Re: Was Camera Profiling Software, Now Aperture
Re: Was Camera Profiling Software, Now Aperture
- Subject: Re: Was Camera Profiling Software, Now Aperture
- From: Richard Wagner <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 06:36:44 -0700
Lee, Matthew's (and Nathan's) point is valid. Nikon has *not* wanted
3rd parties to roll their own RAW processor, and it is *very*
unlikely that Apple used the Nikon SDK. The SDK is really only
useful for developers who want to do cataloging or read embedded
jpegs and metadata but *not* do RAW processing, because the SDK black-
box does not give access to the pre-demosaic'ed data (the grayscale,
raw data) - it would be very difficult make a conversion that was
better than Nikon's. It is also VERY slow and is limited to whatever
raw processing tools Nikon cares to include - which may or may not be
the best processing tools that Nikon has built.
To prevent 3rd parties from building competetive products, Nikon went
so far as to encrypt the white balance data in their NEFs. Most
developers, including Adobe, have made use of the reverse-engineered
code provided by David Coffin called dcraw.c (http://www.cybercom.net/
~dcoffin/dcraw/) to read the RAW file data, but many (including
Adobe) balked at using reverse-engineered encrypted data, for fear of
legal action. Thus, until the latest release of ACR (3.2), it was not
possible to read Nikon's encrypted white balance data and only the
crude text tags could be read (Daylight, Cloudy, etc.) After a huge
uproar and a lot of time and negotiations between Nikon and Adobe,
Nikon finally relented and released a "mini-SDK" that simply
decrypted the white balance data. Adobe still does not use the
"regular" SDK.
Nikon is currently contracting with Nik Multimedia to develop their
next-generation RAW processing software; no further changes or
improvements are planned for Nikon Capture. There has been talk that
Nikon might also come out with a completely encrypted RAW format.
That said, I can't imagine that Apple would head into a project as
big as Aperture without some licensing/contractual agreement with
Nikon. But, they may not have, and the scenario envisioned by Matthew
is certainly possible.
--Rich
> So if anyone out there can comment. Can we expect finger pointing
> between Apple and the camera manufactures when firmware changes and
> things stop working perfectly, or are they working together
behind the
> scenes to make sure that situations like that simply never happen.
I don't see why Canon or Nikon would want to protect that format.
Having
it be in widespread use means they're selling more cameras.
Surely they don't think they'll make their own image processing s/w
that
will be better than Photoshop? Adobe released the raw plug-in that
imports those formats some time ago.
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