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Adobe Blasts Nikon's Closed File Format
Joe Decker writes "Thomas Knoll, creator of Adobe Photoshop,
blasts Nikon's use of encryption to limit access to white-balance information contained in D2X RAW images files. Fearing the DMCA, Adobe won't reverse-engineer the file, slightly reducing Photoshop's support for those files.
Nikon responds. Is Adobe whining? Is Nikon shooting itself in the foot?" We've covered this previously.
Nikon are screwing open source developers in the foot too :(
Will this turn into something like Open Office's support for the .DOC format?
Have you metaroderated recently?
Why doesn't Adobe just break the encryption outside of the United States, and keep all the infringing information on non-US servers so they cannot be sued for breaking the law in the US. I'm sure other people work around the DMCA in the same way?
Jonathanjk.com
NEF file formats will continue to have support in Adobe Photoshop as a plugin. This is the current state of NEF processing, it will continue to be so in the future.
The Nikon SDK that permits decoding of the format is still available to 3rd parties.
In short, it's the same as it ever was.
If the licensing is so heinous that an open source project can't accept it, then perhaps the problem isn't on the Nikon side, but in the perception and conception of how licensing should work on the part of the project team.
Patents aside, there might also be an issue reading some of these manufacturers' RAW formats in years to come if you've lost the original CD or it doesn't work on Windows ZZZZ.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Fortunately, outside the Land Of The Free(tm), anyone can access Nikon's encrypted data with a simple GNU/Linux application
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Is Adobe whining? -- Yes.
Is Nikon shooting itself in the foot? -- Yes.
1. Adobe is whining because it doesn't really matter in the end (see #2).
2. Nikon is shooting itself in the foot because even though I'm not a professional I know enough gurus in the graphics field to know that they are insane product researchers, and won't come within 10 feet of a product that will produce less than optimal results with photoshop.
Ok, next topic. Refresh, refresh, refresh...
Is that Nikon camera users will blame Adobe for a lack of compatibility, and there's nothing Adobe will be able to do about it. If the other camera builders do the same, then Adobe could well be stuffed for Raw File editing. I'm guessing that Nikon have done a deal with a different graphics editing company.
The best solution would be to pay camera companies to include a "Compatible with Photoshop" peelable sticker on the bottom of the camera / camera packaging. That'd probably get Nikon crawling back pretty quickly.
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
It is ironic that Adobe mocks Nikon for their closed file format, while they are guilty of suing a person who reverse-engineered their precious format in the past. It would be fun if Adobe try to reverse-engineer their format and Nikon would respond by throwing one of their engineers into jail.
Looks like Nikon's goofy encryption has been broken.
Oh, here's a link to dcraw which will blast through Nikon's bullshit.
Word of mouth is an amazing thing. I bought a digital camera a couple years ago. After reading a lot of web sites, I choose a Canon G5. Since I'm the go-to guy in my circle when it comes to tech purchases, I've convinced at least 5 or 6 friends to purchase Canon digital cameras. Choose with your feet and tell others to do the same. As a group we've got a lot of power.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Adobe should just put a little message in so when you try to access a Nikon camera in Photoshop it starts bitching about the DMCA and how Nikon doesn't love their customers as much as other manufacturers.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
See http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/23/205 0249&tid=93&tid=155 for original story.
This posting is actually referring to the earlier news - but the above link refers to Nikons response...
Freely readable white-balance information is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.
Free as in mason.
Nikon says they will provide a SDK for "bona fide software developers". I wonder what they are?
first its just an encryption.. and for later i expect they'll apply public-key for camera too.. and maybe, just maybe, then digital format photo can be accepted in court as evidence
http://aip.corolla.or.id/
You dick, how the fuck do you pirate your own material? Guess what, when you click the button on the camera, the image you take is yours, not Nikons. Its nothing to do with ethics, they'd do it if it weren't for the DMCA.
Jonathanjk.com
It was full of .NEF files (no, I haven't RTFA so I don't know if these are the files in question) so I emptied them off and she went back to taking pictures.
Thing is, the CD's she had with her that she'd got with the camera, were full of crippled software - "lite" versions you have to purchase the full version, etc.
I didn't have the time or inclination to look into it fully so maybe other Nikon owners will point out that I'm talking out my ass, which is a possibility.
Seems to me, though, that the Nikon "format" is far from user friendly, nor their software adequate or intuitively obvious to install...
