Open RAW format advocacy.

[Gilbo]

I know that there a couple of us here that have an interest in photography. I don't know how many of you shoot RAW, but many of us need an open and ideally universal RAW format. There are a variety of reasons why this would be A Good Thing.

Nikon's encryption of its white balance information has given the issue a lot more press, and driven home the necessity of an open format to many who may have only been trivially curious of the issue. Michael Reichmann (who maintains an excellent website on digital photography: The Luminous Landscape) has written an article in conjunction with Juergen Specht entitled the RAW flaw. If you are a digital photographer and are not already all too experienced with these issues (as many of us, unfortunately are --particularly myself, owning a Fujifilm S2 Pro) I recommend it.

I also recommend that those of you with digital camera's who feel that the current state of RAW formats is unsatisfactory, take the time, if you can afford a minute or two here and there, and fire off some e-mails to the companies of whom you are a customer and join the petition.

The petition text is at the bottom of the linked article. To read more about this subject, I recommend OpenRAW.org.

Thanks guys. The situation has been getting steadily worse as time has gone on, and if we don't do something, we aren't going to ever own the photographs we take ever again.

 

[Gilbo]

P.S. I'm probably going to post this at SR as well. Please excuse the double post .

 

[iGary]

For one thing, I find that the people advocating such are just a tad naïve about the workings of these formats. The raw files are geared around the signal processor and how it dumps the 8-bit, 10-bit, 12-bit, or whatever number of bits per pixel per band. You will have different raw formats for different signal processing architectures. If every manufacturer used the same image sensor and signal processor, you could then have a universal raw file format. Otherwise, any significant changes to existing raw format output will hugely affect frame rate performance. End of story.

Besides, you can get the file format specifications for most digital cameras as well as pre-compiled programming libraries (usually for 32-bit Windows) to write your own applications. I've seen specifications for the raw Nikon and Kodak file formats. Taking Kodak's raw format for example, it's simply a TIFF variant.

 

[Pradeep]

I would be happy if the 1Ds-MkII had an option to save as a TIFF, rather than have to bugger around for 15 secs per image extracting TIFF from RAW after-the-fact.

 

[Stereodude]

I would be happy if the 1Ds-MkII had an option to save as a TIFF, rather than have to bugger around for 15 secs per image extracting TIFF from RAW after-the-fact.

Except the camera would take 15+ seconds to write the TIFF to the CF card due to it's size.

RAW files are great! You can adjust the exposure and all sorts of setting after the fact to get the best possible picture possible. You can't do that with a TIFF file.

 

[LunarMist]

Stereodude,

Perhaps you should buy some faster CF cards. The write time would be about 6 seconds for 8-bit images or 12 seconds for 12-bit images. Since Pradeep is shooting tethered, a TIFF file option would be nice. I use the 1Ds MK II in the field and have plenty of time to convert files after the fact, so RAW is fine for my needs. My PC takes ~18 seconds to convert each RAW file.

It is not possible to change the exposure after the image is captured, only the mapping of the raw data to the output. In fact all of the post capture changes could be performed with a 16-bit TIFF file, since it is a larger space than the 12-bit A/D conversion. However, some operations performed during the RAW conversion may be better done in that step (pre-interpolation).

 

[Pradeep]

I would be happy if the 1Ds-MkII had an option to save as a TIFF, rather than have to bugger around for 15 secs per image extracting TIFF from RAW after-the-fact.

Except the camera would take 15+ seconds to write the TIFF to the CF card due to it's size.

The 1DsII is perfectly capable of saving a RAW shot via FW in less than 3 seconds. The problem is that I then need at least four computers to convert the RAWs to TIFFs at a rate that can keep up with the camera. This is only going to get worse when the III comes out at around 22MP. Currently JPEG is the only time-viable option. We are going to get access to the Japanes SDK writers soon, hopefully they will take our input

Going to check out a Pentium D @ 3.2GHz to see if it improves matters. The P4 3.6GHz 2MB cache is not fast enough.

I'm all for the flexibility of RAW, just gimme a TIFF option as well.

 

[LunarMist]

Does the dual-core CPU help any? My system is even slower than yours and it is killing me.

 

[Pradeep]

Got a Dell Precision 380 with 3GHz dual core, it seems to be reasonable for Abbyy OCR recognition, haven't yet tested it on RAW conversion.