RAW Photo Editing Online?

Hello all! Today I am taking a look at RAW support that coming to the popular browser photo editor: Polarr! Yes, it turns out that Polarr is adding RAW support to their app! I find this super exciting since I do like Polarr a lot and it is exciting to see it grow from its current form! So, let’s do some editing and see if it is any good!

Edit #1:
I have a few photos from my OneRS (4k lens) which are 48mp DNG’s. I instantly liked that there was no delay in importing them to the editor!

Here are my first edits…

First off, I like the ability to zoom with the scroll wheel, not all editors have this and it is a welcomed feature. The controls are nice and responsive which is amazing considering Adobe’s online suite is very laggy without RAW processing! Now, a big con is that I can’t de-noise until after I convert it to a JPG. I believe this is identical to Snapseed on mobile though, so I can’t complain too much and this is very-much camera dependent since the OneRS can be on the grainier side.

Next up, I pressed more tools but it clearly doesn’t work yet since it doesn’t properly import the photo to non-raw Polarr leaving me to do it manually…

During the conversion to JPG after the edits, the file dropped from 91mb to just 15mb showing the editor does compress the image by a chunk. Zooming in, we see that the detail is well maintained during compression but you can see more pixels than in the DNG.

Now I’ve pointed out the noise, I did de-noise it and Polarr gave a much cleaner result

You can of course see loss of detail when zooming but overall it isn’t too bad for as noisy as this image was:

I finished up with an official Insta360 1 Inch LUT which brought out the colors some more…

I decided to replace the sky before exporting since it is a feature I really like in Polarr and I thought it looked more pleasing than the blown out sky in the original photo.

So, my impressions of this first edit are good! Overall it works well and I really can’t complain about the experience. Polarr’s teams really make great web apps and this is no exception. My only really complaint is the de-noise being done with a JPG instead of DNG but the difference of detail probably isn’t super bad either way.

The file actually ended up being very large when exported with a full 48mp resolution and it came out at 195mb! The photo looks very sharp and I really can’t complain!

Edit #2:
Here is my second edit for today! I imported this wide photo of a gravel road…

After minor adjustments, this is where we are at in the new RAW editor:

Now onto the main editor:

I first imported an Insta360 LUT…

I then went straight to the de-noiser:

I finished up some basic color adjustments and here we are at 160mb!

Conclusion:
Overall I would have to say this is my favorite online RAW editor. You may know that Photopea offers an online editor that has some beneficial depth features for iPhone and Pixel photos but simply for RAW basic adjustments, I have to give it to Polarr.

Thanks for reading!

-Digital Wonders & Smiles