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A RAW repository, The Internet Archive and OpenRAW 146

Posted by timothy from the awesome dept.
Stan writes "I just read this in the OpenRAW mailing list, OpenRAW plans to create a RAW repository, a final resting place for RAW file documentations of current and already abandoned digital cameras. The RAW repository will be hosted in the Internet Archive, which describes themselves as a digital archive of the Internet and other cultural artifacts. And they have all reasons to support OpenRAW, they currently photograph billions of book pages with cameras and store them in RAW format. Unfortunately the camera makers think different (which is not always a good thing)."
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A RAW repository, The Internet Archive and OpenRAW More

A RAW repository, The Internet Archive and OpenRAW

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  • Which format again...? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @04:55AM (#12755901)
    I just read this in the OpenRAW mailing list, OpenRAW plans to create a RAW repository, a final resting place for RAW file documentations of current and already abandoned digital cameras. The RAW repository will be hosted in the Internet Archive
    Sorry, you lost me there. Which format will this archive be covering?
    • Probably either NEF or CR2...
    • Which format will this archive be covering?

      I realize you were making a joke, but RAW isn't a single format. It is a generic term for dozens of different formats, each of which depends on the make and model of digital cameras. Even if you take just Canon, you've got several formats including at least CRW, TIFF (with an extended section containing the raw data), and CR2. Each of these formats supports several camera models which may or may not need to be taken into account when decoding.

  • Digital == Loss of freedom (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @04:56AM (#12755902) Journal
    I'm not going to say I told you so, but I told you so. The minute you give up the physical artifact and rely on a digital representation of your data, you are at the risk of any company who wishes to exert some control over the format of that data. That's why all those RAW file formats for each camera are different from company to company. They gain the most benefit by locking you into a certain piece of software and forcing you along their upgrade path.

    If you stick with film, you are only limited in your ability to develop your own negatives. If you can do this, you will be able to continue with film for as long as you want. Scan the negs and save them in whatever format you want. It doesn't matter because the actual physical artifact is still in your possession.

    Not so with Digital.

    In many ways, digital is superior to film. However, when it comes to ownership of your data, you are far better off with film than you ever can be with digital.

    • Re:Digital == Loss of freedom (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kimba ( 12893 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @05:33AM (#12756009)
      With my camera I shoot in RAW. By some process in history, today the RAW format for my specific camera is open - available not only for use in commercial products like Adobe, but in GPL'd software that will convert it for me and for while I have the source.

      Unless someone arrests me and confiscates all my software, as well as removes all this purportedly legal software from the market, what is the risk of using this camera?
      • There is always some risk in machine readable data.
        In 20 or 30 years time you might have trouble getting hardware which reads your data and runs an OS which runs your software.
        Ok, you might be clued up enough to always copy backups to newer technology, but joe public is one day going to bring a CD out of his dad's attic and find he cannot even look at the photos on it.

        • Re:Digital == Loss of freedom (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Phanatic1a ( 413374 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @07:07AM (#12756259)
          There is always some risk in machine readable data.

          There is always some risk, period. If I keep stacks of negatives in boxes in my house, then in 20 or 30 years time my house might catch fire and burn to the ground.

          Okay, *I* might be clued up enough to always keep my negatives in a fireproof safe, but Joe Public is one day going to use a penny as a fuse replacement and find that he can't look at the photos on all that celluloid ash.

        • On the other hand, in the analogue world, in 20-30 years Joe Public pulls his prints and films down from the attic and finds they've been damaged due to damp etc.

          There's always some risk no matter what you do. Call it the 'shit happens' principle.
        • joe public is one day going to bring a CD out of his dad's attic and find he cannot even look at the photos on it

          Wouldn't it be nice if Joe's Dad used Smugmug/Flickr. I'm hoping that those guys will still be around in 20 years. I'm sure they'll have a disk array farm the size of Texas.
        • The thing with digital data is that if you have a good backup procedure (you should do anyway), it's safe. When you notice the format going out of fashion, pick up the latest lossless encryption format and it's a swift and easy move.

