> > Hi John, > > Is this important to know? Will knowing this make for better > photographs? If so, in what way?
Knowing that a PEF file is, essentially, a TIFF file is about as relevant to making better photographs as a discussion of just what developer to use for a given film. If you don't do the processing yourself, the information is of no use to you. But there are several people here, myself included, who are questioning whether the Pentax tools used to get a digital image onto your computer could be improved on. More than one person has mentioned dcraw as a conversion tool to go from the raw sensor data to a TIFF (or JPEG), but it looks as though it may not make use of the EXIF data in the PEF file to pick settings. It shouldn't be *that* difficult to come up with a command-line tool that would decode the EXIF data from the PEF file, use that to control dcraw (reportedly a far superior Bayer matrix pattern converter), and write the resulting image to a TIFF or JPEG file. But in order to create such a tool, you need to know in what format the PEF stores the information. You might not need to know the information directly; you'd probably never write such a tool. But you may benefit from it indirectly if you ever used the resulting tool to process your digital images.
