Comment by jeffbee
2 hours ago
I wish there was a middle ground between what Android/Pixel camera saves as raw, and the in-camera JPEG. Sometimes I have a few quibbles with the JPEG and what I'd like to do is edit the raw file, but starting from something close to the JPEG. Unfortunately what you get as a starting point from raw is hideous, and it's never clear how to begin. I don't think I've ever got an acceptable result trying to edit raw photos from my Pixel.
For Android, you can sort of get some of this with Snapseed. I occasionally use it, and it's "ok". I'm more frustrated by the fact that my preferred RAW editor (DxO) doesn't handle Android's DNG files. For me, at least, editing raw images on a phone screen is just not tolerable.
In other words, you want either your camera app to select the initial tweaks for you to be able continue in the external editor (not going to happen, RAW editing software is incompatible by design), or your editing software to select the initial tweaks that "look good" (that depends on your software). In RAW mode, Google Camera's output is photometrically correct, even if it stacks multiple frames or denoises it. Which is the only way to do it that makes sense, any other RAW camera app or actual dedicated camera does this the same way.
Or you could provide the RAW and the JPEG and it would start you off at a point that most closely matches the JPEG?
That's exactly what I'm talking about, how do you imagine that working? Metadata is not compatible by design, because processing pipelines are all subtly different and your result will always look different in your editor. Trying to match some basic parameters with the JPEG is possible and some RAW software can do that, but the result is going to be subtly different for the same reason.