          The trick is to make the formats open (like this project is trying to), so that in 500 years when people dig out those antique nano-disks there will still be documentation for the format. With any luck if they get it right first time the format will still be the de facto standa
      • That is a risk you can't fix anyway, I mean even if you where using a film-based camera the authorities could still take your pictures and negatives away by force.

        If anything digital makes it easier to guard against that, because it makes it trivial to ensure mutliple, backups. If you're *really* paranoid you make you've got atleast 5 backups in 5 different jurisdictions.

    • Re:Digital == Loss of freedom (Score:5, Insightful)

      by phidipides ( 59938 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @05:35AM (#12756018) Homepage
      They gain the most benefit by locking you into a certain piece of software and forcing you along their upgrade path.

      Just to nitpick a bit, most of the professional photographers I know use the various plugins to Photoshop to work with RAW images, so technically they aren't being forced into an upgrade path by the camera manufacturers. I personally use a Canon 10D, and the Canon software is so awful that I always use other tools to convert and manipulate the images.

      I fully agree with your point that it would be better if the camera manufacturers fully opened up their file formats, and I fail to see how keeping them closed provides them an actual competetive advantage. However, so long as there is no constraint against converting RAW images to another lossless format I'm not sure that this is a battle in which the camera companies can be accused of trying to pull a fast one on consumers; I think it's merely a case where they need to be educated about the further benefits of opening up their formats (ie open source developers can build free tools, etc).
      • However, so long as there is no constraint against converting RAW images to another lossless format I'm not sure that this is a battle in which the camera companies can be accused of trying to pull a fast one on consumers
        RAW format seems the best starting format for achieving best results in image manipulation (at least that was the message of an earlier /. discussion).
        So the following comparison would not be unreasonable in a review:
        -For cameras whose RAW format is publicly available, start image processi
        • -For cameras whose RAW format is publicly available, start image processing from RAW.
          -For cameras with undocumented RAW formats, convert to something like .bmp first and work from that.

          Admittedly, I'm not a photographer or a graphic artist, but I'm a little confused as to how those are really any different. Chances are your image manipulation is done in Photoshop/GIMP/etc. If you use a Photoshop plugin, doesn't the plugin simply convert the RAW format internally? I assume Photoshop has some kind of standa
      • Just to nitpick a bit, most of the professional photographers I know use the various plugins to Photoshop to work with RAW images

        So, they're not being forced to buy Photoshop?
      • "I personally use a Canon 10D"

        What do you think of the 20D? It looks appealing. The new Rebel XT is tempting as well.

        • What do you think of the 20D?

          I'd definitely like to own one -- more pixels, less image noise, turns on/wakes up faster, etc., etc. Of course, if money were no option I'd get the 1Ds Mark II [dpreview.com] and be shooting 16.6 million pixels. If money were no option.

          Still, the 10D and its 6.3 million pixels produces shots that are good enough for magazine publication, and I like it way more than the film cameras I've owned. In another ten years we'll probably all be shooting with cameras that capture 50 million pixel
    • they could just use an unecumbered format like png

      BUT the advantage or "raw" is its the closest you can get to what actually came out of the cameras CCD. because of the way CCDs work this will be about a third the size of the resulting image (assuming they are uncompressed or compressed using a lossless algorithm that gets roughtly the same compression on both).
      • The issue with the camera makers isn't the file format being used - it's the fact that the raw data would give their competitors an insight into how they postprocess the raw CCD/CMOS sensor data into a balanced color image acceptable for photography.

        Each CCD colour channel has it's own frequency response curve [webcaddy.com.au], which is more complex than a simple cubic or exponential curve. A considerable amount of calibration has to go into developing these equations for all light conditions.

        If a new competitor were abl

        • The usual "you must protect your 'valuable' intellectual property" canard that lawyers and others like to push to drum up their parasitic business, completely ignoring the fact that openness oftens make better business sense.

          In this case any company capable of competing in the market can trivially sniff the raw data coming off their competitor's chip with controlled lighting, a digital storage CRO and a little common sense.

