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

What about ...

[foobsr]

...taking the position that manufacturers deprive photographers of the proper future use of their IP if the format is not open? IANAL etc ...

CC.

Film versus Digital?

[John Seminal]

Most professional photographers prefer using RAW image capture because it offers the highest quality and the greatest creative control.

I won't argue the second point, that there is more creative control on a computer, be it a jpeg or anything. To do minor editing in a film lab takes great skill, anyone can edit with photoshop.

But what about quality? Will digital ever come close to the quality film when blowing up an image to full page size or more? Will digital ever be as true as film, can an algorithm on a camera that converts colors and images to zero's and one's be as good as film which reacts naturally to the light?

Re:Film versus Digital?

[BrianJacksonPhoto]

But what about quality? Will digital ever come close to the quality film when blowing up an image to full page size or more? Will digital ever be as true as film, can an algorithm on a camera that converts colors and images to zero's and one's be as good as film which reacts naturally to the light?

Uhh, Yes. Most professional photographers shoot digital now. Photojournalism, sports, wedding, editorial, even the commercial studio guys. Full page size? You mean a single page or a double truck at 11x17? Oh, you'd be suprised as to how many of the images you see published are shot digitally.

Digital is being used for billboards and large (4' x 5') display prints. I personally have around 15 20x30's for display prints and they are amazing. And I shoot with a camera that 3 1/2 years old (the original Canon 1D)

Digital doesn't mean printing on some home inkjet. Most pros, don't produce images that way, they still send them to a pro lab to be printed if making physical prints. Offset printing does their own thing.

The capture on the latest crop of cameras is amazing. The colors are beautiful, and crisp.

You think film captured colors true? Wow, where have you been? Film manipulates color all over the places. Ever wonder why there are so many types out there? Provia, Velvia, Astia, NPS, NPC, NPH, E100G, E100GX, E100VS, etc, etc. Each capture the image in a different manner.

Just like there are different types of paper. Each delivers slightly different results. All present color differently. Which one is true? Which combination of paper and film is true? Seems rather subjective if you ask me. But what do I know, I just do this for a living ;p

Re:Film versus Digital?

[Inkieminstrel]

I can't wait do buy one though, simply because of the great learning effect instant feedback can provide.

I have a friend who is a photographer and refuses to use digital (he's also a programmer so it's not because of some fear of modern electronics). His claim is that with regular film you have to learn how to take a picture and get it right the first time, whereas with digital you get instant feedback and can therefore afford to be sloppy.

He laughs about the behavior of digital photographers which he calls "chimping," that is taking a few of the same shot until you get the right one, then hovering over the LCD screen going "ooh oooh oooh."

If you're going to pose every shot, then by all means go digital, but if you want to be sure to catch a particular moment just right, film is the way to go.

Nits...

[Anonymous Coward]

If I may pick a nit, "raw" is a word, as in "raw data from the sensor." It's not an acronym.

Re:Adobe DNG

[Bluesy21]

Yeah that would be nice. Forget it though, we can't even get ALL camera manufacturers to agree on one format for memory cards and there's only a few types out there. I haven't looked at camera's in awhile, but when I bought my last Canon, they were still using Compact Flash, SD was almost a standard, but Fuji and Olympus were using xD.
I can only imagine what excuses we would hear if we try to get they to standardize their RAW format.

Shooting RAW is not so great anyway

[cpuh0g]

Good article here on why RAW is really unnecessary for almost all photographers, no matter how "advanced" you think you are.

Re:Shooting RAW is not so great anyway

[smcavoy]

much of his criticism is based on the fact that current cameras use proprietary RAW formats. Open RAW eliminates that.
Granted a large percentage of photographers will never need RAW, but there are plenty that would prefer processing the image themselves and not have worry if they will be locked out of their collection next adobe upgrade or whatever.

Double Edged Sword

[DumbSwede]

I generally applaud anything to do with opening up data standards. I have heard that several camera manufacturers include things like focal distance and exposure time, etc. to their image formats. Perhaps this is the norm, I'm not really into the specifics of digital photography. We now live in an age where it is trivial to retouch photographs for propaganda or to tamper with evidence. With adequately safeguarded setting info it becomes much harder for digital forgers to do their work. If you can easily get to all that data you can easily alter it.

