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We asked camera companies why their RAW formats are all different and confusing

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361 points Tomte | 3 comments | 04 Apr 25 11:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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t0bia_s ◴[07 Apr 25 07:10 UTC] No.43608683[source]▶
Compressed RAF (Fujifilm, 24MP) ~20 MB

DNG (24MP) ~90 MB

It cost about 4 times more to store RAW files in DNG format.

replies(3): >>43609905 #>>43612339 #>>43612406 #
hoherd ◴[07 Apr 25 15:03 UTC] No.43612339[source]▶
To test this, I downloaded a random RAF image from this gallery https://mirrorlesscomparison.com/galleries/fuji-xt2-sample-i...

    $ /Applications/Adobe\ DNG\ Converter.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe\ DNG\ Converter DSCF6001.RAF
    SPL-LOG-1002: starting logger thread
    *** GPU Warning: GPU3 disabled via cr_config at init time. ***
    SPL-LOG-1003: terminating logger thread
    SPL ~DefaultMemoryManagerImpl bytesAllocated = 0
    $ ls -la DSC*
    -rw-r--r-- 1 danielh staff 50377216 2025-04-07T10:59:30 DSCF6001.RAF
    -rw-r--r-- 1 danielh staff 30747896 2025-04-07T11:00:13 DSCF6001.dng
Maybe your method of converting to DNG is embedding the original RAF image and ... something else?
replies(1): >>43612385 #
1. 4ad ◴[07 Apr 25 15:07 UTC] No.43612385[source]▶
He probably compares a mosaiced RAF with a debayered (linear) DNG. Just... don't do that. Use a mosaiced DNG. And certainly don't embed the RAF file. Plus with lossless JPEG-XL, the difference is trivial (under 5%):

On my own files:

    edengate:1$ ls -l
    total 163664
    -rwx------@ 1 aram  staff  40894672 Apr  4 15:25 DSCF1483.RAF
    -rw-r--r--@ 1 aram  staff  42894224 Apr  7 16:51 DSCF1483.dng
replies(1): >>43614353 #
2. t0bia_s ◴[07 Apr 25 18:20 UTC] No.43614353[source]▶
Lightroom cannot do that. I'm not sure if Iridient X-transformer have some options for this. I always ended up with massive files.

Also, I'm not confident to replace entire RAF collection with converted DNGs and delete originals.

replies(1): >>43616966 #
3. 4ad ◴[07 Apr 25 23:27 UTC] No.43616966[source]▶
Iridient X-transformer produces a linear (demosaiced) DNG, that's its sole reason to exist, to do a better job at debayering than other software like Adobe. So it wouldn't make any sense for Iridient X-transformer to produce a mosaiced DNG because that would be basically a noop, the program wouldn't do anything.

So yes, of course that files produced by Iridient X-transformer are large, they are linear files. They are exactly three times as large because there are three color channels, four times as large if you also embed the original.

There is zero reason to convert RAF files to DNG files if you camera produces RAF files. The discussion we're having here is cameras producing mosaiced DNG natively, which as I hoped I showed you wouldn't come with any size penalty. The DNG can use modern lossless compression techniques, and can encode the same mosaiced (not debayered) data. And it works in every program, unlike RAF which always needs to be reverse engineered for every new camera release.