The RAW Flaw
By Michael Reichmann and Juergen Specht
May, 2005
Some Background
For most of the past 10 years (effectively, the entire geological age of digital SLR cameras) photographers have been almost oblivious to a lurking danger. This threat and it is no exaggeration to call it that can best be understood by analogy.
Imagine that you were a photographer working with film, some time during the 20 th century. Many of us don't have to make too great an effort to imagine this, because we were.
You shot your transparency or negative film, had them processed (or processed them yourself), made your prints, and then filed the negatives safely away in acid free storage boxes, so that the next time you or your clients needed a print the negatives were be safely available.
And, sure enough, whenever needed even ten or twenty years later, we'd go back to our negatives, put them in the enlarger, and make a new print. And often, because over the intervening time our darkroom skills had advanced, or maybe because we had a new enlarger or we were using an improved paper or chemistry, our new prints turned out to be superior to what we had been able to produce before.
Now, imagine the following scenario. We retrieve our files, find the negative or slide that we want to reprint, and then discover that it has become opaque. The image is gone or otherwise inaccessible. We still have the piece of film that originally went though the camera, but the image itself cannot be accessed!
Good Lord what could have happened? Well, imagine if the answer was that the company that made your original roll of film had manufactured it so that the film only fit into one type of enlarger, and that those enlargers aren't being made anymore. Or that the chemical properties of the dyes used to make that roll of color film were such that they would only interact to form an image with matching dyes in a printing paper from that same company; but sorry, that company was sold a few years ago and the new owners decided to stop making that type of paper.
Totally unacceptable of course. But really, this is a pretty far-fetched scenario isn't it?
No. Actually it isn't, because this is exactly the situation that we now face with our digital camera's RAW files. Let's see if we can understand what's going on and why the current situation has come to a head.
____________________
I tried to paste the entire thing, but it's too long...for the rest of the article please go here:
http://www.digitaldiver.net/raw_flaw.php
By Michael Reichmann and Juergen Specht
May, 2005
Some Background
For most of the past 10 years (effectively, the entire geological age of digital SLR cameras) photographers have been almost oblivious to a lurking danger. This threat and it is no exaggeration to call it that can best be understood by analogy.
Imagine that you were a photographer working with film, some time during the 20 th century. Many of us don't have to make too great an effort to imagine this, because we were.
You shot your transparency or negative film, had them processed (or processed them yourself), made your prints, and then filed the negatives safely away in acid free storage boxes, so that the next time you or your clients needed a print the negatives were be safely available.
And, sure enough, whenever needed even ten or twenty years later, we'd go back to our negatives, put them in the enlarger, and make a new print. And often, because over the intervening time our darkroom skills had advanced, or maybe because we had a new enlarger or we were using an improved paper or chemistry, our new prints turned out to be superior to what we had been able to produce before.
Now, imagine the following scenario. We retrieve our files, find the negative or slide that we want to reprint, and then discover that it has become opaque. The image is gone or otherwise inaccessible. We still have the piece of film that originally went though the camera, but the image itself cannot be accessed!
Good Lord what could have happened? Well, imagine if the answer was that the company that made your original roll of film had manufactured it so that the film only fit into one type of enlarger, and that those enlargers aren't being made anymore. Or that the chemical properties of the dyes used to make that roll of color film were such that they would only interact to form an image with matching dyes in a printing paper from that same company; but sorry, that company was sold a few years ago and the new owners decided to stop making that type of paper.
Totally unacceptable of course. But really, this is a pretty far-fetched scenario isn't it?
No. Actually it isn't, because this is exactly the situation that we now face with our digital camera's RAW files. Let's see if we can understand what's going on and why the current situation has come to a head.
____________________
I tried to paste the entire thing, but it's too long...for the rest of the article please go here:
http://www.digitaldiver.net/raw_flaw.php
