You may not have heard of Core Image RAW – but if you've shot or opened a RAW photo on an iPhone, you've already used it. Now, the software that Apple uses to process RAW photos is getting a key upgrade to reduce noise.
Apple has announced the latest updates to Core Image RAW, the software that processes RAW images taken on iPhones and handles RAW processing in Apple image editing tools. This software is used everywhere from the native Photos app to some third-party apps like Pixelmator Pro.
Core Image RAW 9 was announced in a YouTube video released earlier this week, and is slated for rollout as part of macOS 27 and iOS 27 across Apple devices and image editing apps in September of this year.
The major upgrade is the software’s ability to de-noise RAW images, now heavily driven by machine learning (ML).
By infusing ML, an artificial intelligence (AI) model, into demosaicing – the process of ensuring all image pixels contain the colors red, green, and blue – RAW files appear drastically less grainy, and unwanted color artifacts are reduced.
Above: Apple imaging engineer explains the updates coming with Core Image RAW 9
In the video, Apple imaging engineer David Hayward presents several examples demonstrating the denoising power of Core Image RAW 9, but it’s the close-up image of crayons that most impresses me.
First we see the image rendered with the previous Core Image RAW 8 model, which relies on traditional, hand-tuned algorithms for demosaicing. Then we see the same image processed by the latest software version.
To my eye, the results are significantly better, with fine details becoming much clearer and grain drastically reduced, albeit with some slight softening.
Above: swipe to see Apple Core Image RAW Version 8 vs Version 9
Core Image RAW 9 is the eighth upgrade Apple has made to its RAW processing engine, with the stack of programs currently able to process RAW files captured on 846 cameras across all the major brands.
While version 9 of the processing engine is more resource-intensive for devices, iPhone photographers and people who edit RAW files in Apple applications can expect much crisper images.
In the video, which came out as Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2026 kicked off, Hayward also mentions that activating Core Image RAW 9 requires making some slight adjustments to the underlying code of some image editing apps.
However, he doesn’t state whether this will be the case once the latest iOS and macOS versions are released later this year.
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