          To claim that hiding the the storage format is anything more than anti-competitiv

    • Re:Digital == Loss of freedom (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Hast ( 24833 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @05:55AM (#12756068)
      Oh you mean you'd rather use propriatary film with propriatary developer chemicals? There is nothing particularly "open" about that besides that the chemicals are available to buy in most photography stores. If they go out you will no longer be able to develop your old exposed film.

      Just to be clear, RAW is like the undeveloped exposed negative. After "developing" it to a TIFF16 or whatever format you want to have. You might think that RAW is equivalent to the undeveloped negative, but it really isn't.

      Besides, there is always DCRAW which allows you to "develop" your RAW files in an OSS fasion.

      Furthermore the reason RAW formats vary between makers is because it is raw data from the CCD/CMOS. So it's not strange at all that different manufacturers use different formats.

      I do agree with you though that we need open standards as far as RAW is concerned. I don't agree that the film world is any better though.
      • Actually... for the most part the formulas are publicly known for developers. You don't have to worry about acid fixes and rinse baths being proprietary. For most developers there are a number of companies that will make the chemical for you. Then you can just mix it yourself, or dilute it. I suppose you could make it yourself from scratch, but many of them use all sorts of evil to arrive at the final chemistry.

        Also, it isn't particuarly impossible to make your own film. Sure, getting the emulsion nic
        • I'm not an expert in this field, but I think that making a color film of even barely acceptable quality would be an enormously difficult undertaking. Kodak, Fuji, et. al. have 100 years of research in their products and a lot of their product uses trade secrets. I would rather try to make my own digital camera.
          • You're completely correct. Doing B&W is much easier overall than color. I was just pointing out that while it's hard, it isn't by any means impossible to do these things. While their products used trade secrets, many of those have already been figured out. It's still outside the realm of what most people could, or would be willing, to do in their homes.

            On the other hand, making your own digital camera isn't nearly as hard as making your own color film. There's a lot less reasearch and trial &
      • The chemical formulations of film and developer are published {and even if they weren't, would still be susceptible to mass spectrometry if not simpler analysis techniques}. If the companies making them go out of business, then the only thing preventing anybody from starting up making exact clones would be availability of equipment.

        What we really need is for it to be enshrined in law, in bold type if necessary, that a person is automatically privy to any secret embodied in any article they physically ow
    • You are wrong. The issue is not "digital vs analog", or "film vs harddisk", the issue is yourself knowing how to use the image, or have some arbitrary company control access to your images.

      With a film negative you're able to develop your own images as long as the required chemicals aren't a secret, and as long as it's allowed to sell them to you, and as long as you've got the required skills.

      With a image-file you're able to do the same thing as long as it's not a secret how to decode the image, as lon

    • What bullshit. The lengths that some people go to to "defend" film. If you like film, use it, but don't come up with these lame arguments, just say you like it and be done with it. I've NEVER lost a digital file since I went digital back in 1998. I keep my photo library on a computer and do periodic backups to DVD, which I store offsite. In my years of using film, I did lose negatives (only one copy of them, remember?) had many negatives that could only produce poor quality images because they got scratch

    • The minute you give up the physical artifact and rely on a digital representation of your data, you are at the risk of any company who wishes to exert some control over the format of that data.

      As everyone else is pointing out, I also don't understand why you think physical devices are somehow better off in this regard. You leave no caveat for data standardization in either the physical or digital realm, and standardization is the only thing that gives you any such data security.

      It's not data, but look

    • That's why all those RAW file formats for each camera are different from company to company. They gain the most benefit by locking you into a certain piece of software and forcing you along their upgrade path.

