monica_b1998What an unprocessed photo looks like
Most cameras will let you export raw files, and a lot of phones do as well(although the phone ones aren’t great since they usually do a lot of processing on it before giving you the normal picture)
My understanding is that really raw phone data also have a lot of lens distortion, and proprietary code written by the camera brand has specific algorithms to undo that effect. And this is the part that phone tinkerers complain is not open source (well, it does lots of other things to the camera too).
Modern mirrorless cameras do this too. For example, this is what my Canon kit lens looks like with/without digital barrel distortion correction:
Not my photos. From: dustinabbott.net/…/canon-rf-s-18-45mm-f4-5-6-3-is…
And dustinabbott.net/…/canon-rf-24-50mm-f4-5-6-3-is-s…
My own unprocessed RAWs are pretty wild. But (IMO) it’s a reasonable compromise to make lenses cheaper and better, outside of some ridiculous examples like the 24-50.
