I think Apple still has aspirations to include professional-level photography in their OS so a photographer could do advanced RAW edits with just the OS.
The article says:
> photographers can take full advantage of Apple’s fantastic RAW engine, even when Apple itself does not support a RAW file, which is, unfortunately, a common problem for photographers using macOS, of which there are many.
And I’m also curious about how this RAW engine is fantastic even when it doesn’t support a RAW file. I guess people who actually shoot RAW can answer that. (I shoot JPEG on my camera.)
Apple bought Pixelmator/Photomator last year, though I have no idea what their roadmap looks like or if they plan to turn those into native apps or OS features.
Every camera manufacturer has their own RAW format. Apple produces a general-purpose RAW engine that can process many of those formats, but not all of them, and with a few notable misses, as noted in the linked article. The RAW engine is considered pretty good, fast/efficient, but overly aggressive on some of its defaults (noise reduction to the point of detail loss). The native Photos app also doesn't have many advanced RAW tools for editing the RAWs.
I posted my current workflow in a sibling - basically, I use Photomator for edits (Lightroom competitor, now owned by Apple) and Photos for library management and sharing. Works fine for me as a enthusiasts, but unlikely to work for a professional (and probably not for enthusiasts who like tinkering with their photos more than I do).
The article says:
> photographers can take full advantage of Apple’s fantastic RAW engine, even when Apple itself does not support a RAW file, which is, unfortunately, a common problem for photographers using macOS, of which there are many.
And I’m also curious about how this RAW engine is fantastic even when it doesn’t support a RAW file. I guess people who actually shoot RAW can answer that. (I shoot JPEG on my camera.)