      So shoot in JPEG. Seriously, I don't get the complaint here. If JPEG isn't good enough for you and RAW comes with some restrictions you find unpalatable and that prevent you from doing good work as a photographer, then it sounds like digital cameras aren't for you. Am I wrong? Why does everything

  • What's been said before (Score:4, Informative)

    by twoshortplanks ( 124523 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @05:02AM (#12755922) Homepage
    In the last slashdot article on OpenRAW [slashdot.org]

  • RAW format (Score:5, Insightful)

    by James_Duncan8181 ( 588316 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @05:09AM (#12755937) Homepage
    The RAW format wars seem an odd competiton between camera manufacturers, who are actively hurting their presence in the professional space by making their imafes less useful for archive purposes and less interoperable for press agencies to sell. The thing that is particually noticible is that manufacturers are now being actively co-opted into sharing this information under NDA with MS to allow the hardware to work seamlessly with Longhorn. This mass move from open to propriatory standards (something MS will, of course, encourage) is meaning that the camera manufacturers are seeing their poduct become commoditised, and apparently feeling unable to compete on hardware quality alone.

    Thanks Canon, you just made me finally feel confident about buying Taiwanese.

    • Re:RAW format (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Uruk ( 4907 )
      I think though that most people buy cameras for the functionality of the camera, rather than the image file format. Besides, a lot of the cameras that have strange formats come with ready-made software to convert that format into something reasonable, (even if such software doesn't run on minority OS's)

      They aren't hurting their presence in the professional space - those folks still are going to buy the camera for its camera features. That provides an opportunity to sneak in other stuff that the camera co
    • They're not having wars over the format. The issue is the data is *raw* -- its right off the sensor, with some header information.

      Every camera can't *by definition* have the same RAW format. Every camera has different electronics.

      Picking a common "RAW" format is no different that picking any other non-"RAW" image format. Might as well ask them all to just store uncompressed images as TIFF files or PNG with the additional metadata. But its not RAW at that point.

    • Re:RAW format (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DigicamGuy ( 876393 )
      The thing that is particually noticible is that manufacturers are now being actively co-opted into sharing this information under NDA with MS to allow the hardware to work seamlessly with Longhorn.

      Actually, that's incorrect. The Longhorn interface is binary-only (no source code or format information is communicated to Microsoft or to the OS). Basically, the manufacturer (or third-party developer) writes a driver with an API that makes processed RGB data available to the OS. This is the same basic mode of

    • RAW files were never intended for archival or interchange. The only reason they exist is to take the time and expense associated with "developing" the CCD output to a real image file format, and move it off of the camera and onto the workstation. A 2GHz desktop CPU is going to be much better at converting the data than whatever embedded microprocessor can fit into a camera form factor.

      I'm sure the AP's photographers take their shots in a raw format, but the images don't go out on the wire until they've b
  • Which is apparently from quality point of view, not a good thing (however it has a high quality, low loss setting), but from an access point of view (and like what they do here: Photograph pages of books with it), is always works. No aging of formats or whatever.

    P.S. I am used of cancon just sending their software development manuals (at least in the past for their printers), apparently some attitude changed.

  • why? (Score:2)

    by croddy ( 659025 )
    why is it referred to as RAW when it doesn't seem to stand for anything?

    why does the article link directly to some sort of blog?

    • Re:why? (Score:2, Informative)

      by BabyDave ( 575083 )
      I think it refers to the camera's internal representation of the image (i.e. the "raw" data)

    • Re:why? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      why does the article link directly to some sort of blog?

      "Blogs" are the new informercial. Take something said somewhere else, post it on "your blog". Get a bunch of other accounts and link to it, and presto lots of page hits for your ads.

      Then of course, you can get it posted to slashdot (for free, I'm sure), and rake in the Rolandbucks.

      I wish google had a "blogs:no" option when searching.

    • Re:why? (Score:5, Informative)

      by petermgreen ( 876956 ) <plugwash@p[ ]ink.net ['10l' in gap]> on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @06:00AM (#12756077) Homepage
      in this case (cameras) raw reffers to the fact its the raw unprocessed data from the CCD

      this has to be processed to convert it to a form that we would recognise as an image file. This can happen either on the camera or on a PC.

