You have to hand it to Microsoft. When it wants to, it certainly can make things happen. It can even make peace happen.

Digital imaging has seen a format insurgency of late, with every camera supplier coining its own format. Nikon, Canon, Sony and Olympus all have their own, thoroughly obfuscated, partially encrypted, DMCA-protected, software-patented and assuredly most superior format. Their precious, theirs alone. Hear the buzzing? The litigious vultures circling?

Some poor photographers and less poor developers were heard muttering that, after all, the files contained user images, and users should be allowed to read them at will. Ha! These errant souls were obviously in need of an airlift to a vulture nest. The most forward of these users even petitioned: See www.openraw.org for the sideshow.

Now, Microsoft has come and said, in effect, "All your formats belong to us." Miraculously, every camera maker under the sun is playing nice. Yes, I've now seen Nikon, Canon, Fuji and Adobe actually signing off on the same press release!

Click here to read more about support for digital negatives in Photoshop.

Technically speaking, Microsoft has done something admirably elegant: Instead of requiring the various firms to publish their formats, as OpenRAW has demanded, it simply requested that the camera suppliers also supply Microsoft with the required functionality to decode the files by implementing a predefined API. This is what they call a codec. At least that's what I understand from the press-speak I've seen so far.

Let me explain with the analogy of sound: Whatever the encoding—WAV, MP3, AIFF, etc.—a sound is a sound is a sound, and thus your user can want to do something with it like play it. So a codec API might supply the functionalities as follows: "Load Sound File," "Return Recording Duration," "Prepare to Play," Play," "Stop Playing," "Close Down and Exit."

If each sound format has these functions associated with it, then anyone can build player software without knowing the format's details. Device drivers for Windows work in a similar way, providing Windows with access to specific hardware functionality. It's a proven software engineering method.

The beauty of the method is that it makes an end run around intellectual property issues. Manufacturers can provide the functionality—the interface API implementation, in this case the codec—without disclosing the trade secrets that may be embodied in the corresponding proprietary Raw format.

In the past, Microsoft has used its market predominance to persuade hardware manufacturers to assist in the creation of Windows drivers for every known device under the sun. Or perhaps the hardware makers asked Microsoft to generously help them to implement the drivers without which their products would be unsaleable.

Now we will see the same situation in the consumer space: Most camera makers will want to implement the codec API because doing so will reassure consumers that they can use any Windows software to access the image data. And cataloging software and other imaging processing software will be able to rely on the Windows APIs to get at the image data and, importantly, the metadata.

Click here to read more about Raw image handling in Photoshop.

I like this! The task of anyone writing image processing software under Windows just got much easier. I think we'll see a slew of nifty little Raw-image processing utilities appear soon. Until now, a big obstacle to coding something was reading the files. And the ability to easily strip out image metadata will make searching for files much easier. Neat!

Of course conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day about the pacification of the Raw by Microsoft. Let's pre-empt them. In the spirit of satire, I suggest naming Raw format files collectively Raw NeGative, aka RNG: "One RNG to see them all, One RNG to find them. One RNG to bring them all and in the darkness bind them."

Edmund Ronald has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, but he is currently on a sabbatical as a photographer in Paris.