If the licensing is so heinous that an open source project can't accept it
It isn't a problem for open source projects. They can already access the data. Well, those outside the US anyway, and people inside just need to download from outside...
It's Adobe, a proprietary US company, that's having problems.
You need to sign an NDA to get hold of it, so it won't be redistributable and most users are going to have to just disable its use when building the program. It probably only includes binaries for Windows/x86, anyway.
There would be no question that Adobe is a "bona fide software developer", and would be able to get their hands on the SDK. The good news is that they are refusing to sign up for it - They are determined to get the information out in the public domain, legaly.
For this, they should be praised. IMHO.
Adobe don't claim any rights on the settings you apply to images created with Photoshop. Whilst file formats are often proprietary, or are open to a limit expressed by API documentation (is .psd an open format ? Could Capture Read / Write .psd ? I think so...) here .NEF is replacing film. Did Nikon own your processed film ? Seems like commercial suicide to me - they're in danger of making their products extremely unattractive to advanced users.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
That is true. Nikon has provided software which functions as a means of bypassing an encryption scheme which protects copyrighted works to which they don't hold the copyright (the copyright belongs to the photographer). Seems like anybody who has taken a picture with one of these cameras would have standing to bring a DMCA complaint against Nikon.
Guess that knife cuts both ways, eh?
Except that Adobe is a fan of the DMCA. So they didn't like it when people decrypted their ebook format and had the programmer jailed (!).
So now they're complaining about somebody else doing the same thing. I find their whining at best, uh, whiny.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Nikon are free to do this.
We are free not to buy their products.
I run a heavy traffic photo mailing list (http://www.topica.com/lists/streetphoto) and the overwhelming response has been "Stuff Nikon".
Photogs tend to have well established workflows with a few choice tools (eg Capture One + PSCS) and do not enjoy having to use Nikon's frequently b0rked software.
There is no reason whatever to encrypt this data except to screw more $$ out of the customer.
If Nikon had a conspicuously superior product then this might conceivably make some kind of bean-counting sense but these days they don't. Canon's DP stuff is arguably superior and the only real effect of this on anyone will be to drive up Canon sales and drive down Nikon, amplifying an already-existing trend.
Thomas Knoll, who blew the whistle on this, is regarded with great affection within the DP community. Nikon is not.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the sound of Nikon flushing itself down the toilet.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
Well, this is certainly an ironic twist. Adobe should have lost its right to complain about the DMCA when it created the Dmitry Sklyarov incident, creating the first and still most ominous DMCA-related precedent for the use of criminal charges for what are fundamentally business problems and civil matters...
Adobe CREATED this and now wants protection from it. That's kinda funny. I don't care so much about white balance. The other issue in this matter is much more interesting.
I bought a D70 recently. I choose cameras by using them (and of course reading the odd review). This way i've always bought cameras that I, myself, can take great pictures with (previously, Canon A70, Olympus C-5060).
I also tried out the Canon 300D and 350D, E-300 etc. The Nikon felt best in my hand. That's the secret to a good camera/photographer relationship.
I would put up with having to install a plug-in if it meant getting better results. Perhaps Nikon's plug-in produces better results?? They did create the camera, after-all.
I think Nikon's biggest problem is they have no decent mid-range D-SLR. But then I can't imagine what you would need that the D70 can't deliver.
The DMCA is about protecting copyrighted works.
A photo you take, and its representation (including
whitebalance information) is *your* copyrighted work,.
As owner of the work, you can give yourself permission
to break the encryption (says so in the DMCA).
If Nikon tries to sue you in spite of this, countersue them
for theft of copyrighted material.
Alternately, if all of this is too much bother, and the whole
concept offends you, don't buy Nikon.
Or one might make the case that a picture taken using Nikon equipment - or any other brand - is really the property of the person who shot it. That person should be able to do whatever he or she wants with the photo without having to pay Nikon any more $, either directly or indirectly through the cost of software whose developers had to pay for a license to Nikon's SDK. Call me crazy.
/lawyer doubletalk reason that they never ever will understand.
And yes, of course the solution is "if you don't like it, don't buy it". So I won't. However, I'm feeling some pity and righteous anger on behalf of the inevitable bulk of Nikon buyers who (a) never heard of this outrage and (b) wouldn't understand until it's too late and they find out they have to buy more software for some incomprehensible computer nerd
What most /.-ers miss is that Adobe Camera RAW as well as most other converters such as Capture One or RawShooter don't rely on manufacturers' SDK to convert RAW files. This way they can achive better results.
