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  • raw format

    hi,

    I keep reading about "raw" formats in every digital camera review. What is that?!

    Doesn't Tiffs support 16bit per channel? So if the CCD gets 12bit per channel it could be encoded as a Tiff, doesn't it?

    Or perhaps that raw format includes other stuff apart from the image pixels?

    btw there is any Photoshop plugin for those Raw formats? or do every camera have it's own Raw file type and I have to get a reader from the manufacturer?
    I'm looking for a free jpeg2000 plugin for PhotoShop too, any hints will be welcome on this one, I can't find any!


    cheers, Ivan
    <font face="verdana, arial, helvetica" size="1" >epox 8RDA+ running an Athlon XP 1600+ @ 1.7Ghz with 2x256mb Crucial PC2700, an Adaptec 1200A IDE-Raid with 2x WD 7200rpm 40Gb striped + a 120Gb and a 20Gb Seagate, 2x 17" LG Flatron 775FT, a Cordless Logitech Trackman wheel and a <b>banding enhanced</b> Matrox Parhelia 128 retail shining thru a Koolance PC601-Blue case window<br>and for God's sake pay my <a href="http://www.drslump.biz">site</a> a visit!</font>

  • #2
    Cameras save only 8bit/channel TIFFs and JPGs, egardless of sensor range.

    RAW is just "raw", unmodified Sensor data, which can only be read with special software (each manufacturer has their own raw data format, and you get software to work with raw files with your camera, if it supports raw. There are also some photoshop plugins for certain raw format files, but they're usually not as good as the manufacturer's tools).

    The advantages of raw formats are that no compression occurs, just like with TIFF, yet the files are smaller than TIFF files (though still very big), you can correct exposure to a certain extent after taking the shot, due to 12 bits per pixel (so you can "save" over- or underexposed aeas), and you can change white balance (in fact you have to!) on your computer, as the cam doesn't do any white balance.

    So, in essence, raw is useful for professional or amateur photographers, and for your most valuable shots, or when you want to do a lot of editing. You will likely find the highest quality jpg setting the most useful, as quality is quite good, and both save times and space used are a lot lower, as well as compatibility with all kinds of apps is there, and no need to do any work after taking the shot.

    Some manufacturers' raw editing software might have a strange user interface, making it hard to use efficiently.

    There is an expensive JPEG2000 plugin for PS, but it's not worth it, since its quality is poor, and PS9 will include JPEG2000 support anyway. What do you want it for?

    BTW, Corel 11 has better JPEG2000 support built-in.

    AZ
    There's an Opera in my macbook.

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by az
      Cameras save only 8bit/channel TIFFs and JPGs, egardless of sensor range.
      Nope... My camera saves 12 bit NEF-files (Nikon Electronic Format), or 16-bit TIFF files.

      RAW is just "raw", unmodified Sensor data, which can only be read with special software (each manufacturer has their own raw data format, and you get software to work with raw files with your camera, if it supports raw. There are also some photoshop plugins for certain raw format files, but they're usually not as good as the manufacturer's tools).
      Mostly, the photoshop plugins only allow the raw file to be important; allowing minor adjustments (not raw-worthy ). The raw file should be seen as a copy of the bayer sensor: there are no RGB-values for every pixel, only a single R, G or B value (in the case of an RGB bayer sensor, CMY is also used). This implies that opening/manipulating a raw file is more computer-intensive, as the interpolation to obtain a proper computer image (rgb-values in every pixel) still need to be performed.

      The advantages of raw formats are that no compression occurs, just like with TIFF, yet the files are smaller than TIFF files (though still very big), you can correct exposure to a certain extent after taking the shot, due to 12 bits per pixel (so you can "save" over- or underexposed aeas), and you can change white balance (in fact you have to!) on your computer, as the cam doesn't do any white balance.
      Euhm, some cameras (guess who's ? ) do have a compressed RAW-format. While it doesn't compress as such, for the Nikon, it is said to convert from the 12-bit data to 8-bit data, selecting the proper channels (this has to do with human perception of brightness, not sure about the details, but AFAIK, the sensors read a linear range of brightness, whereas we do not perceive it as linear. Thus it is possible to select the best appropriate 8 bits out of a 12-bit image). The uncompressed NEF file is approx. 9.5 MB, the compressed version takes up about half this space ! Best quality TIFF yields 36 MB...

