What Is Photoshop Camera Raw? Harry Guinness Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw is Adobe’s RAW image-processing engine. It’s what allows you to convert the RAW image files shot by your camera into widely supported, shareable, usable JPGs. If that’s just a load of jargon to you, let me explain. RAW Photos Redux Even iPhones can now capture both RAW and JPG files. When you take a photo with a digital camera, it doesn’t see the world as a JPG. Instead, the sensor “sees” heaps more data about the light levels and colors in the scene than it can possibly record as a single compressed image file.