      However This conversion process may well not be fully reversable (due to rounding errors) and bloats the data considerablly (CCDs generally make a red green OR blue value at each location image files generally have red green AND blue at each location so turning CCD output into an image file always involves interpolation) so from an archivists point of view its best to keep the raw data unfortunately that raw data is often in a closed format.
    • here's the page that OpenRAW points to, to describe RAW:
      http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/unders tanding-series/u-raw-files.shtml [luminous-landscape.com]

      • Re:why? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by croddy ( 659025 )
        well, yes -- that page calls it "Raw" and "raw", which makes sense. I'm just confused about the "RAW" nomenclature.
    • Dunno. Either because people are so used to image formats being acronyms, or because filenames are usually stored in FAT's 8.3 format in capitals, with a filename along the lines of IMAGE001.RAW, which means it should probably be called ".RAW" format.

  • How Open is the Repository? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @05:21AM (#12755973)
    This effort is being set up by a guy (Juergen Specht) who hosted a mailing list and then deleted it without notice when some of the posts offended him.

    See:
    http://www.vudeja.com/04/09/mailing-list [vudeja.com]

    http://www.esthet.org/blog/archives/001294.html [esthet.org]

    http://www.wirefarm.com/archives/004186.html [wirefarm.com]

    http://www.easterwood.org/hmmn/archives/001111.htm l [easterwood.org]

    http://openraw.org/about/ [openraw.org]

    Don't be surprised if this site just up and disappears one day, taking all of the data with it.

  • What horseshit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by loraksus ( 171574 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @05:24AM (#12755984) Homepage
    The manufacturers are just opposed to working together to create some sort of standard.

    But can you blame them? Really, think about this for a second - people (scumbag fucks who should hang from lampposts, call them what you will) from Rambus sat in standards groups for years and then turned around and secretly patented the standard and then had the balls to demand royalties. You saw more or less the same bullshit with .gif and in hundreds of other similar cases in the last 20 or so years.
    I think it is (sort of) understandable that companies would be hesistant to work together to develop a standard way of doing something - especially in a cutthroat business such as photography.

    And by the way, using Canon is a fairly shitty example, Nikon is far worse when it comes to the RAW format (ok, its not really a format) bullshit that flows through the world of pro photography.

    That all said, this smacks more of the petty bickering that is involved in cameras more than than anything else (See Also, "Complete lack of lens interchangability" et al), but as always, we (or those who buy $600+ cameras) get fucked.

    Don't get me started on how "using the DMCA to "protect" the super complex almost but not quite encrypted raw format". I don't need a stroke at this age. . .

    • Re:What horseshit (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mukund ( 163654 )

      The manufacturers are just opposed to working together to create some sort of standard.

      Adobe made an open format called digital negative [adobe.com]... The camera manufacturers need to start adopting it.

      • Re:What horseshit (Score:3, Informative)

        by Hast ( 24833 )
        Unfortunately DNG doesn't go all the way and just moves the problem further down the line. From the OpenRAW FAQ:

        DNG also allows "private data" to be stored in the DNG file. This private data is only known to the camera company that wrote the private data. Third party software that reads and/or writes DNG files will ignore private data recorded by the camera. Only the software written by the camera maker will read the private data written to the DNG file by its camera. Some of this private data might be i

        • Many image-related open formats offer private data areas, including TIFF, EXIF, SVG (it's not a raster format, but still an example of a graphics format which is extensible with custom private data). Even a format with support for comments can be exploited to store private data. If you take the analogy of other open documentation such as CPU manuals, chipset documentation, etc. no company tells you *everything*. They give you enough to work with and keep many undocumented features hidden.

          The point here is
          • It really depends on how the added data is stored there. If it is stored in a fasion which makes it possible for others to figure out what it means then that's one thing. If they put encrypted data there then that is another thing.

            There is also a risk that the camera manufacturers just dump all meta data into a "private" area for no real good reason. Apparently meta data is often obfuscated in RAW files, this includes things like white balance and such things. Hardly something that is very specific to the
            • I completely agree with that. Photographers need to become more aware that their raw photographs are proprietary and there may come a time when they won't work with new software which drops support for old formats, and nothing else can help them as the format is closed.
      • That assumes Adobe won't want a small 3% or so licensing fee for using it.

