Since I have some files on hand and most of the relevant software installed, I decided to systematically look at iPhone HEIC and DNG support some of the major photo viewers/triage tools and RAW developers.
Browsers
FastRawViewer
Shows iPhone DNG, png and jpg. Does not show HEIC.
ApolloOne
Displays iPhone jpg, png, HEIC and DNG perfectly. Should do as ApolloOne includes two decoders, one libraw and the other Apple’s own system tools. You have full access to a histogram and to detailed EXIF and IPTC information as well as star ratings.
ApolloOne would be a good inexpensive choice for image triage before processing.
PhotoMechanic Plus 6
Opens iPhone DNG, HEIC, jpg. Very fast doing so. Very useful tool for rating and managing iPhone images! Surprise, surprise. On the other hand, Photo Mechanic would be total overkill for iPhone image management. If you are using Photomechanic already though for pro work, you can keep using the tool you know best.
Apple Finder Mojave
Will show HEIC and iPhone DNG photos with large thumbnails. Quicklook works as well. No way to rate but a simple tool like Lyn or Lilyview which use Apple’s own display libraries do work.
Raw Developers
Photolab 4 Photo Browser
Sees iPhone DNG but will not open them. Does not show HEIC images. Opens iPhone jpeg only.
Irident Developer.
Opens iPhone DNG for processing. Ignores HEIC as RAW only.
Iridient Developer’s extreme highlight recovery proved to be very useful on some tough images. Best of the lot, as you are very close to the actual RAW data.
CaptureOne 12
Will not see or import iPhone HEIC or even JPEG files. It’s a RAW editor only. Will import iPhone DNG.
Adequate results. Did better on recovering highlights than Lightroom. No native profile so there’s some work to be done setting up a viable workflow. The work to turn these RAW images into something viable makes me look longingly at my D850, my Z6, my Z50 and even my son’s D3300.
Adobe Lightroom Classic
Sees, imports and processes everything.
Results of DNG processing: taking a well-exposed file and applying a simple S-curve, attempting to dial back the highlights was very poor. Much worse than what I get out of the iPhone using Apple’s own processing.
Apple Photos
Not tested this round as I don’t want to open it up and have it start chewing through my images and/or hiding them but Photos app will work with all of these. Might do a better job than the third party apps.
Quality Test
I can see why Photolab is trying to avoid mobile DNG files: they are just not very good. When DxO showed serious interest in supporting mobile phones, there had been some movement in 2014 to more interesting phone sensors with phones like the 1 inch Panasonic DMC-CM1 and Nokia Lumia 1020 coming to market. Heck DxO put out its own DxO One at the time. Finally Huawei is now building some larger sensor phones again as well.
iPhone internally processed versions of the same photos I tried processing in CaptureOne manage to take backlighting and turn it into something magical. If I were taking iPhone DNG processing seriously, I’d certainly like to have Prime available to try and control the noise everywhere.
I don’t have time for a proper quality test now. The grown up commercial tools (Luminar and On1 don’t count) which will handle iPhone DNG files are Iridient Developer, Adobe Lightroom Classic and CaptureOne.
Apple Photos doesn’t really count either as a pro application but I’d have to test it, as it’s the native tool. As Apple Photos disappears one’s images into a proprietary database, I wouldn’t want to use it for anything.
Recommendation
Image review/triage/management with ApolloOne with raw processing in Iridient Developer. HEIC images should be converted before review to jpeg where they can be directly opened up in Photolab. Perspective and noise could be treated in Photolab from exports from Iridient Developer (HQ NR only of course). An expert Affinity Photo or Photoshop editor might prefer to do perspective and noise reduction there.
I’d love to hear about successful recipes for obtaining the best possible images from iPhone DNG from other Photolab users.
I missed an important point about Apple Photos: if you are working with the depth of field effects, those can be saved into the HEIC files and manipulated in Apple Photos.
\What is critical however is that the file is shot using the HEIF format because that’s the only way we can save the depth map needed to create the shallow DOF simulation.
If Apple Photos turns out to have much better support of HEIF files then it would make sense to use it and not even ask DxO for Photolab support for iPhone, as it’s a playing field on which they can’t win without enormous extra work (proprietary info). The future ProRAW improvements bought up by Marc @m-photo become very important to worthwhile iPhone DNG support in Photolab.