Campaign to force Canon to publish RAW format

One of the reasons I bought the D30 is the RAW format, small, no lossy compression. I store my photos on CDs. I am sure in not too far future we will be renting large amounts of space on the net, provided by companies that will provide much better protection from fire, natural disasters or degradation of the media. I can see my "family album" being stored somewhere for many decades to come.

In that time, OS will change, and the tools we use today will now longer run, thus making the RAW files useless. Can we rely on Canon on supporting the tools and format forever ? Of course not.

So my proposal is that we try to make Canon publish the format, as a way to guarantee that some translation of the files will be possible in the future. I am thinking of a campaign ( letters and emails ) to Canon, explaining why this is important to us users. I have no idea how many people might be reading the Canon forums, but hope it is a large number. I am sure there are lawyers amongst us - the question is will any of them reveal their profession publicly They might help us with the text. I even wonder if one could argue successfully that knowing the format is essential to work with the pictures we take, which belong to us, not Canon.

I am leaving for a trip abroad for 2 weeks, but I will check when I get back if there is enough interest in this.

Paul.

While I would love for Canon to publish the RAW format, as users there is no legal standing to push Canon into disclosure.

1. The RAW format is provided as an OPTION on Canon Cameras. There is an option to use the industry/world wide standard of JPEG. The user chooses to use the RAW Format.

2. Canon bundled software with the camera to convert the RAW images to JPEG/Tiff via Zoombrowser into graphics application of choice or Twain driver.

3. Canon provides software that can be downloaded from the internet for FREE that will convert the RAW images to TIFF. There is no registration required to proof of Canon Camera ownership. Your uncle in Des Moines who wants to view your RAW images can download the converter

4. Canon provides a Software Developers Kit (to anyone who wants one, by the way) to incorporate dlls and ActiveX controls that will convert the RAW images - and some fairly heavy documentation to walk developers through it step by step.

From my perspective the G1 has two features that set it apart from its major competitors (CP995, C3040Z, S75): Rotating LCD and the RAW format. Not only can the image be altered prior to conversion (without a loss of a single pixel) but it enables the user to store 3 times as many images on a CF/MD. Thats the difference between 52 pics on a 128 MB card (using RAW) vs 16 using TIFF.

Like I said, I would love to have access to the format. I have a stuck pixel on my CCD that I would like to erradicate en masse prior to conversion. I have contacted Canon requesting that a option like this is added to conversion software (Twain or RawConverter).

Paul said:

One of the reasons I bought the D30 is the RAW format, small, no
lossy compression. I store my photos on CDs. I am sure in not too
far future we will be renting large amounts of space on the net,
provided by companies that will provide much better protection from
fire, natural disasters or degradation of the media. I can see my
"family album" being stored somewhere for many decades to come.

In that time, OS will change, and the tools we use today will now
longer run, thus making the RAW files useless. Can we rely on Canon
on supporting the tools and format forever ? Of course not.

So my proposal is that we try to make Canon publish the format, as
a way to guarantee that some translation of the files will be
possible in the future. I am thinking of a campaign ( letters and
emails ) to Canon, explaining why this is important to us users. I
have no idea how many people might be reading the Canon forums, but
hope it is a large number. I am sure there are lawyers amongst us -
the question is will any of them reveal their profession publicly
They might help us with the text. I even wonder if one could
argue successfully that knowing the format is essential to work
with the pictures we take, which belong to us, not Canon.

I am leaving for a trip abroad for 2 weeks, but I will check when I
get back if there is enough interest in this.

Paul.

Click to expand...

Yes, let's force a private company disclose their private technology for the world to see. Next week: Let's ask the government to force Paul to tell us how he shaves.

Paul said:

One of the reasons I bought the D30 is the RAW format, small, no
lossy compression. I store my photos on CDs. I am sure in not too
far future we will be renting large amounts of space on the net,
provided by companies that will provide much better protection from
fire, natural disasters or degradation of the media. I can see my
"family album" being stored somewhere for many decades to come.

In that time, OS will change, and the tools we use today will now
longer run, thus making the RAW files useless. Can we rely on Canon
on supporting the tools and format forever ? Of course not.

So my proposal is that we try to make Canon publish the format, as
a way to guarantee that some translation of the files will be
possible in the future. I am thinking of a campaign ( letters and
emails ) to Canon, explaining why this is important to us users. I
have no idea how many people might be reading the Canon forums, but
hope it is a large number. I am sure there are lawyers amongst us -
the question is will any of them reveal their profession publicly
They might help us with the text. I even wonder if one could
argue successfully that knowing the format is essential to work
with the pictures we take, which belong to us, not Canon.

