Image Preservation Through Open Documentation

OpenRAW Group writes "The OpenRAW Working Group launched a website today at http://www.OpenRAW.org designed to solve issues crucial to the future of photography. Digital technology is revolutionizing the photography industry, and an emerging part of that technology is the set of RAW camera file formats. Most professional photographers prefer using RAW image capture because it offers the highest quality and the greatest creative control. The grass roots OpenRAW group arose out of photographers' frustration with camera manufacturers' refusal to openly document their proprietary RAW file formats. That lack of file format information inhibits innovation, limits image processing choices, and endangers the long-term accessibility of millions of photographs. The goal of the new website is to obtain complete documentation by manufacturers of their RAW file formats."

Comments

Nikon White Balance Encryption

[Hulkster]

For those interested in the recent related Slashdot stories that are very relevent to OpenRAW's efforts, there was discussions last week and also this weekend about Nikon encrypting the white balance information. Michael Reichmann asks a rhetorical (IMHO) question of Do You Really Own Your Own Raw Files.

Enjoy my fun little christmas hoax - help me do it for real in 2005! ;-)

Re:Nikon White Balance Encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

Acording to the author of dcraw it's not only Nikon who are encrypting their metadata...

Adobe DNG

[shirai]

I know the story is about getting manufacturers to open up their RAW formats but I think the preferred goal is to have camera manufacturers standardize on ONE format.

Note that Adobe has already developed an open raw format called DNG (Digital Negative). They have a good track record with open formats with PDF files. You may or may not like them, but you they certainly can be generated by non-Adobe products and as far as I'm aware, nobody pays any license fee for that.

Another plus for DNG is that Adobe has a free DNG converter which will convert RAW files from many popular cameras to the DNG format.

You can find more info here about DNG.

Note that Photoshop (the most common photo processor) supports RAW formats for over 80 cameras. You can See a complete list here

Re:Shooting RAW is not so great anyway

[Hays]

That guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Well, most of what he says isn't factually wrong, it's just very misleading. He makes it sound like it's a bad thing to process your RAW files later instead of having your camera apply some half-baked conversion on the fly. It's like arguing that film camera's are crap because polaroids can do the conversion for you on the fly.

Shooting in RAW is very powerful.