Nokia's latest slew of Lumia phones has been really great for smartphone photography enthusiasts and now the Finnish company has upgraded its camera app to shoot raw images natively.
Nokia updated its Camera app for its Windows Phone 8.1 handsets, the Lumia 1520 and Lumia 1020 running the Lumia Black software update. The new camera app update lends Purview shooters the added bonus of shooting pictures in lossless the raw Digital Negative Format (DNG).
The Camera app update is free and available to Lumia 1520 and 1020 owners right now. At the moment, it only works on two Lumia devices, but we expect that this functionality will be extended to PureView snappers in the near future.
Doing it raw
Raw images are uncompressed digital pictures with a minimal amount of post processing. The files are quite a bit larger than your garden variety JPEGs, but they have the added bonuses of carrying more data for finer details.
It's not just a matter of having a higher megapixel count either. Nokia's DNG images can be photoshopped with more natural-looking white balance adjustments and can be modified with a few stops of exposure compensation, which means a world of difference when saving an overblown or underexposed image.
This is the second time we heard that RAW image capabilities were being added onto smartphone cameras. Last week, raw image support was uncovered in some public Android source code.
