image from Photos as a full size TIFF image, the file was some 73MB: 42" x 56" - no mean feat for an iPhone.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. He is now continuing that in the Bangkok Post supplement, Life. He can be followed on Twitter (@extensions_th)