I am leaving for a trip abroad for 2 weeks, but I will check when I
get back if there is enough interest in this.

Paul.

Click to expand...

Hi folks:

You guys are funny. Paul's intention is good but won't ever happen. Plus not practical cause RAW format is not really any better than JPEG except it is "raw". JPEG ain't bad at the best super resolution setting on G1.

I tried RAW but didn't have much interest in it then.

JPEG is going to be a more acceptable standard for a long time but then things change just like our pants so-to-speak. So we need to convert our archived files to newer formats once/twice in our life time.

Arif

My e-gallary ... http://www.webmeridian.com/gallery

Paul said:

One of the reasons I bought the D30 is the RAW format, small, no
lossy compression. I store my photos on CDs. I am sure in not too
far future we will be renting large amounts of space on the net,
provided by companies that will provide much better protection from
fire, natural disasters or degradation of the media. I can see my
"family album" being stored somewhere for many decades to come.

In that time, OS will change, and the tools we use today will now
longer run, thus making the RAW files useless. Can we rely on Canon
on supporting the tools and format forever ? Of course not.

So my proposal is that we try to make Canon publish the format, as
a way to guarantee that some translation of the files will be
possible in the future. I am thinking of a campaign ( letters and
emails ) to Canon, explaining why this is important to us users. I
have no idea how many people might be reading the Canon forums, but
hope it is a large number. I am sure there are lawyers amongst us -
the question is will any of them reveal their profession publicly
They might help us with the text. I even wonder if one could
argue successfully that knowing the format is essential to work
with the pictures we take, which belong to us, not Canon.

I am leaving for a trip abroad for 2 weeks, but I will check when I
get back if there is enough interest in this.

Paul.

Click to expand...

Tong Yi Tsui said:

Yes, let's force a private company disclose their private
technology for the world to see. Next week: Let's ask the
government to force Paul to tell us how he shaves.

Click to expand...

I doubt there is that much IPR in the raw format, or that Canon would be revealing much of what is going on in the camera by publishing it.

My guess is that Canon does not realize that publishing the format would allow commercial tools to support it, which is a plus for any Canon user or peson considering buying Canon equipment, and thus a plus fro Canon. They will not know them unless we the user tell them.

Paul.

Tong Yi Tsui said:

Paul said:

One of the reasons I bought the D30 is the RAW format, small, no
lossy compression. I store my photos on CDs. I am sure in not too
far future we will be renting large amounts of space on the net,
provided by companies that will provide much better protection from
fire, natural disasters or degradation of the media. I can see my
"family album" being stored somewhere for many decades to come.

In that time, OS will change, and the tools we use today will now
longer run, thus making the RAW files useless. Can we rely on Canon
on supporting the tools and format forever ? Of course not.

So my proposal is that we try to make Canon publish the format, as
a way to guarantee that some translation of the files will be
possible in the future. I am thinking of a campaign ( letters and
emails ) to Canon, explaining why this is important to us users. I
have no idea how many people might be reading the Canon forums, but
hope it is a large number. I am sure there are lawyers amongst us -
the question is will any of them reveal their profession publicly
They might help us with the text. I even wonder if one could
argue successfully that knowing the format is essential to work
with the pictures we take, which belong to us, not Canon.

I am leaving for a trip abroad for 2 weeks, but I will check when I
get back if there is enough interest in this.

Paul.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Every company has to decide for themselves what is good for them. I don't think your original suggestion of "forcing" them to reveal RAW format to outsiders is appropriate. Another company can easily copy the technical specifications and incorporate it into their products. What would Canon hope to gain from the end result?

paulc said:

I doubt there is that much IPR in the raw format, or that Canon
would be revealing much of what is going on in the camera by
publishing it.

My guess is that Canon does not realize that publishing the format
would allow commercial tools to support it, which is a plus for any
Canon user or peson considering buying Canon equipment, and thus a
plus fro Canon. They will not know them unless we the user tell
them.

Paul.

Click to expand...

Paul said:

I doubt there is that much IPR in the raw format, or that Canon
would be revealing much of what is going on in the camera by
publishing it.

Click to expand...

That is of course up to Canon to decide. It appears to be a nicely-compressed lossless format. I see no reason why Canon shouldn't protect it.

paulc said:

My guess is that Canon does not realize that publishing the format
would allow commercial tools to support it, which is a plus for any
Canon user or peson considering buying Canon equipment, and thus a
plus fro Canon. They will not know them unless we the user tell
them.

Click to expand...

But Canon provides tools that allow commercial products to support it. Already there are several shareware and freeware tools available. (BreezeBrowser, YARC, Polyview, Thumbs Plus all have direct support for Canon RAW format.)

