RAW deal—duel of the digicam file formats

As the “digitization of everything” continues at breakneck speed, one of the real success stories is the rapid replacement of film cameras with digital versions. At the top of the digicam pyramid reside the digital SLRs (“dSLRs”) made by Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, etc. Although almost all digicam’s produce images in standard file formats (JPEG and/or TIFF), the dSLRs can also record images in an uncompressed format known as “RAW.” Photo professionals and top-end photo enthusiasts prefer the RAW format because it can produce pictures with the greatest resolution and color depth and it avoids all compression artifacts. However, every digicam vendors’ RAW format is proprietary and different.

Consequently, every digicam vendor that makes cameras with RAW file capability must offer a proprietary RAW converter program so that their RAW images can be converted to the standard file formats at some point. In addition, vendors of image-editing and image-manipulation programs such as Adobe, Bibble Labs, and DxO offer their own homegrown RAW converters, but not for every camera.

As dSLRs evolve, the problem of proprietary RAW formats grows and the professionals and enthusiasts in the dSLR market are increasingly up in arms about proprietary formats. Most recently, Nikon has marketed itself straight into the crosshairs of what may well turn out to be a shooting war. Nikon has drawn fire because it is encrypting the white-balance data in its RAW files (called Nikon Electronic Format or NEF files) from the Nikon D2X and D2Hs dSLRs (as reported in dpreview.com, the Engadget blog, ). This encryption effectively cripples third-party image-processing programs and forces users of those two cameras to employ Nikon’s own Nikon Capture program (sold separately). Nikon has an SDK that converts NEF files into standard image files that can be processed by third party programs. Nikon says it will license the SDK to what the company calls “bona fide” software developers, but the encryption has been cracked by at least two developers, although such actions may open the third-party developers to prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

There are some signs of sanity on the horizon. One of the first is the openRAW project, an attempt to get digicam manufacturers to openly document their RAW formats for the benefit of the entire photographic industry. Adobe is taking a different tack, trying to drum up support for a universal RAW format that it introduced last year called the Digital Negative (DNG) format, which is based on the TIFF 6.0 standard. Here’s hoping the imaging mavens wake up sooner rather than later.