I don't know about Nikon, but for my Canon I know that ACR produces far better results than Canon RAW Converter.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Shooters who are serious about RAW files don't use Photoshop as their RAW converter. Photoshop may be the number-one image editor, but when you've got 300 RAW files to process it's totally unacceptable for that task. Not only is the output merely good rather than great, Photoshop just isn't engineered for smooth high-volume workflow. If you shoot weddings, catalogs, fashion, or the like; you've got too many files to use Photoshop time-efficiently.
The kind of shooter who needs a D2x will be using something like Capture One. I once used it to convert 300 RAWs under difficult stage lights in two hours. I grouped photos under similar light, fine tuned the converter for one group, set it batch converting the group in the background while I moved on to the next group. This would have taken a loooong time in PS. Once your RAWs (NEFs ORFs CRWs, whatever) have been converted to TIFFs, THEN you move to Photoshop, if necessary.
PhaseOne has already announced that C1Pro 3.7.release.candidate supports the D2x, so I guess the SDK is available to 3rd parties. The overlap of [D2x owners} and {Adobe Camera RAW users} will be a relatively small group.
It's ironic that this is coming from a company that, for many years, kept the (encrypted) file format of Postscript Type 1 fonts a closely-guarded secret.
It took a combined threat from Bitstream (who successfully reverse-engineered the format), Apple and Microsoft (who teamed up to produce a serious alternative, TrueType) to force Adobe to open the file format to the public.
So I guess the same would apply here--either reverse-engineer the Nikon format (a legal course of action in the US, UK and Australia), refuse to buy their products or design and popularize with an superior alternative file format.
Freely readable white-balance information is the bedrock of our liberties. Those who would give up essential white balance information to obtain temporary control over copyright infringement deserve neither.
You bring up a good point, despite the unnecessary cussing. The DMCA only applies to things that are "primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under" the copyright laws (other provisions are similar, IIRC). To what copyrighted-work does this encrption scheme limit access? It can't be the photographs . . . Nikon did not contribute in any way. It can't be the camera's firmware . . . how does the this encryption scheme limit when/where/how offen you can access that work?
I'm not a photography buff. Perhaps somone who uses this stuff can explain.
PhotoShop CS2 lists for $599. I think Adobe could probably afford to pay the licensing that Nikon is asking for, rather than just complaining about it to the media. Sorry if I'm not sympathetic to a multi-billion dollar corporation having to deal with another multi-billion dollar corporation's licensing fees.
XeoMage
Typically the SDKs don't provide full, unfettered access to the manufacturer's raw format, just a subset. Canon is as bad as Nikon in this regard. Despite that, Thomas Knoll has usually managed to decode any given camera's raw format well enough that Adobe Camera Raw produces results as good or better than the manufacurer's software and with more parameters that can be adjusted.
.CRW 2 or 3 times faster than Canon's own software.
My experience with a Canon G4 is that ACR not only is more flexible (and even allows recovery of blown highlights if at least one color is not blown on the highlight), but converts images from
Knoll has essentially reverse engineered the formats for the cameras that ACR supports, but is being extra cautious with the Nikon situation because of the possible DMCA legal issues where encryption is involved. There has been no encryption involved in the other formats ACR handles.
Adobe recently unveiled XML-based DNG (Digital NeGative) as a universal open format, which they are encouraging all camera manufacturers to support.
What other digital camera manufacturers have documented their RAW file format?
That entirely misses the point.
Undocumented RAW formats are one thing, and can in most cases be reverse-engineering quite trivially just by using commonsense.
But what Nikon did was to *ENCRYPT* the values contained in one particular set of fields, those holding the white balance information.
This is totally unrelated to the structure of their RAW files being undocumented. It requires a decryption key to release that data (which is the photographer's data anyway, not theirs), and commonsense cannot possibly reveal it.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
If I took the photograph isn't the data mine? Not Mine and NIKONS... Shouldn't I be able to control what parts are encrypted and what parts aren't, so I can get the best posible image/color/detail out of the photograph.
There should be no fear of decrypting this data. Didn't I create that file? Isn't the data even though encrypted mine?
I can't even think of an analogy. Even MS with its word file format, won't document how it works but isn't so evil as to encrypt it.
This is bad form and is another strike against Nikon.
