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A RAW repository, The Internet Archive and OpenRAW
Stan writes "I just read this in the OpenRAW mailing list, OpenRAW plans to create a RAW repository, a final resting place for RAW file documentations of current and already abandoned digital cameras. The RAW repository will be hosted in the Internet Archive, which describes themselves as a digital archive of the Internet and other cultural artifacts. And they have all reasons to support OpenRAW, they currently photograph billions of book pages with cameras and store them in RAW format. Unfortunately the camera makers think different (which is not always a good thing)."
I'm not going to say I told you so, but I told you so. The minute you give up the physical artifact and rely on a digital representation of your data, you are at the risk of any company who wishes to exert some control over the format of that data. That's why all those RAW file formats for each camera are different from company to company. They gain the most benefit by locking you into a certain piece of software and forcing you along their upgrade path.
If you stick with film, you are only limited in your ability to develop your own negatives. If you can do this, you will be able to continue with film for as long as you want. Scan the negs and save them in whatever format you want. It doesn't matter because the actual physical artifact is still in your possession.
Not so with Digital.
In many ways, digital is superior to film. However, when it comes to ownership of your data, you are far better off with film than you ever can be with digital.
In the last slashdot article on OpenRAW
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Thanks Canon, you just made me finally feel confident about buying Taiwanese.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Which is apparently from quality point of view, not a good thing (however it has a high quality, low loss setting), but from an access point of view (and like what they do here: Photograph pages of books with it), is always works. No aging of formats or whatever.
P.S. I am used of cancon just sending their software development manuals (at least in the past for their printers), apparently some attitude changed.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
why does the article link directly to some sort of blog?
Hmm, and where would that be?
Somewhere in the world where the Americans aren't in control? Closest you're going to get is probably Iraq...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
This effort is being set up by a guy (Juergen Specht) who hosted a mailing list and then deleted it without notice when some of the posts offended him.
m l
See:
http://www.vudeja.com/04/09/mailing-list
http://www.esthet.org/blog/archives/001294.html
http://www.wirefarm.com/archives/004186.html
http://www.easterwood.org/hmmn/archives/001111.ht
http://openraw.org/about/
Don't be surprised if this site just up and disappears one day, taking all of the data with it.
The manufacturers are just opposed to working together to create some sort of standard.
.gif and in hundreds of other similar cases in the last 20 or so years.
But can you blame them? Really, think about this for a second - people (scumbag fucks who should hang from lampposts, call them what you will) from Rambus sat in standards groups for years and then turned around and secretly patented the standard and then had the balls to demand royalties. You saw more or less the same bullshit with
I think it is (sort of) understandable that companies would be hesistant to work together to develop a standard way of doing something - especially in a cutthroat business such as photography.
And by the way, using Canon is a fairly shitty example, Nikon is far worse when it comes to the RAW format (ok, its not really a format) bullshit that flows through the world of pro photography.
That all said, this smacks more of the petty bickering that is involved in cameras more than than anything else (See Also, "Complete lack of lens interchangability" et al), but as always, we (or those who buy $600+ cameras) get fucked.
Don't get me started on how "using the DMCA to "protect" the super complex almost but not quite encrypted raw format". I don't need a stroke at this age. . .
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The point isn't that you can get a jpg out of your camera -- I haven't seen a digital camera that can't -- the problem is that the original, uncompressed data generally isn't in an open format.
From Canon, as they refused to cooperate with openRAW and ended their letter with a slap in the face: "If our equipment or software does not meet your needs, you are entirely welcome to seek other suppliers".
And this is *exactly* what I'll do from now on and for the foreseeble future; I will *not* entrust the future accessiblity of my visual data to such a company and its formats, and I will not render myself under their mercy given their manifest chauvinism. Does anyone know what suppliers are cooperating with openRAW? Those will get *all* my business.
Thanks
Something powerful enough to organise boycott that would cause *pain* to the offending company. Something that a congresscritter would be afraid to piss off. EFF comes close, except that it a) has a broader scope and b) sadly is not powerful enough.
