Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Request for Panasonic RW2 format

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Requested Request for Panasonic RW2 format

    Hi,

    I recently purchased a Lumix FZ28 which uses the RW2 raw format. Is it possible to get this format added to one of the Irfanview plugins?

    You can download a sample file from ftp://mears.dyndns.org/rw2.rw2 (12MB)

    Thanks

    #2
    (batch) Rename the extension(s) to RAW...
    Try avoiding the damn ‘populair’ RAW format...
    See what I did with your photo in JPG (apart from the quality-deduction by uploading it).
    Attached Files

    Comment


      #3
      It definitely looks more vivid, but I don't like how the shed looks with pixelated color.

      Why does the RW2 image already have some lossy compression in it? The borders around the flowers are terrible. The image looks nice otherwise. Panasonic does have good quality.

      Comment


        #4
        Quit right! See the borders around the flowers from the RW2 file. I wonder how the camera handles JPG-compression (finest mode) in comparison with his RAW-compression. Please read also this about RAW versus JPG:
        Attached Files

        Comment


          #5
          Hi Sjef,

          I already think JPG is great, but why is there RAW compression? I thought the purpose of RAW is that it is free from visible compression artifacts. Why would anyone want a RAW image if it looks worse than a JPG?

          Your original JPG looks fine Sjef, but isn't the image overcorrected? Don't you see the funny color blocks on the shed even at around 33% zoom?

          Comment


            #6
            RAW is a professional 16 bits format with 65.536 brightness levels. A common user isn't able to see this on his screen. Some RAW formats (like Pentax) are indeed worse than JPG. In practice there's no perceptible difference between RAW and JPG. A RAW file is no general format, so it isn't very usefull; after editing it has to be converted to a bitmap format. When you are a professional, RAW or DNG may be handy for editing in behalf of printing in high quality. I think the RAW option is to judge the same as lots of Megapixels. The buyer gets what he things he needs in competition between camera manufacturers.

            ‘My’ JPG photo was attached to show how Photoshop can deal with this brightness without its RAW-plugin. Notice that I earlier wrote about quality-deduction. And notice that the deformations were already inside the source RAW file.

            Comment


              #7
              I understand what you mean. I didn't think there was anything wrong with the JPG compression you used. I just thought whatever you did in Photoshop lowered the quality, by introducing splotches of color in the shed. Maybe that was in the RW2 file, but now it is accentuated in your file, regardless of JPG compression.

              Again, any idea why the flower borders show artifacts in the RW2 file? It is hard to believe that is acceptable.

              Comment


                #8
                RAW isn't a standard format, so it is hard to know what kind of routine has been applied to the picture when saving it to the memorycard. To my knowledge there's a kind of lossy compression applied, but which kind? It's the computer in the camera that provides this routine and as we know, every factory uses their own routine and extension. Maybe in future every factory will use the DNG format, which is an Adobe standard. But to edit that format, they must make better software which is easier to handle for the common photographer and by all means faster.

                Here are examples of screenshots from the Panasonic DMC-FZ28 and the Nikon D40.
                Both files are edited in Raw Therapee (a free RAW editing program). The shadowed areas on both files are 100% brighten up. You can see how the pixels are fabricated/deformed/interpreted by respectively the Venus Engine III and the Expeed routine.
                Attached Files
                Last edited by Sjef; 11.10.2008, 10:49 AM.

                Comment


                  #9
                  I am just surprised that lossy compression is applied at all to such images. I can't understand how you could edit them if they are already ruined by compression. Seems to be counterproductive. I guess you just have to get a high quality camera like the Nikon or better yet, forget about RAW like you say. Of course, I basically already have.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Thanks for the response and comments. When I get a chance I will use the software that came with the camera and see if those "artifacts" around the flowers are in the raw version of the photo in the Panasonic Software. I would think they shouldn't be there.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Maybe it is instructive to other visitors of this forum to send us a zoomed-in screendump of (a part of) the interface from the software that came with the camera, including the flower-photo of course, without having applied any filters or only just having brighten up the shadows. As you know IrfanView can be used to produce such an example.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        RW2 could be displayed by Infanview if renamed to RAW

                        I have a Lumix DMC-LX3. It creates if configured RW2 files. If I try to open them with ifanview directly I get first the message that is an TIF file with a wrong extension and if I want to rename it. If I click on "No" I get the message that an decoding error happened "Wrong or Unknown TIF File".

                        If I just rename the file to RAW and open than with infanview, I do not get an error and the file is displayed correctly.

                        I think it should be simple to handle RW2 files as RAW files by infanview. If this does not work allways it may be worth to use the EXIF Data to use the procedure at least for the DMC-LX3 where it works.

                        :-glup

                        Comment

                        Working...
                        X