"Fearing the DMCA, Adobe won't reverse-engineer the file"
The poetic justice is lovely this evening.
"Adobe won't reverse-engineer the file, slightly reducing Photoshop's support for those files."
Adobe needs to just punish Nikon by stripping all support for Nikon raw images from Photoshop until Nikon caves. Nikon will have a hard time selling digital cameras to professional photographers if Photoshop just spits up all Nikon raw images as improperly formatted.
One key difference is that Nikon has not only left their file format undocumented, they've actively encrypted a key image parameter, allegedly as a spoiler tactic to prevent 3rd party developers fully parsing the files without signing up as 'approved' developers. If Nikon decides you are a 'bona fide' software company worthy of the honour, you can get hold of an SDK (apparently Windows/Mac C++ only with binary runtime libraries) but won't be given a full description of the file format. This has serious implications for the use of Nikon NEF files as an archival format (will Nikon's SDK components work on whatever OS you are running in 20 years time?), for developers who want to use their own algorithms (like Adobe), and for FOSS projects. Luckily, Dave Coffin has already reverse engineered the decryption algorithm in the current version of his open source dcraw RAW converter, so we're not yet locked out of the NEF format. What isn't yet clear is whether Nikon will continue with this sort of tactic in future NEF versions, and if Adobe will overcome their DMCA concerns to fully support NEF in their ACR raw converter (assuming they're not just grandstanding). Incidentally, there's a brief description by Tom Christiansen of the white balance encryption algorithm here, and a pointer by Thomas Knoll (of Photoshop fame) to the relevant section of the dcraw code here.
What, exactly, has happened with PDFs that Adobe doesn't like?
Hell, they've managed to make most people think you need horribly expensive "Distiller" software, when they could just use GhostScript and PDFCreator. What a racket...
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'm no lawyer, but I've a feeling here in Scotland the encryption of other people's data without providing them with a means of decrypting it COULD be taken as illegal.
Here in Scotland, preventing someone access to something they own (and you would expect that the photographer owns the data of the photograph) is viewed as theft by the law. It's why car clamping is illegal in Scotland. I'm not sure if there are any cases which provide precedence for this with regards to data, but would be interesting to see Nikon bought to court over this!
Nikon released a statement late last week regarding the "encryption" (not technically encryption, but instead, obfustication) of the RAW format (NEF) photo data taken with a D2X camera:
Nikon: You Are Wrong. Period. And do not insult me by lying.Update: Nikon has removed this statement from their web site.
The thing that galls me about Nikon's statement is that Nikon is essentially telling me that I need to use their processing solution, or one that they approve, or not use the NEF format at all.
They can wax poetic in PR legalese all they want, but at the end of the day, all I am reading is that Nikon is saying that my data is for me to use as they see fit. No, Nikon, it is not.
A camera is an instrument to take a photograph, and that's all. Now, however, the coming of age of digital has married irrevocably cameras and software. Without software, a digital camera is absolutely useless. It produces nothing tangible, and to make that photograph anything more than a small image on the LCD screen on the back of the camera, you simply must have software.
That said, if the images are now aetherial bits, do they not still belong to us, the photographers, or our assignees?
I think the answer to that is yes. They certainly would if they were film images. And has any camera manufacturer ever mandated what film processing methods must be used with photographs taken with their camera? No. It would have been insane for one to even try.
And this is insane now.
As such, I think that the SDK should be freely available to anyone who asks for it, and at the very least, to any owner of a Nikon digital camera. Why should I not be allowed to write my own software? Because Nikon says that I can't, as I am not a 'bona fide' developer? Do I need to be one, to write applications to fiddle with my own images?
No. The data are mine.
Let me use a real world example: I photograph a lot of panoramics. I use Panorama Tools a great deal of the time to stitch those programs together. Now then, PTools does not have an embedded interface for NEF files, especially D2X NEF files. Let's say that I wanted to open my NEF files and input them programmatically into Panorama Tools. With this press release, Nikon is telling me that I cannot have the information to do the task I want to do. In other words, sod off, pay us to play.
This whole issue reminds me much of Gillette, the razor company, when their mantra was "sell the razor cheap and the blades at a high price." Instead this time, it is "sell the camera high and continue to reach into their pockets to allow the photographer to use his/her pictures. Use our software, or someone we like, or do not use your data as you see fit."
