>>3996294>What's amazing however is that this is all the result of shit software.>If you shoot RAW, you can pull impressive details out of phones that will rival [...]Big doubt.
It's the opposite, the software is insanely good at improving the technical quality of the image.
There's no chance in hell you can beat the phone's jpeg engine manually, on technical quality. The phone's engine uses a complete pipeline full of DSPs and custom ASICs, whatever heuristic meme neural/AI stuff, on top of having access to a chockfull of data like multiple captures, dark frame subtraction, accelerometer data, potentially pixel shifting, etc etc. that you'll never get in a raw.
You might disagree with the heavy hand of some chink brands, but take something more neutral like a Pixel or iPhone, and I guarantee you, you won't beat their jpeg engine by a long shot.
The RAWs are almost irrelevant, it's computational photography making the majority of the end result. And there's no fucking chance you'll beat their algorithms+neural nets+extremely fast ASICs that perform billions of operations of second, by just pushing some sliders around in Lightroom.
Case in point, grab an iPhone or Pixel, and shoot a "nightmode" photo handheld. Now take the same photo manually in RAW with an app, and try to match the first one.
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