Granted those with enough motivation, time, or money can circumvent any protections against forgery, but in trying to open up the standard it should be done in such a way to make it an nonreversible process, such that you can manipulate the images, but not be able to push them back into the original format.

I predict that at sometime in the future Digital Camera manufacturers may taught their cameras has having "evidence quality" data integrity. Perhaps some already do.

Granted this evidence integrity argument almost certainly has nothing to do with why most manufactures might choose to close up their data formats.

When?

[John Seminal]

Yes. High end digital exceeds film for resolution

When does digital exceed film? 5 megapixels? 6 megapixels? More? It seems when digital cameras came out, the sales people said 2 megapixel is better than film for 4 by 6 prints, and 3 megapixels is better for a full page.

Then they came out with the 5+ megapixel cameras, and they changed their docs to say 3 megapixels for brilliant 4 by 6 prints, 5 megapixels for a full page.

The quality of film was never measured by how large the print would be, the way they do with digital cameras. Instead film is more concerned with lighting conditions, the time of the exposure.

So I am asking, at what point does film do worse than digital? And who is programming those digital programs to say what "ones and zeros" equals an image. With film it is all natural.

One last quick comment. What will last longer? Film or digital content? What can you be 100% certain to be able to view in the future? CD's get rot, and go bad. Many programs and games that used to run on my 386 will not run on my PIII. Technology changes, maybe we will need some emulator to view those digital images. Or maybe the standard will change and our old 3 megapixel jpegs will be considered crappy, like it came from a childs toy. Film will always have it's place as the elite method for taking quality pictures.

Re:When?

[Inkieminstrel]

My understanding was that 35mm film ~= 10 Megapixels resolution.

How much of that resolution you actually need for a 4x6 print is up in the air, though.

Re:When?

[jtev]

Realy, then why is slide film more expensive than 400 speed color negitive? Eventual print size DOES matter, even with film. The film captures a certain amount of information based on the size of the film grains. The faster the film, the larger the grains, and the lower the resoultion of the picture. The way around this is to use medium format or large format cameras instead of 35mm, in other words more film to get more inforamtion. No, digital cameras do not come close to matching a 12x8 negitive, and I don't realy know how they compare to 35mm, because that also depends on speed. If you have subjects who stand still, it may still be preferable to use that 35mm slide film. Anyway, your argument about the size of the print is utter bullshit. The film may not be advertized that way, but it is one of the factors one must take into account when determining the film to use.

Re:When?

[LurkerXXX]

Certainly, someday 3 megapixel jpgs will be thought of as something from a kids toy. We will all be using holographic displays then ;)

Seriously though, I just got done scanning in a few thousand old family photo's, mainly from the 60's and 70's. A lot of the photos were very faded and overall the colders on many had shifted toward red or yellow. It took a good bit of photoshop'ing to bring things back closer to the way they originally had been. Old prints don't last forever, and neither do negatives. So if you've got old family photo's, I'd start scanning/rescuing them now into electronic versions. If jpeg becomes outdated, you can always keep converting them to the next big file type.

Re:Standardized RAW = non-sequitor

[shirai]

I answered this in a separate post but don't confuse a standardized format with a format that cannot adjust to the capture parameters of a camera.

For example, DTS (for home) is a digital encoding system for sound but it is very flexible. You can specify the bit depth, the encoding rate, the number of channels and the amount of compression. In other words, you can encode anything from AM radio to 6.1 (and higher I think) all in the same format.

In the same way, a RAW format could easily support multiple bit depths to match the bit depth of the camera. It could also support multiple color square patterns (though almost every camera manufactured uses the RGBG square with the exception of Sony's new camera and the Foveon sensor in Sigma cameras. Don't flog me if I missed one.).

The rest of the data could be encoded as meta data and basically are *hints* on how to decode the image anyways and are not part of the bitmap image. By hints I mean readings from ISO, shutter speed, etc.