        I personally think we should be using a format that is braindead simple on the camera end. Forget having the camera decide that one pixel has this brightness or color, but do it yourself, on a computer - not in the camera.

        Each pixel (well, actually, we would want to use sub-pixels instead of viewing 3 sub-pixels (each with a different primary color) as a single pixel) would report that it received so much light while the picture was

  • Please tell me this, this is critical.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by johansalk ( 818687 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @05:34AM (#12756015)

    From Canon, as they refused to cooperate with openRAW and ended their letter with a slap in the face: "If our equipment or software does not meet your needs, you are entirely welcome to seek other suppliers".

    And this is *exactly* what I'll do from now on and for the foreseeble future; I will *not* entrust the future accessiblity of my visual data to such a company and its formats, and I will not render myself under their mercy given their manifest chauvinism. Does anyone know what suppliers are cooperating with openRAW? Those will get *all* my business.

    Thanks
    • I don't know about openRAW but I use cameras which work with Adobes new open Digital Negative standard. Check out its FAQ sheet for cameras which support it. That fact that it is an open standard should be good enough.

    • Re:Please tell me this, this is critical.. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ubergrendle ( 531719 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @07:54AM (#12756460) Journal
      From Canon, as they refused to cooperate with openRAW and ended their letter with a slap in the face: "If our equipment or software does not meet your needs, you are entirely welcome to seek other suppliers".

      This is true, and unfortunately Canon can afford to take this position. In the DSLR market -- the *serious* digital photography market -- Canon has through various reports a 50-70% market share. Their only serious competitor is Nikon who controls anywhere from 30-50% depending upon who you listen to, and the rest make up a very small percentage. Kodak just announced a complete retirement from the DSLR market, Sigma cameras are doing horribly, and although Pentax and Minolta have decent offerings their market penetration is relatively weak. Canon can throw around threats since Nikon is WORSE in their disregard for RAW, actively encrypting (weakly) the white balance data. Nikon knows the encryption is a joke, but its enough to have legal teeth via the DCMA and thus Adobe won't translate it.

      Personally I'm more concerned with the retirement of RAW formats than the current vendor specificity. When you by a Canon EOS system or a Nikon F-mount you're buying into a closed, proprietary hardware system. Extending it to the software realm is crappy, but not surprising. Microsoft is best positioned to bust this wide open, and its in Adobe's best interests to open RAW or see the success of DNG. My guess is once the balance of power starts shifting heavily in favour of Canon or Nikon (towards virtual monopoly) the lesser company will open up their RAW format to be more accomodating.
      • This is a hold over from the normal DSLR market. Arguably, Pentax and Minolta have better lines, feature wise, but people who have tons of canon or nikkor lenses aren't really going to care. Luckily, I recently got into photography, stuck my fingers in my ears and sung 'lalalala' over the nikon vs. canon debate and went straight to a k1000.
        • The high end Minoltas are nice, but Minolta didn't even have a digital SLR until this year (is it even available yet?). I bought my first Canon digital SLR like 3 years ago and it was already a 3rd generation dSLR. A few years ago, for digital SLR's the choices were Nikon or Canon. That was it. Now, there's Pentax, Olympus, Minolta, Sigma, Kodak, and other stuff like the digital rangefinder by Epson (an interesting device, but not really mainstream).

    • And this is *exactly* what I'll do from now on and for the foreseeble future; I will *not* entrust the future accessiblity of my visual data to such a company and its formats, and I will not render myself under their mercy given their manifest chauvinism. Does anyone know what suppliers are cooperating with openRAW? Those will get *all* my business.

      You can not just change the supplier, because everyone does the same thing and after a while you'll be obliged to return to Canon and ask them for pardon. T

  • Need for a broader approach? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by archeopterix ( 594938 ) * on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @05:37AM (#12756028) Journal
    Hm... Everytime I read something similar to the article (that is about twice a week), I think that there should be a non-profit organisation to oppose taking away customer rights under the guise of "intellectual property".