Too bad that the existing consumer organisations are focused on making money from their "consumer reports" and the general population doesn't care (the frog is half-boiled and still comfortable).
think different
:)
Damn it Jim! It's "think differently".
Just one of those little annoyances like "To boldly go" and "Anytime. Any place. Anywhere."
so far my experience with canon gear has only been positive. firstly, they released linux and osx drivers for an old inkjet i had, along with most of their current line, and a good number of their scanners. second, their cameras are amazing, and use normal sd and cf cards instead of the MS and XD that are becoming infuriatingly ubiquitous. Also, their printer lines tend to standardize on the same types of ink, with better quality than the hp's and terrible machines epson is putting out nowadays (my r300 photo printer ran low on lt yellow ink, so it won't print black and white and keeps nagging me in windows to order more ink).
i suspect this is just canon usa marketing dicks playing bs politics for their own sake. so far theyve given out a lot better specs for most of their printers than most companies, and few printer mfg's will even bother to put out cups drivers for their lines.
not releasing their RAW format seems amazingly petty, but sounds exactly like all those fat, middle-aged sales execs who thought it wasn't worth it developing open-sourced linux drivers, cause they could get more commision charging each customer for the drivers themselves. we released them anyway, but a lot of those types make VP and do stupid shit like this to try to throw their cock around.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
they could just use an unecumbered format like png
BUT the advantage or "raw" is its the closest you can get to what actually came out of the cameras CCD. because of the way CCDs work this will be about a third the size of the resulting image (assuming they are uncompressed or compressed using a lossless algorithm that gets roughtly the same compression on both).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Ydco co
It litterally means raw (as in uncooked or otherwise unprocessed).
Like people refer to Apple Macs as MACS. It's just plain wrong and irritating.
We have nice lossy and lossless image compression formats. There is NO reason ever to bother with raw camera images for archival storage.
Raw image may theoretically contain a tiny bit more information under some circumstances. But you have a cost/benefit tradeoff: store and manage terabytes of raw images indefinitely vs. just achieving the same quality by using higher quality imagers together with standard image formats. Both store the same amount of information in the long run, but the latter is the better economic tradeoff.
No, really? You don't say?! My god, if you had never explained the joke, no one would have got it! Thank God you were around, Mr. Joke Guy!
P.S: Just to save you the trouble, this post contains high amounts of sarcasm! No need to post again to point it out to everyone else.
It's funny how we always capitalize 'RAW' even though it's not an acronym. Despite knowing this, I myself can't stop from typing RAW when referring to it either.
Yes, *that* Bob Vila.
By converting, for example, to JPEG and throwing the RAW away you are losing lots of creative post-processing control.
Later you may want to re-process the picture with superior software (it does get better over time). Or perhaps you just needed to tweak the white balance. Or fiddle with the sharpening. Or the tone curve. That's why it's important to archive the RAW file.
Why not just convert the RAW files to an open format?
I hear Alpha Centauri is pretty safe. It use to be Mars was safe (and it's conveniently closeby), but unfortunately America has set it's eyes on it, so it won't be safe for much longer. I wouldn't bother with it.
Austin 3:16 says Internet Archive just kicked your ass!
By converting, for example, to JPEG and throwing the RAW away you are losing lots of creative post-processing control.
Indeed, you are. That's because JPEG doesn't have the depth and gamut to represent digital images captured by modern cameras. If you use a more modern cooked, open format (e.g., TIFF, JPEG2000) at the right depth and at a lossless or high quality setting, then you lose nothing.
Later you may want to re-process the picture with superior software (it does get better over time).
And you can do that because the interpolation from raw to RGB is invertible given a tiny bit of metadata (metadata you would need to carry around with the raw image as well). If you are dealing with a four channel sensor, you can still store the data in a four channel TIFF. No need to store RAW.
Or perhaps you just needed to tweak the white balance.
You can do that in RGB.
Or fiddle with the sharpening.
For professional archival applications, you should turn off in-camera sharpening. That has nothing to do with whether you use raw storage.