If I were to try and pressure Canon into anything, it wouldn't be this. There is nothing to gain. If you're worried about being able to read your image data in the unlikely scenario that future computers within our lifetimes will suddenly become incompatible with RAW format decoders from Canon, convert them to something else. Compressed TIF and PNG immediately come to mind.

eg said:

Paul said:

I doubt there is that much IPR in the raw format, or that Canon
would be revealing much of what is going on in the camera by
publishing it.

Click to expand...

That is of course up to Canon to decide. It appears to be a
nicely-compressed lossless format. I see no reason why Canon
shouldn't protect it.

eg #37159 said:

My guess is that Canon does not realize that publishing the format
would allow commercial tools to support it, which is a plus for any
Canon user or peson considering buying Canon equipment, and thus a
plus fro Canon. They will not know them unless we the user tell
them.

Click to expand...

But Canon provides tools that allow commercial products to support
it. Already there are several shareware and freeware tools
available. (BreezeBrowser, YARC, Polyview, Thumbs Plus all have
direct support for Canon RAW format.)

If I were to try and pressure Canon into anything, it wouldn't be
this. There is nothing to gain. If you're worried about being able
to read your image data in the unlikely scenario that future
computers within our lifetimes will suddenly become incompatible
with RAW format decoders from Canon, convert them to something
else. Compressed TIF and PNG immediately come to mind.

Click to expand...

there is nothing to gain ?

I could not disagree more. There is a lot to gain for both Canon and the end user if the format is published. Few examples:

• the tools third party develop would be based on documentation provided by Canon, not reverse engineered. This would make these third part tools more reliable
• tools that run on other OSs ( Linux. WinCE, Palm OS ... )

Publishing the format does not mean that Canon would be giving it away. They can always patent any part of the format they feel is valuable, so their competitors would not be able to use it, and the restrict the "public" usage of the format to tools that read the file produced by Canon, but not alter it, or create files in such format.

Paul.

Paul said:

there is nothing to gain ?

I could not disagree more. There is a lot to gain for both Canon
and the end user if the format is published. Few examples:

• the tools third party develop would be based on documentation

provided by Canon, not reverse engineered. This would make these
third part tools more reliable

Click to expand...

Why reverse engineer? Canon gives out APIs for decoding RAW format. As far as I know nobody has reverse engineered the G1 RAW format, yet the four programs I mentioned in my previous message have no problem dealing with it.

paulc said:

• tools that run on other OSs ( Linux. WinCE, Palm OS ... )

Click to expand...

I concede this point and will now rephrase my stance from "nothing to gain" to "not much to gain."

eg #37159 said:

eg #37159 said:

• tools that run on other OSs ( Linux. WinCE, Palm OS ... )

Click to expand...

I concede this point and will now rephrase my stance from "nothing
to gain" to "not much to gain."

Click to expand...

Exactly. How many Canon G1 users will actually use Linux, Windows CE or PalmOS is convert RAW images? Realistically. What could Canon gain by having a few tools developed for those OSes? Even Mac OSes are being neglected nowadays...

eg said:

Paul said:

there is nothing to gain ?

I could not disagree more. There is a lot to gain for both Canon
and the end user if the format is published. Few examples:

• the tools third party develop would be based on documentation

provided by Canon, not reverse engineered. This would make these
third part tools more reliable

Click to expand...

Why reverse engineer? Canon gives out APIs for decoding RAW format.
As far as I know nobody has reverse engineered the G1 RAW format,
yet the four programs I mentioned in my previous message have no
problem dealing with it.

Click to expand...

My understanding is that all the tools you mentioned use DLLs ( Dynamic Link Libraries ) from Canon which perform the conversion. The Bibble tool ( I use it with the D30 RAW files ) is the one that is built on reverse engineering. I do not believe Canon has released the format to anyone.

Which API do you refer to ? the DLL one ? If so, don't you think that these being Windows only is a serious limitation ?

eg #37159 said:

eg #37159 said:

• tools that run on other OSs ( Linux. WinCE, Palm OS ... )

Click to expand...

I concede this point and will now rephrase my stance from "nothing
to gain" to "not much to gain."

Click to expand...

Let's see what one could do on a WinCE Ipaq - quickly browse photos on a microdrive, email them wirelessly or via dial up to friends/family/work. Maybe not your cup of tee, but certainly of interest to me.

Paul.

One word = Entitlement.

You have an iPaq, therefore Canon must make it available on an iPaq.

