On Dec 23, 2005, at 10:09 AM, Jens Bladt wrote:
BTW: Why can't camera manufacturers agree on using just one RAW
format?
It is ridiculous to have different formats. So, why don't we have
different
JPEG'S, Tiff's or whatever?
Beats me!
RAW is sensor data. Sensors and supporting electronics differ between
cameras, the format of the sensor data is dependent upon the hardware
if you want it to actually be sensor data. This is where RAW formats
started and continue to this day for the most part. RAW files contain
the sensor data along with the metadata that is required to render it.
An analysis of RAW formats shows remarkable similarity as to how to
package this data into a file across manufacturers. Thus the
invention of Adobe Digital NeGative (DNG format), a standardized
format for how to write the sensor data to a file along with the
metadata required to process it into LAB or RGB channel rendering.
DNG is catching on, it takes time for a standard to evolve and be
adopted particularly when there are many different formats it is
attempting to coalesce.
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a container protocol defined at
the outset to represent a very generalized image data. (In fact, most
RAW format files use TIFF format structure as does DNG.) It is by the
nature of its design a standard format.
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Guild) format is a still image
compression format with scalable loss designed to standardize a way
of representing still images for various types of display rendering.
Again, by the very nature of its design, it is a standard format.
Godfrey
