OpenRAW.org, more on Nikon RAW format
A couple of days ago, I posted about the Nikon RAW image format and the general issue of access to “digital negatives”. Interest in this topic has been building for a while, and this being the age of instant communities of interest, we now have the OpenRAW group:
OpenRAW is a group of photographers and other interested people advocating the open documentation of digital camera RAW files.
After Canon dropped support for their Canon D30 DSLR in their latest software release and Nikon removed features of their own RAW converter Nikon Capture, plus the encryption of features in Nikon’s D2x digital camera RAW format (NEF), some members of the mailing list D1scussion founded the OpenRAW mailing list to coordinate their efforts to motivate camera makers to openly document their individual RAW formats.
This web site is the first result from this discussion and has the goal to gain public awareness of the RAW Problem.
There is also some followup and the official response from Nikon at DPReview.com:
Through use of the Nikon Software Developer Kit, authorized developers can produce software by applying creative concepts to their implementation and adding capabilities to open Nikon’s NEF file and use NEF’s embedded Instructions and Nikon’s Libraries. Nikon photographers reap benefits from independent developers’ approaches, because it allows the photographer to open and process their NEF images.
Nikon has provided its confidential SDK software to many software developers. With the Nikon SDK, developers may design excellent and creative compatibility between the NEF and their software, all without compromising the integrity of the NEF’s original concept, and ensuring that work done by the photographer during the picture taking process can be incorporated into the rendering of the image.
The JPEG/EXIF format is a good working solution for consumer and general photographic applications, and moving and carrying around the unprocessed sensor data is awkward for general use. At the same time, declining processor and storage costs are rapidly making it less impractical to move raw camera data, and documenting the (necessarily) different raw data formats would help future-proof the image data as the original manufacturer’s support goes away over time. I’d like to see the OpenRAW.org folks succeed in building a path for open access to unprocessed camera data.
I’d like access to the unprocessed data to allow the best possible images to be created both now, and in the future as new post-processing methods are developed. Today’s cameras are able to do a great job of adjusting the color and dynamic range on the fly for JPEG compression, but they have to make many tradeoffs to run at an acceptable speed on the camera itself. Reconstructed JPEG data is 8 bits, sRGB color space, while the raw sensor data has much greater brightness resolution and dynamic range. Similarly, the original spatial filtering for the color filters on the sensor can be performed more accurately with more computing resources than what’s on a typical camera, or replaced with other color demosaicing methods in external software.
update 04-26-2005: discussion on OpenRAW.org and Nikon RAW format at Slashdot
update 2005-05-10 15:42 roundup of followups at Metafilter
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