Photos and RAW

What you see is what you get

The live view is Apple's video feed; the saved picture is the camera's own processed frame of the same moment, so the two are the same rendering. Looks are applied to that frame in the Gallery, on the phone and on the Mac alike, and the DNG is attached for the Mac's own RAW development.

The RAW

The DNG is a Bayer RAW: the sensor's data before demosaicing, with no Deep Fusion, no Smart HDR and no noise reduction. Apple hands third-party apps the Bayer RAW of a 48 MP sensor binned to 12 MP; 48 MP exists only as Apple ProRAW, which has been through Apple's processing. So the RAW is 12 MP, 4:3 cuts keep all of it, and the 2× export brings the saved picture back to 48 MP by resampling.

Photos renders the DNG with Apple's own engine when you look at it there, grainier and more contrasty than the picture. That is what a single unprocessed frame looks like; the picture next to it is the app's development.

Opening a shot's RAW elsewhere

The DNG attached to a picture in Photos opens in Color Science Lab on the Mac and in any RAW developer. The crop and the look are not applied there; the DNG is always the full sensor frame.