Slashdot Mirror
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."
...a camera that will etch the image into a chunk of granite!
Let's see somebody try to encrypt stone, baby!
*off to the USPTO
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
Enjoy my fun little christmas hoax - help me do it for real in 2005! ;-)
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
Sunny
Be my Friend
These camera makers obviously don't want professional photographers buying their equipment. If I (hobbyist) can't use the Industry Standard photomanipulation package (PhotoShop; my own money, too) with my prosumer camera's highest-quality-mode's files, I ain't buying the camera.
Pinhead control freak MBAs have ruined everything.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
Somehow I'm feeling a little uneasy about clicking on a link which points to www.openraw.org.
Just remember -- you don't see the same colours with your eyes that I see with mine; even the colour skew will be slightly different.
As for quality of enlarged photographs, digital images have pixel halos, but these can be compensated for with digital algorithms; with a digital camera, *every* aspect of what has been recorded is a fixed known value.
With Film-based photographs, there are many uncontrollable variables that go into the recording process; not all films are identical, film is not 100% even across its surface, and most importantly, film is not your retina. When enlarging images recorded on film, there will be a grain effect caused by lack of information in the film. To combat this grain effect, many people *digitally scan* the film and use a computer algorithm to reconstruct the lost pieces. Sound familiar?
The main thing is that film and digital imaging are *both* lossy, and store different bits of visually captured information. Both can be of exceptionally high quality (much higher than the human eye can detect), but both have different limitations on what data actually gets recorded. Film has been around long enough that we accept it, with all its flaws, as "standard". Eventually, this spot will probably fall to digital imaging/storage, as a new generation of people who aren't used to seeing film-based images grow up.
Standardized RAW files don't make sense precisely because they are "raw".
Each camera, particularly as technologies progress, has its own peculiar nuances regarding how the image is captured. It's up to the manufacturer to decide the appropriate way to store that data in a "raw" format. Complying with a standard for unprocessed data will add unnecessary bulk and/or change data values (wrecking the point of "raw" image files).
I don't want a standard RAW format; I want the camera to give its data unmodified. If I need a camera-specific driver to interpret that data into a useable form, fine. If I want the camera to produce standardized formats, pick TIFF or JPG or such from it's menu. There is a place for standards; unprocessed data is not it. I want the unprocessed data unprocessed.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
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.