(rolling eyes rapidly)

paulc said:

Let's see what one could do on a WinCE Ipaq - quickly browse
photos on a microdrive, email them wirelessly or via dial up to
friends/family/work. Maybe not your cup of tee, but certainly of
interest to me.

Paul.

Click to expand...

paulc said:

Publishing the format does not mean that Canon would be giving it
away. They can always patent any part of the format they feel is
valuable, so their competitors would not be able to use it, and the
restrict the "public" usage of the format to tools that read the
file produced by Canon, but not alter it, or create files in such
format.

Click to expand...

i think you will find that a patent already exists

Mike

Paul said:

Let's see what one could do on a WinCE Ipaq - quickly browse
photos on a microdrive, email them wirelessly or via dial up to
friends/family/work. Maybe not your cup of tee, but certainly of
interest to me.

Click to expand...

Then may I humbly suggest you ask Canon to release APIs for other OSes. I really think you have a better shot at that than to have them release proprietary information.

Hi

This sounds like a good test of the open source concept

http://www.opensource.org/

However, I doubt Canon will even consider it

Red Dawn

I also want to have information about the RAW format. The G1 has 10 bits per colour channle but after conversion to TIFF, the number of bits is reduced to 8 bits per colour chahnel. I am thinking of writing a program to convert a G1 RAW file into a TIFF file with 16 bits per colour channel. The TIFF has such an option of supporting 16 bits per colour channel. Without knowing the RAW format it would be quite difficult (if not impossible) to write the converter. I may have to take some test pictures and analyse the corresponding RAW files. Re-engineer it is quite a tedious process.

I do not think that the compression algorithm used in the RAW file is ao advanced that Canon has to protect. Most probably it is a very common lossless compression algorithm.

It would be to Canon's advantgae to publish the RAW format because it may attract more application developers to support Canon's RAW format which is one of the major attractions of Canon's G1 and D30.

Regards,

KW Tse

Paul said:

One of the reasons I bought the D30 is the RAW format, small, no
lossy compression. I store my photos on CDs. I am sure in not too
far future we will be renting large amounts of space on the net,
provided by companies that will provide much better protection from
fire, natural disasters or degradation of the media. I can see my
"family album" being stored somewhere for many decades to come.

In that time, OS will change, and the tools we use today will now
longer run, thus making the RAW files useless. Can we rely on Canon
on supporting the tools and format forever ? Of course not.

So my proposal is that we try to make Canon publish the format, as
a way to guarantee that some translation of the files will be
possible in the future. I am thinking of a campaign ( letters and
emails ) to Canon, explaining why this is important to us users. I
have no idea how many people might be reading the Canon forums, but
hope it is a large number. I am sure there are lawyers amongst us -
the question is will any of them reveal their profession publicly
They might help us with the text. I even wonder if one could
argue successfully that knowing the format is essential to work
with the pictures we take, which belong to us, not Canon.

I am leaving for a trip abroad for 2 weeks, but I will check when I
get back if there is enough interest in this.

Paul.

Click to expand...

Sure the wrong way is forcing them. But I'm very interested in the specification, too:

1. Other OSses/Platform support. The in-camera preview of CRW is quite blurry. Previewing with an PDA could do much better.

2. The 2048*1536 CCD has a CMYG color mask which yields to a "real" resolution of 1024*768*10. In special cases, it can be very interesting to have this real raw data (e.g. astrophotography).

3. I don't believe the format has an aspect that is technically that advanced that makes it worth protecting it.

2048*1536*10/8/1024/1024=3,75 MB uncompressed file size. CRW manages to bring it down to 2-3,3 MB. Sounds this ratio is possible with freely available lossless compression schemes.

4. File formats should be public in general. Who knows if Canon does its job best in converting the files? Perhaps someone out there has brilliant ideas to improve certain aspects of the CMYG-> RGB conversion. At least the opportunity should exist.

There is a lot of discussion about why should we care...

My opinion:

There is a lot of information on CRW that gets lost in any other format.

There are quite a few ways to convert RAW data to Tiff, some are better some are worse... look the work made by Q-image with Nikon's NEFs and Bibble with CRWs... They algorithms are much better than Canon's!

Sometimes I like to shot B&W, that's shooting in RAW and converting to B&W, I thing I could make a conversor from RAW to B&W without pre-calculating the RGB colors and so introducing noise... just geting the digital converted output from each CCD's cell and using a threshold adaptation for its original color... (well, if you know how the RAW to RGB conversion is done, you understand my idea).

Most of my work is published in B&W press, so there is no need of high quality (newspapers lpi are awfull compared even to the cheapest photo printer) but I would like to deliver them at H.Q., it's... right behaviour...

That was my two cents,

Sarbos