Good News: Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS supports Canon CR3 RAW!!

Fresh news right from Canonical: I am not only the leader of the OpenPrinting project for 22 years and therefore the printing guru for all Linux, Unix, and alike operating systems, but therefore also employed at Canonical, in the Desktop Team. And one of my colleagues has fixed the exiv2 package (RAW decoding library) so that the CR3 format is supported now, in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) which will get released next week, on Thursday, April 21, 2022!

I have tested with both DarkTable and RawTherapee and it actually works!

This should especially cover cameras like the G5X Mark II (my camera), the G7X Mark III, ...

Note that there is no automatic lens distortion correction for most cameras, as the correction coefficients for the lenses are not available. This is especially a problem as in full wide angle the zoom lenses of the newer PowerShots are more fish eyes than rectiliniar lenses and the corners of the camera sensor are not covered.

But at least in RawTherapee I have found an easy-to-manage solution for this: This application allows for manual distortion correction by a slider and together with this slider there is a genius trick, a button for setting this slider automatically and to do so, it simply matches the RAW image with the embedded JPEG preview. This is a great solution for the many lenses which are not registered, especially super zoom lenses. You find it in the RAW/Image editor under the geometry correction (drawing tools icon), "Distortion Correction", "Automatic". If it does not perfectly hit, you can slightly adjust the value.

I hope many of you will enjoy their Canon camera much more now.

Till

Hello...

Thank you for this tip.

Till Kamppeter wrote:

Fresh news right from Canonical: I am not only the leader of the OpenPrinting project for 22 years and therefore the printing guru for all Linux, Unix, and alike operating systems, but therefore also employed at Canonical, in the Desktop Team. And one of my colleagues has fixed the exiv2 package (RAW decoding library) so that the CR3 format is supported now, in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) which will get released next week, on Thursday, April 21, 2022!

I have tested with both DarkTable and RawTherapee and it actually works!

This should especially cover cameras like the G5X Mark II (my camera), the G7X Mark III, ...

Note that there is no automatic lens distortion correction for most cameras, as the correction coefficients for the lenses are not available. This is especially a problem as in full wide angle the zoom lenses of the newer PowerShots are more fish eyes than rectiliniar lenses and the corners of the camera sensor are not covered.

But at least in RawTherapee I have found an easy-to-manage solution for this: This application allows for manual distortion correction by a slider and together with this slider there is a genius trick, a button for setting this slider automatically and to do so, it simply matches the RAW image with the embedded JPEG preview. This is a great solution for the many lenses which are not registered, especially super zoom lenses. You find it in the RAW/Image editor under the geometry correction (drawing tools icon), "Distortion Correction", "Automatic". If it does not perfectly hit, you can slightly adjust the value.

I hope many of you will enjoy their Canon camera much more now.

Till

This is FANTASTIC news!

Question, exiv2, available in any other major Linux distro's by default?

Granted Ubuntu is the leading Linux distro of choice, other than MacOS.

Question #2... RawTherapee, do you recommended it for RAW conversion in Ubu? I noted there is a lack of major third party paid support. Does LR or others support Linux-64-bit yet?

For that matter, is there a webpage these days that shows major third party software support? Things like Tax software are gotchas these days, still.

RLight wrote:

This is FANTASTIC news!

Question, exiv2, available in any other major Linux distro's by default?

Generally, exiv2 library is free software and makes it into all major distributions, but when its CR3 support was introduced some time ago, the developers were in doubt whether they perhaps infringe some intellectual property by that and made including the feature optional when compiling the source code of the library, ending up that most distributions compiled exiv2 in default configuration and so did not include CR3 support. Currently, the doubts are cleared and newest versions of exiv2 are compiled with CR3 support by default, meaning that future Linux distributions should support CR3 out-of-the-box.

IN Ubuntu 22.04 the maintainer of the exiv2 Debian/Ubuntu package has switched the option to include CR3. Therefore this version of Ubuntu supports CR3.

