On Sat, Dec 5, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Anton Aylward <li...@antonaylward.com> wrote: > I'm not going to argue with that in the generic, only the specific. > *SOME* vendors have adequately defined their formats and publicised the > same.
This is simply not true. There isn't a single manufacturer that I know of that publishes a format specification for their raw formats. Everything is pieced together from examples. > that holds for my Fuji and Sony, Including these two. Fuji in particular does all sorts of strange things with their formats (rotated, double image) that we have to figure out from examples. If you have a link for a format specification for any of these I'd be very interested in seeing it. > Call me a dinosaur but I remember when there were such things as "link > editors" that were used with compilers to produce sing load modules by > rearranging internal linkages in the files. Computer software has a > good and long established history of doing things like this. I'm no > longer a programmer, like Patric I'm officially (!) retired from such, > but if this "you don't know how to rearrange linkages" were directed at > me as a programmer who once produced many compilers and ancillary tools > I'd find it a personal insult. You can't "rearrange" the format if you don't understand it. We just don't for raw formats, not completely. > While I'm sure some technological skills fall into disuse (Clay tablet, > anyone? Mercury delay line storage?) I don't think that the current > generation of programmers in this field are as incompetents as you are > trying to make them out to be. I'm one of these programmers and I admit my incompetence. There's no way I'd trust myself to write a tool to edit these raw files with an incomplete understanding of how they work. > Your assertions may be valid for the general case, as I say, I can only > speak for a few formats that I'm familiar with and know to be documented > in adequate detail, and I'm sure many are undocumented and for which > your assertions hold. I don't see what you base your familiarity of these formats on. Do you know how Sony saves it's metadata? Do you understand their brittle "encryption" format we have to reverse to get the white balance out of? > But I've carried out a simple test: I've taken those edited RAW files, > put them back on a card, and put the card in the camera and viewed them > there. One camera has primitive editing capabilities, not as > sophisticated as DY ( :-) ) but enough to demonstrate that the formats > are not corrupted. That's a poor test. What we are discussing here isn't that you can't edit a file so that it will then seem to work fine with most software. It's that you can't edit it without being sure you haven't broken something you currently don't care about but will in the future. Or changed the way something is written to the file that happens to work now but will break in the future when we change how something is read. Like this: http://redmine.darktable.org/issues/10733 Editing raw files is simply not safe. TIFF is already a mess to edit to the point no one really does (they just write a new file with the same content). Raw files are even worse. Just don't do it, write a sidecar XMP file with whatever changes you need and sleep comfortably knowing (instead of hoping) you didn't break anything. Pedro ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Go from Idea to Many App Stores Faster with Intel(R) XDK Give your users amazing mobile app experiences with Intel(R) XDK. Use one codebase in this all-in-one HTML5 development environment. Design, debug & build mobile apps & 2D/3D high-impact games for multiple OSs. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=254741911&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Darktable-users mailing list Darktable-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/darktable-users