Or the tone curve.
You can do that on the cooked image just as easily as on the raw.
I think the whole confusion arises because people like you equate non-raw storage with JPEG. JPEG is a bad choice for high-quality archival storage, but formats like TIFF and JPEG2000 are fine.
The need to archive large quantities of high-quality images captured with CCDs didn't arise only when photographers finally discovered digital--scientists have been doing this for decades.
You do not need manufacturer-specific formats to do this. There are a bunch of formats you can use that store the data in a vendor-independent form and still let you recover the original data.
The most important thing about such formats is that they need sufficient depth (16 bits per channel), they need a choice of lossless and high-quality lossy compression, and they need space for metadata to annotate them with the color space transformations and interpolation method that transformed the original image into the portable image.
Even if none of the existing standard archival formats fit for these needs, it is far easier to define a new format than to try to keep track of zillions of proprietary raw formats.
Canon and Nikon have a Mac-like following in the photography field. Their buyers like them. In particular, support is incredibly good compared to computers.
Edmund
This is not a signature.
Sure the pros use it, but they are already locked into a system so they just complain (or don't think long term).
i know, lossy format, but its more then good enough for me and works in every software i've seen.
(and my camera doesnt support RAW/Tiff or something else)
Is the RAW format really that better (for someone who just want to make pictures)?
If i'd do it professionally (and require the best quality), i'd use raw, but i dont see a reason why i should drop jpeg for raw.
What is this "RAW" format?
RAW doesn't really refer to any single file format. RAW refers to pulling the unprocessed (raw) sensor data out of a digital camera. The actual layout of the bits varies from brand to brand, and often from model to model.
Why do photographers want access to the raw data anyway?
Many professional/prosumer photographers like to archive the version of their work that contains as much of the originally captured information as possible. In the professional film world, this meant processed slides (for consumers, this meant processed negatives). In the digital world, the RAW file contains all the data captured by the camera, before some data is lost by compression and other data is added through interpolation.
Can't they just pull a lossless image out of the camera and be happy?
No. The very act of converting the raw data into an image involves lossful processing of the data. Out of gamut color data is discarded, and CCD color data is interpolated to fill surrounding pixels.
Haven't you just described RAW? :)
That Juergen controlled the mailing list he took down. He doesn't control archive.org, so he can't affect this archive--that's kind of the whole point of hosting it there.
it's the data straight from the camera's sensor.
when it comes to doing any sort of real editing JPG is *NOT* an option. I see people here that are obviously not photographers or have not used a digital slr camera saying just to use JPG. If you plan on doing little to no post processing sure use JPG but for true manipulation RAW is essential
"...Canon has been among the top 3 companies receiving US Patents for 13 consecutive years..."
I just cannot believe that during this sensitive time concerning intellectual property and software patents, they are using THIS as a marketing statement.
My last sig was ridiculed
A final resting place, eh? What is OpenRAW, a symlink to /dev/null?
This article should probably say: A place for people to search for RAW file documentations, not a final resting place... Come on guys, be a bit more imaginative!
RIP, RAW...
Breakfast served all day!
The high end Minoltas are nice, but Minolta didn't even have a digital SLR until this year (is it even available yet?). I bought my first Canon digital SLR like 3 years ago and it was already a 3rd generation dSLR. A few years ago, for digital SLR's the choices were Nikon or Canon. That was it. Now, there's Pentax, Olympus, Minolta, Sigma, Kodak, and other stuff like the digital rangefinder by Epson (an interesting device, but not really mainstream).
My other first post is car post.
Adobe's DNG (Digital Negative) format seems to be to be a much better deal than OpenRaw. "Ah!", you think, "DNG is still the Man smacking us down".
Not true. Adobe's published the spec and will let anybody use it for free. My money's on Adobe swaying the camera companies to support DNG. Free for you, free for me, free for everybody and support from a company that seems to get it.
Here's more info on DNG: http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/main.html
"I personally use a Canon 10D"
What do you think of the 20D? It looks appealing. The new Rebel XT is tempting as well.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you