Note also that the fact whether a Linux distribution supports CR3 (or any other new RAW format) does usually not influence image editing software which comes in so-called "sandboxed" packages, like Snap or Flatpak, as this software comes with its own libraries, especially also with its own exiv2. So you can be lucky that via Snap or Flatpak you get CR3 support also into older distributions but also catch a software without CR3 support on a generally CR3-supporting distribution. But usually you should get into the former situation as the idea of Snap and Flatpak is to always get the newest application software also after the release of your distribution.

Granted Ubuntu is the leading Linux distro of choice, other than MacOS.

Question #2... RawTherapee, do you recommended it for RAW conversion in Ubu? I noted there is a lack of major third party paid support. Does LR or others support Linux-64-bit yet?

I did not hear about Adobe software being available for Linux. I hope Snap and/or Flatpak will help Adobe to make their software available to us in the future.

About whether DarkTable, RawTherapee, or DigiKam is the best RAW editor I cannot say much, as I do not wear these "I shoot RAW" T-shirts, I actually shoot JPEG (with RAW as backup but used it only very rarely), but as free software developer and especially co-founder and the leader of the OpenPrinting project I am also interacting with the developer and user communities.

For that matter, is there a webpage these days that shows major third party software support? Things like Tax software are gotchas these days, still.

For software which is not included in your distribution you should watch out at the App Stores for Snap and Flatpak. Here software gets posted independently of any Linux distribution and you can install it on (nearly) any Linux distribution. Both packaging systems have security concepts similar to what you have for apps on Smartphones (this was probably the inspiration for developing these systems in the first place). I know about the inner workings at least of Snap, as I have [snapped several printing-related pieces of software](https://snapcraft.io/search?q=OpenPrinting), especially CUPS and also all printer drivers which are available as free software (in 4 Printer Applications). I have also participated in the development of Snap, for a smooth and secure printing integration.

Till

@RLight and in terms of choice of your RAW software under Linux, you should use RawTherapee at least for your G5X Mark II as here you can easily fix the lens distortion as I described in my initial post.

Till

GazzaChapp wrote:

Hi there Till,

I have been hanging out for Canon CR3 support in Linux. I have several PC's both desktop and laptop, some running Mint and a VM running Ubuntu 22.04.

Today after installing and updating 22.04, I was still not seeing CR3 support for file natively, with them being shown as plain stream/octet files. I was able to correct this today by creating the required mime type xml and updating the mime DB, so CR3 files now have the correct mime type, however I still cannot enable thumbnails for them in the system!

CR2 files thumbnail fine, but not 3's, any idea why? It would be really good to be able to view the thumbnails in Nautilus, as opposed to having to open Dark Table every time I want to visually identify images.

I have gone through the usual process of adding the mime type to the thumbnailer file and deleting the thumbnail cache, but no luck still. I would really like to be able to resolve this.

If anyone has any suggestions regarding CR3 thumbnails, it would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Garry C.

I have a non-remediation suggestion; shoot small JPEG + RAW. The file names are concurrent. Store together on archive.

Thanks for the heads up about the mime; I haven't played with Ubu for personal use, yet. Been waiting out features like this before making the swap from MacOS. Sadly it's probably still not there yet as I'm looking for third party apps support for Linux 64, which isn't there yet.

I could just do my taxes the old fashion way, but that's getting harder these days... Things like TurboTax are a small deal, until they're not.

I did not test the appearance of these files in file managers, only whether they can be handled, opened, and edited in the applications DarkTable, RawTherapee, and DigiKam. All display a preview of the CR3 files, probably the embedded JPEG. And all open the actual RAW file for editing, I have tried it with a picture taken in full wide angle with the G5X II where one clearly sees that one gets a fish-eye picture not covering the whole sensor in untreated RAW.

So the editing itself works, what is missing seems to be the support in file managers.

Till