We’ve found that JPEG or HEIC conversion can reduce the size of a ProRAW to 10%-20% of its original size without any perceptual difference in quality.
This 48MP Apple ProRAW is ~81.9MB, but the perceptually-equivalent HEIC version is only 10.6MB—12% of the original size!
When converting hybrid RAW files (RAW + JPEG or HEIC), the asset size is a total of the RAW and JPEG or HEIC components. Conversion discards the RAW data for these images and reuses the original JPEG or HEIC version to avoid recompressing the image.
Finally, more significant savings could be achieved with stronger compression, but SMAWL was designed to compress your photos and keep them looking good. Therefore, we use the minimum amount of compression to achieve quality results.