Sorry, I'm a photo-noob. What type of post-processing is the iPhone doing that professional would do themselves with RAW? Looking at RawTherapee, it looks like colour profiling. What other operations do people do?
The iPhone does a lot of stuff:
- correcting for lens distortion
- automatically setting white balance
- optimizing color and contrast
- blending multiple exposures when it's dark and has some advanced denoising tricks (which sometimes gives photo's a bit of an 'oil painting' look)
- sharpening to get that 'crisp' look (even if your lens is not that sharp)
I think correcting for lens distortion is the main thing that wasn't already mentioned in the article. Regular cameras can't do that, but the iPhone knows exactly what lens is being used and can take advantage of that.
