raw engineering

[Robert-Peter Westphal]

Hello,

due to a discussion in a different German forum, I was wondering how the support for new raw-formats is done.

Does Eric still have to reverse engineer all files of the new cameras he has been sent by the manufacturer ( especially Canon and Nikojn ) or does he receive documents containing all required information.

Best wishes

Robert

[Schewe]

Does Eric still have to reverse engineer all files of the new cameras he has been sent by the manufacturer ( especially Canon and Nikojn ) or does he receive documents containing all required information.

Depends on the camera maker...and I'm not sure Eric can (or would want to) answer this question...sometimes the ACR engineers (Eric and Thomas) get "data" that's useful but in general, every camera (and lens) is personally tested (when possible) regardless of the outside help they may (or may not) get.

I do know that Leica has been a really good ACR citizen...other camera companies? Maybe not so much. It all depends (and it's complicated).

[Robert-Peter Westphal]

Hi Jeff,

many thanks for the fast and interesting answer !

Would a brief technicially description of the raw-format tell insider information on sensor-technologie, so that manufacturer would 'drop their pants' and tell secrets about their sensors ?

Robert

[Rory]

No.

[Vladimirovich]

Hello,

due to a discussion in a different German forum, I was wondering how the support for new raw-formats is done.

Does Eric still have to reverse engineer all files of the new cameras he has been sent by the manufacturer ( especially Canon and Nikojn ) or does he receive documents containing all required information.

Best wishes

Robert

if you will check the source code of dcraw (or its refactoring like libraw) - its sequential releases and DNG sdk, you shall see that changes in format between new cameras (from the same manufacturer) are minimal and rare... profiling and testing takes more time...

it is known also that Adobe cooperates w/ dcraw author (that was on record from Eric) and probably w/ others for reverse engineering and it is safe to assume that w/ some manufacturers relations are good and they will provide the details necessary/sufficient for Adobe's raw converter to operate

[Vladimirovich]

Would a brief technicially description of the raw-format tell insider information on sensor-technologie, so that manufacturer would 'drop their pants' and tell secrets about their sensors ?

example - when Panasonic decided to bring "software optics correction" on a massive scale... they did whatever changes they wanted in their own raw format and it took Adobe how much time to adjust their DNG standard to reflect that (remember for how long .RW2 to DNG conversion was generating massing linear DNG files for cases when Panasonic was embedding software optics correction information)... question - what Panasonic was supposed to do ? wait w/o releasing cameras  ? disclose in advance to Adobe (and to other manufacturers if DNG is a standard used by many) ? wait for competition to approve that (if DNG is a standard you need your competition to agree, at least some of them) ?... it is possible that Panasonic did tell Adobe what they did and how... what 's important is that Panasonic's hands were not tied by DNG and if they were not inclined to disclose they did not have to.