    Something powerful enough to organise boycott that would cause *pain* to the offending company. Something that a congresscritter would be afraid to piss off. EFF comes close, except that it a) has a broader scope and b) sadly is not powerful enough.

    Too bad that the existing consumer organisations are focused on making money from their "consumer reports" and the general population doesn't care (the frog is half-boiled and still comfortable).

    • EFF comes close, except that it a) has a broader scope and b) sadly is not powerful enough.

      They would become powerful enough if they received more donations.

      If you agree, show it not by replying and saying so, nor by modding me up, but by DONATING TODAY!
    • You could expand on this and say that each RAW format specification should be left in escrow. One of the conditions for public release could be that the format is no longer supported by any devices currently in mass production. Obviously this would work best for formats that are used in mass produced devices in the first place.
      Other conditions could be:
      • The company that owns the IP goes out of business.
      • The company decides to donate it to the community.
      • The format is succesfully reverse engineered.

      You co

  • going canon fanboy in here but (Score:3, Informative)

    by william_w_bush ( 817571 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @05:46AM (#12756052)
    so far my experience with canon gear has only been positive. firstly, they released linux and osx drivers for an old inkjet i had, along with most of their current line, and a good number of their scanners. second, their cameras are amazing, and use normal sd and cf cards instead of the MS and XD that are becoming infuriatingly ubiquitous. Also, their printer lines tend to standardize on the same types of ink, with better quality than the hp's and terrible machines epson is putting out nowadays (my r300 photo printer ran low on lt yellow ink, so it won't print black and white and keeps nagging me in windows to order more ink).

    i suspect this is just canon usa marketing dicks playing bs politics for their own sake. so far theyve given out a lot better specs for most of their printers than most companies, and few printer mfg's will even bother to put out cups drivers for their lines.

    not releasing their RAW format seems amazingly petty, but sounds exactly like all those fat, middle-aged sales execs who thought it wasn't worth it developing open-sourced linux drivers, cause they could get more commision charging each customer for the drivers themselves. we released them anyway, but a lot of those types make VP and do stupid shit like this to try to throw their cock around.
    • One of the comments to the post about Canon specifically points out that they only released the printer specs after being put under pressure, though. It's not as if they were overly enthusiastic about it.
      • yes, and i'm sure the gimp-print people must be swearing up and down about canon's reluctance as they work hard to crank out epson and hp profiles.
        • yes, and i'm sure the gimp-print people must be swearing up and down about canon's reluctance as they work hard to crank out epson and hp profiles.

          I'll take that as sarcasm. If not...please ignore the following comments.

          Both Epson and HP have provided drivers for printing under Unix-like systems. HP, specifically, has gone out of thier way to be helpful and contribute what they have to CUPS. The Gimp-print folks could use that at a minimum while contacting HP's reps for the CUPS drivers for more det

    • As a Apple user Canon has nearly convinced me to sell all of my canon stuff and go to Nikon, just because of the lack of a real SDK for there cameras. Then I tried to sign of for Nikon's SDK to compare them and found that they are have a contest of who can be the biggest asshole. Both companies ship a camera control program for Mac & Windows that I would say is like a demo in terms of quality and usefulness. So you know it's possible to control the camera from the USB port... but just try and get it

  • Just keep... (Score:3, Informative)

    by troon ( 724114 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @06:09AM (#12756095)

    ...a copy of the dcraw [cybercom.net] source code.

    • Re:Just keep... (Score:3, Informative)

      by RDW ( 41497 )
      The various manufacturer-specific Perl modules in the ExifTool [queensu.ca] package are also an excellent source of documentation for RAW file metadata. Reading this (rather well-commented) code can help make the more cryptic dcraw source much more comprehensible.
  • We have nice lossy and lossless image compression formats. There is NO reason ever to bother with raw camera images for archival storage.

