The OpenRaw Working Group launches a Web site to work for open documentation of all Raw file formats.The OpenRaw Working Group has launched a Web site, www.openraw.org, to promote open documentation of Raw file formats.
Juergen Specht, a Japan-based photographer who is spearheading the OpenRaw group, used the analogy of baking a cake to describe what the public documentation of the format would mean in the future.
"The file formats are just the ingredients, and the final result is a cake [the image]. The OpenRaw workgroup does not want the camera makers to publish their recipe [the algorithms they use to convert their Raw file into an image], just the ingredients. With this knowledge, everybody can bake a cake [create an image from a Raw file format], but there is more than one way to do it," said Specht.
As evidenced by the heavy comment postings on its Web site, the group has plenty of support among digital photography professionals. Specht said there has been no official feedback from any camera makers.
"Because lots of Raw formats are already reverse-engineered, most [but not all] of the file formats are known, now camera makers try to obfuscate new Raw file formats with encryption, to make reverse-engineering harder to impossible."
Click here to read about Adobe Systems' Digital Negative specification.
Nikon responded to Publish.com's request for comment by pointing to an earlier released statement. In it, the camera maker details the NEF, Nikon's proprietary raw file design, and the Nikon Software Developer Kit, where authorized developers can produce software by "applying creative concepts to their implementation and adding capabilities to open Nikon's NEF file and using NEF's embedded Instructions and Nikon's Libraries."
Choice in applying a proprietary system—whether it be Nikon or Canon, both of which provide free software development kits, or Olympus, Minolta, Konica and Sony, which do not provide kits—is not the prevailing issue for the OpenRaw Working Group.
The group calls for all manufacturers to publicly document all the Raw image file formats and then let photographers have the processing choices.
Richard Hess, of Vignettes Media, said he is pushing the issue because there is still time to impact the future of digital image processing and archiving for generations to come.
"There is time for the photographic equipment manufacturers to learn from the mistakes in the audio and video fields. I am very much in support of this from an archivist's view because if you look at what has happened in the audio and video world, and the cost of maintaining the functional skill set and recovery of data, this is the only thing that will prevent the same thing happening to digital images," said Hess.
"Manufacturers tend to be more short-sighted for the day. It's always, Get it better, faster, cheaper and in the latest formats. But what happens to all those images left behind?" said Hess.
"Let's hope that sanity prevails and we can have a universal format that is kept alive for a century or more, so that we won't have significant challenges opening 100-year-old digital image files in their highest quality," commented Hess in an OpenRaw Web site posting.