Worst of all, this has been enabled by the US government, what with the asinine provision of the Digital Milleneum Copyright Act. The DCMA makes it illegal to reverse engineer encrypted files. Bottom line is that one can argue that NEF files are not encrypted, but in reality, they are, because the data are obfusticated...and without Nikon's blessing, one risks enormous civil fines and prison to bypass Nikon's methods.
I hope at the end of the day Nikon is punished severely by the marketplace for this. I truly hope that Canon makes a point to point out in their marketing that not only do they not charge for their RAW conversion tools but that developers can get the information they need to extend the capabilities of Canon cameras.
That sounds severe, but the only thing Nikon will understand is a beat-down from their potential customers. And this time, Nikon deserves a black eye.
They could certainly simply reverse-engineer the format and fight it out in court. But they're kind of in a bind because they like broad applications of the DMCA and don't want to weaken it.
It's unlikely white balance information is copyrightable at all. Which means decrypting it isn't bypassing a technological measure protecting a copyrighted work, which means the DMCA doesn't apply. In any case, the white balance information in a photo isn't copyrighted _by Nikon_ (unless a Nikon employee took the picture), so Adobe could probably get any case dismissed for lack of standing.
It's amusing to see Adobe hoist by its own petard. And even more amusing to see that the format (including encryption) has been reverse-engineered, and will be supported by open-source tools.
To combat this, Adobe has introduced a new open RAW format called DNG for digital negative. They provide a free converter to convert all of the closed proprietary formats to it and are willing to work with the camera comanies to make sure that the format contains the information they need.
The RAW converter that came with $2500 Minolta SLR I bought does a terrible job. They want me to pay an extra several hundred dollars for the Pro version that does the job decently. All that just to read the damn pictures I take!
Can you imagine if you bought a film camera and got consistently crappy prints from it unless you bought a pro-upgrade lab? At least Adobe takes the time to reverse engineer these proprietary formats and even provides a free tool to convert to an open format.
Nikon might want to consider publishing their format. But it it truly just image information? I thought there was some internal state information included. This might be simply a way to protect their complete 'system,' whose borders reach beyond the physical camera, to the export of jpeg and tiff. It really is their format, after all. Positive persuasion is more appropriate here, not demonization.
Uhhh... you realize that many large cities prohibit the sale of photos of their buildings without buying the rights? Or that selling photos of photos, ads, sculptures, paintings, artwork, etc can get you sued if you don't acquire the rights to the original? It's called "photography clearance".
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
http://www.openraw.org/ OpenRAW is a group of photographers and other interested people advocating the open documentation of digital camera RAW files.
Which is.... not copyright.
You still own the copyright, even if you need to make agreements to use the photographs commercially.
It's called reality.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
The paper is here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/main.html
Essentially they're trying to create an open, ISO certified format that is capable of holding all the RAW information that a camera maker would need. This would future proof images so that they can be read by a number of tools.
cheers,
Kris
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
A lot of people don't seem to understand why the white balance has value to a professional photographer. When you shoot RAW, you can completely correct for ambient lighting after the fact by adjusting the white balance, and without any loss of quality.
Even just for "pro-sumer" cameras, this feature is great when working with ambient light.
Nikon has not asserted any ownership of your images. This outcry has come from the general bitching that everyone has with the encryption issue. Everyone's falsely concluding that just because something is encrypted in the file that that means that Nikon owns your image. How absurd is that! My guess is that there's more than just white balance that is encrypted in the file.
Yes, let's get the facts straight:
1. Nikon has obfusticated some of the data I produce with their camera.
2. Nikon tells me this is for my own good.
3. Nikon has restrictions on it's SDK such that despite your assertations it is not for the asking, otherwise Bibble and Capture One would have licensed them. And as an end user, even in Japanese-English I am not a "bona fide" developer. I am a person who diddles with writing their own software for their own purposes.
4. Under DMCA provisions, it is illegal for to reverse engineer the data I produce with the camera.
5. Nikon sells a product called Capture, that performs extremely poorly and essentially cripples a computer from doing anything but run Capture while it is in batch operation.
I never said Nikon owns my image per se, but instead they own the key to my white balance data, which is carefully set by me when I am out shooting. Since I use the Preset WB, why would I want anything but "as shot" -- after all, using an ExpoDisc, I set it correctly in the field.
In other words, MY DATA is the white balance information. It is as integral to the photograph as the image itself. Nikon is telling me that I cannot easily or freely access my data. They say that they have the key and I cannot have it.