“With the release of Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger,’ Apple has added basic support for Raw images to its OS and to the iPhoto digital photo management application. Sadly, Apple, like Adobe, has decided to go its own route with Raw image support: The company is manually reverse-engineering each Raw image format so that photos in those formats will work properly in iPhoto. Therefore, iPhoto will also lag behind as new Raw image formats appear in new cameras,” Paul Thurrott writes for Connected Home Media.
“Raw image support in iPhoto has other problems. In its bid to keep things simple, Apple maintains two copies of each Raw image you import into iPhoto. One copy is the original Raw image. The other is a lower-quality JPEG image that the application displays to avoid a performance lag. However, when you edit a Raw image in iPhoto, you’re actually just editing the JPEG version—not the original. Thus, each edit you make will likely impact the overall quality of the finished product,” Thurrott writes.
“In short, Apple’s support of Raw images is half-baked at best, but it’s better than nothing. I advise photographers who use the Macintosh to skip iPhoto and instead use third-party tools such as Adobe PhotoShop or PhotoShop Elements to manage and edit Raw images,” Thurrott writes.
Thurrott covers Windows XP’s Raw image support and more in the full article here.