Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fsckin 4614 days ago
Not directed at you, but why do camera makers continue to reinvent RAW formats for new models? Isn't this a 'solved' problem with Adobe's DNG being royalty free and all?

When I got a D800 around launch time, even Lightroom didn't have the capability to import them directly at launch and I had to convert them to DNGs first. What a bloddy mess.
1 comments
wiredfool 4614 days ago
There are many rants about that. It's not so much that the formats change, it's that they keep adding tags that mean something within the formats. Oddly enough, of the ones that I've looked at, they can (generally) be interpreted as a tiff file if you squint at them correctly. (not that a tiff file is any better. It's not called Thousands of Incompatible File Formats for nothing).

But once you have that file format, camera manufacturers tend to embed hunks of data in the raw file about settings and other things that the camera knows about the image, like the focus points, white balance, camera calibration, image compression, dot layout and all that.

I'd like to leave that as Someone Else's Problem. (unless there's a lot of money and shiny cameras in it for me)

link
e12e 4613 days ago
Wouldn't libraw and/or freeimage be a good fit (both for raw and dng)?

http://www.libraw.org/ http://freeimage.sourceforge.net/

link
wiredfool 4613 days ago
I just found libraw yesterday. Looks interesting, and I have no objection to pulling it in as an optional dependency. Pull requests accepted. :>

Freeimage looks like more than we'd need, and includes libraw. And actually, looks like it does a lot of the same things that Pillow does, wrt to various image formats.

link
e12e 4612 days ago
I make no promises :-/

Surprised you weren't aware of libraw (assuming DNG/RAW has been a requested feature for Pillow) -- but great it's on your radar now. FWIW libraw does an excellent job of handling RAW/DNGs -- as far as I know it's still the best tool for that (including various closed tools).

link
wiredfool 4612 days ago
So far, this thread is the extent of the requests.

I'd known about dcraw from a ways back, just not the libraw fork.

link