      Most cameras do allow whitebalance to be set, and often provide for automatic white balance. Some () also allow the defenition of "white" by means of a test-picture (e.g. colour-chart).

      That being said, the ability to override the whitebalance used when taking the picture is very interesting (most auto-white balances don't work 100% flawless), as it doesn't require you to be concerned about it at the time of shooting. Apart from white balance, quite a number of settings can be overriden (e.g. in-camera sharpening, noise reduction, exposure compensation, curves, hue, ...).

      So, in essence, raw is useful for professional or amateur photographers, and for your most valuable shots, or when you want to do a lot of editing. You will likely find the highest quality jpg setting the most useful, as quality is quite good, and both save times and space used are a lot lower, as well as compatibility with all kinds of apps is there, and no need to do any work after taking the shot.
      In some cameras, there are claims that the RAW images converted to JPG are sharper than their incamera-JPG counterparts. For most SLRs (don't know about other camera's, the time requried to save an (uncompressed) raw is almost equal to saving JPGs. I believe Canon also offer a dual mode (resulting in 2 images for one picture: a raw-file and a jpg.

      As Az said, raw if useful for getting the most out of your shots. This doesn't mean that you couldn't have gotten the same / a similar image straight from camera, but it would have required you to make very minute tweaks (which is time consuming, and not something you like to do while shooting).

      Some manufacturers' raw editing software might have a strange user interface, making it hard to use efficiently.
      There are a number of third-party RAW capable programs. An interesting one is Capture One DSLR (as it uses some form of image-server technique to speed up processing), another one is Bibble. Naturally, most camera manufacturers offer their own software (I use Nikon Capture 3.5.1).

      It turns out that RAW-processing can be computer-intensive; opening NEF files on my previous PII-450 (384 MB RAM) took about one minute !



      Jörg
      pixar
      Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die tomorrow. (James Dean)

      Comment


      • #4
        There is an expensive JPEG2000 plugin for PS, but it's not worth it, since its quality is poor, and PS9 will include JPEG2000 support anyway. What do you want it for?

        BTW, Corel 11 has better JPEG2000 support built-in.
        I guess you wanted to say PS8 instead of 9, didn't you?

        Actually what I was looking for was a plugin to be able to save in Jpeg2k in ImageReady (save html and images ). I was thinking to make two versions of my home page, one using plain old jpeg and another using jp2 files.
        I think that if everyone does this, jpeg2000 will become a standard on internet very quickly. I don't want it to be like the PNG format

        ciao, ivan
        <font face="verdana, arial, helvetica" size="1" >epox 8RDA+ running an Athlon XP 1600+ @ 1.7Ghz with 2x256mb Crucial PC2700, an Adaptec 1200A IDE-Raid with 2x WD 7200rpm 40Gb striped + a 120Gb and a 20Gb Seagate, 2x 17" LG Flatron 775FT, a Cordless Logitech Trackman wheel and a <b>banding enhanced</b> Matrox Parhelia 128 retail shining thru a Koolance PC601-Blue case window<br>and for God's sake pay my <a href="http://www.drslump.biz">site</a> a visit!</font>

        Comment


        • #5
          Yes, I meant 8

          IrfanView allows jp2 export up to 60x480. If you want, you can send the images to me and I'll save them with Corel. mai to azrael_katz( at )gmx.net

          AZ
          There's an Opera in my macbook.

          Comment


          • #6
            thanks for the offer AZ

            I found the kaduku library, I'm using it to convert the images.
            I was interested in an ImageReady plugin because my home page is designed as a PSD with slices. So it'd have been nice to have the html with jpg embedded to be created automatically.
            Anyway it'll just be a bit of find&replace

            the size of the graphics has come down from 321kb to 183kb!!!! and I haven't tried to find the optimum parameters yet!
            This new Jpeg seems to me like an awesome technology, and much needed nowadays, I hope it becomes the defacto standard for internet graphics very soon.


            And now a silly question: why digital cameras don't use this format? A $1000 camera should include this jpeg2k since the advantages are awesome. Less space in the memory card, less time to write the image.
            I guess that it's too new to have cheap microchips to include in a camera though

            ciao, Ivan
            <font face="verdana, arial, helvetica" size="1" >epox 8RDA+ running an Athlon XP 1600+ @ 1.7Ghz with 2x256mb Crucial PC2700, an Adaptec 1200A IDE-Raid with 2x WD 7200rpm 40Gb striped + a 120Gb and a 20Gb Seagate, 2x 17" LG Flatron 775FT, a Cordless Logitech Trackman wheel and a <b>banding enhanced</b> Matrox Parhelia 128 retail shining thru a Koolance PC601-Blue case window<br>and for God's sake pay my <a href="http://www.drslump.biz">site</a> a visit!</font>

            Comment


            • #7
              jp2 requires a LOT more computing power than jpg, so either your cam would be even slower at saving than now, or more expensive, hotter, and with shorter battery life.

