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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?
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.
They're a US company; the same way that soliciting somebody to commit a crime is (usually) criminal, I'm assuming they'd also be found to be guilty in a civil court when the DMCA is broken.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Easier said than done at the D2X end of the line (or Canon 1D / 1Ds, same idea). People have thousands (or, if they're buying D2X's, probably tens or hundreds of thousands) of dollars invested in glass (lenses to everyone else). Switching camera manufactureres is a VERY expensive proposition. Not only do you have to buy a whole new set of glass, but you have to learn (from scratch) which of the new manufacturers lenses work best for what you do, and how to use them to get that result.
Sure, at the G5/Powershot/etc level, changing brands is a matter of picking a new camera up. When you get into DSLRs, changing brands is orders of magnitude more expensive than simply buy a new camera body.
The NEF file format is Nikon's RAW data, ie: not compressed to JPEG or other format, it's pure image data from the camera's sensor.
By default, Nikon cameras (that are able to shoot RAW) convert to JPEG on the camera, and you have to select RAW manually. Sadly though as you discovered, they don't supply fully licensed software that can read RAW data with their cameras, beyond a trial version of Nikon Capture (this might have worked for you?).
Granted - their software is a total pain in the ass to install. I've just recovered from a situation in which I installed updated 4.1 to 4.2, but the installer crashed, and 4.1 refused to reinstall because it detected the remnants of 4.2 and aborted - leaving me with no usable version of the software. In the end I had to borrow a copy of version 3 which didn't have the newer-version-check in the installer, and then patch up from there.
I'm not bothered about NEF being encrypted or whatever, but I do think it's lame that they don't supply a fully licensed copy of Nikon Capture with their cameras that can shoot RAW. I own a D70 and had to fork out for a copy of it to make the most of the camera. Other than that, Photoshop natively supports NEF files, although IMO the remote control and live previewing features of Capture make it worth the cost.
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?
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.
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
This is the crap I hate. You buy some nice piece of hardware that seems like it _should_ work just spiffy on its own, but the truth is you have to use someone's proprietary software or go searching for a hack to make it work. It's maddening.
Other things in this category: My daughters' iPod. Yeah, I know y'all love iTunes and I know that it doesn't suck, but maybe you can cut me some slack in the fact that I happened to choose a different package for my MP3 library before getting her the iPod. Now I have this incompatible mess. I could just switch to iTunes throughout the house, but why should I have to make that choice just to put a stupid MP3 file on her player?
My cell phone has this nice memory card that I need synch software in order to access. Yeah, I can store and use a gig of data, including MP3s, software, books, etc, but I can't access it on any computer that doesn't have ActiveSync. Why?
I'm sick of it. Maybe these folks think they're helping me out by including their crappys software or maybe they're just doing it to lock me in. Either way, it makes me, the consumer, wary of buying their products. That can't be something they actually like.
TW
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.openraw.org/ OpenRAW is a group of photographers and other interested people advocating the open documentation of digital camera RAW files.