    Raw image may theoretically contain a tiny bit more information under some circumstances. But you have a cost/benefit tradeoff: store and manage terabytes of raw images indefinitely vs. just achieving the same quality by using higher quality imagers together with standard image formats. Both store the same amount of information in the long run, but the latter is the be

    • Re:storing raw digital images is stupid (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jgordon7 ( 49263 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @07:03AM (#12756247)
      Most raw formats on modern cameras is compressed using a lossless format. Take Nikons nef format, a 6.1mp image in raw is only about 4-5 MB, if this was not compressed it would be closer to 10 MB.

      You can not tweak certain settings as easily once the image is convert to another format, even a lossless one like tiff. Best example is white balance.
      • Actually, NEF is a bad example because some versions (D100) implement lossy compression.

        White balance is just as easily adjusted in TIFF as it is in a RAW format as is most everything else. It's simply a matter of what tools are available. The only thing you lose is the opportunity to do the demosiac over again.
  • It's funny how we always capitalize 'RAW' even though it's not an acronym. Despite knowing this, I myself can't stop from typing RAW when referring to it either.

    • Its also funny how /, often includes some sort of explanation of terms that most people know, but on this term, that I've never even heard of, they seem to have forgotten.

      WTF is 'RAW' ? I know what raw meat is. I know what a 'raw deal' might be. But neither of those seem likely in the context of this story.
  • The need to archive large quantities of high-quality images captured with CCDs didn't arise only when photographers finally discovered digital--scientists have been doing this for decades.

    You do not need manufacturer-specific formats to do this. There are a bunch of formats you can use that store the data in a vendor-independent form and still let you recover the original data.

    The most important thing about such formats is that they need sufficient depth (16 bits per channel), they need a choice of los
  • The number of consumers that shoot RAW is so low that it doesn't matter to them.

    Sure the pros use it, but they are already locked into a system so they just complain (or don't think long term).

  • i know, lossy format, but its more then good enough for me and works in every software i've seen.
    (and my camera doesnt support RAW/Tiff or something else)

    Is the RAW format really that better (for someone who just want to make pictures)?
    If i'd do it professionally (and require the best quality), i'd use raw, but i dont see a reason why i should drop jpeg for raw.
    • For the vast majority of people taking pictures, JPEG is fine. The file size is relatively small, meaing that a lot of pictures can be stored on removable media, and the compression is pretty much unnoticeable.

      The problems come when you save the same image multiple times. Each time you save a JPEG image it's compressed a bit further, with a loss of more information. Eventually, you can be left with a fuzzy mess. It takes a couple of times for it to become noticeable, but it happens. For the vast majority o

  • Summary of some key points: (Score:4, Informative)

    by Distan ( 122159 ) on Wednesday June 08, 2005 @08:06AM (#12756531)
    What is this "RAW" format?

    RAW doesn't really refer to any single file format. RAW refers to pulling the unprocessed (raw) sensor data out of a digital camera. The actual layout of the bits varies from brand to brand, and often from model to model.

    Why do photographers want access to the raw data anyway?

    Many professional/prosumer photographers like to archive the version of their work that contains as much of the originally captured information as possible. In the professional film world, this meant processed slides (for consumers, this meant processed negatives). In the digital world, the RAW file contains all the data captured by the camera, before some data is lost by compression and other data is added through interpolation.

    Can't they just pull a lossless image out of the camera and be happy?

    No. The very act of converting the raw data into an image involves lossful processing of the data. Out of gamut color data is discarded, and CCD color data is interpolated to fill surrounding pixels.

  • when it comes to doing any sort of real editing JPG is *NOT* an option. I see people here that are obviously not photographers or have not used a digital slr camera saying just to use JPG. If you plan on doing little to no post processing sure use JPG but for true manipulation RAW is essential
  • OpenRAW plans to create a RAW repository, a final resting place for RAW file documentations of current and already abandoned digital cameras.

    A final resting place, eh? What is OpenRAW, a symlink to /dev/null?

    This article should probably say: A place for people to search for RAW file documentations, not a final resting place... Come on guys, be a bit more imaginative!

    RIP, RAW...

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