              AZ
              There's an Opera in my macbook.

              Comment


              • #8
                thanks for the info AZ!

                I'm gonna propose to Sasq to add "DigiCam Guru" next to your Super MURCer rank

                btw if we're going to post hi-res pictures in this forum, perhaps will be a good idea if Sasq could tweak vBulletin to allow the link and attachment of jp2 files.
                You can't use the "<img>" tag for jp2 files
                There is a nice "how-to" from Morgan Multimedia

                ciao, Ivan
                <font face="verdana, arial, helvetica" size="1" >epox 8RDA+ running an Athlon XP 1600+ @ 1.7Ghz with 2x256mb Crucial PC2700, an Adaptec 1200A IDE-Raid with 2x WD 7200rpm 40Gb striped + a 120Gb and a 20Gb Seagate, 2x 17" LG Flatron 775FT, a Cordless Logitech Trackman wheel and a <b>banding enhanced</b> Matrox Parhelia 128 retail shining thru a Koolance PC601-Blue case window<br>and for God's sake pay my <a href="http://www.drslump.biz">site</a> a visit!</font>

                Comment


                • #9
                  Or (don't know if this has been discussed) we can "volunteer" az &/or VJ &/or others to moderate this forum
                  DM says: Crunch with Matrox Users@ClimatePrediction.net

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Ivan, I'm at work and my pc is somewhat limited, however you can directly insert html as opposed to vb tags into your post.

                    There are some limits, but give it a try and see what happens

                    Dan
                    Juu nin to iro


                    English doesn't borrow from other languages. It follows them down dark alleys, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      like this:

                      <table width=100000><tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr></table>

                      DM says: Crunch with Matrox Users@ClimatePrediction.net

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        TEST:

                        <embed src="http://www.drslump.biz/mark.jp2" width="562" height="671">
                        Last edited by drslump; 3 July 2003, 18:49.
                        <font face="verdana, arial, helvetica" size="1" >epox 8RDA+ running an Athlon XP 1600+ @ 1.7Ghz with 2x256mb Crucial PC2700, an Adaptec 1200A IDE-Raid with 2x WD 7200rpm 40Gb striped + a 120Gb and a 20Gb Seagate, 2x 17" LG Flatron 775FT, a Cordless Logitech Trackman wheel and a <b>banding enhanced</b> Matrox Parhelia 128 retail shining thru a Koolance PC601-Blue case window<br>and for God's sake pay my <a href="http://www.drslump.biz">site</a> a visit!</font>

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          yeah! it works!!!!
                          using the tag < embed src="http://myserver.dom/myimage.jp2">


                          didn't realize html code was on
                          thanks for pointing it out Sasq
                          Last edited by drslump; 3 July 2003, 18:58.
                          <font face="verdana, arial, helvetica" size="1" >epox 8RDA+ running an Athlon XP 1600+ @ 1.7Ghz with 2x256mb Crucial PC2700, an Adaptec 1200A IDE-Raid with 2x WD 7200rpm 40Gb striped + a 120Gb and a 20Gb Seagate, 2x 17" LG Flatron 775FT, a Cordless Logitech Trackman wheel and a <b>banding enhanced</b> Matrox Parhelia 128 retail shining thru a Koolance PC601-Blue case window<br>and for God's sake pay my <a href="http://www.drslump.biz">site</a> a visit!</font>

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Originally posted by az
                            jp2 requires a LOT more computing power than jpg, so either your cam would be even slower at saving than now, or more expensive, hotter, and with shorter battery life.
                            Perhaps some new chips might come out that allow jp2 compression using relatively simple electronics (e.g. dedicated processor). But we'll have to wait for that, as I think it is not a priority for camera manufacturers. Currently, they are mainly focussing on megapixels...

                            Originally posted by az
                            Or (don't know if this has been discussed) we can "volunteer" az &/or VJ &/or others to moderate this forum
                            hehe...


                            Jörg
                            pixar
                            Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die tomorrow. (James Dean)

                            Comment

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