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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."
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.
I think it refers to the camera's internal representation of the image (i.e. the "raw" data)
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).
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.
oh, they do. just add -me to your search terms :-)
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
in this case (cameras) raw reffers to the fact its the raw unprocessed data from the CCD
this has to be processed to convert it to a form that we would recognise as an image file. This can happen either on the camera or on a PC.
However This conversion process may well not be fully reversable (due to rounding errors) and bloats the data considerablly (CCDs generally make a red green OR blue value at each location image files generally have red green AND blue at each location so turning CCD output into an image file always involves interpolation) so from an archivists point of view its best to keep the raw data unfortunately that raw data is often in a closed format.
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
well, yes -- that page calls it "Raw" and "raw", which makes sense. I'm just confused about the "RAW" nomenclature.
Most raw formats on modern cameras is compressed using a lossless format. Take Nikons nef format, a 6.1mp image in raw is only about 4-5 MB, if this was not compressed it would be closer to 10 MB.
You can not tweak certain settings as easily once the image is convert to another format, even a lossless one like tiff. Best example is white balance.
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.
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.
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