主题：a RAW flaw？ -- 晨枫

喜欢操作RAW FILE的朋友这下有免费的工具了。点击这里下载RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer

After installing the Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer Powertoy for Windows XP you will be able to view, organize, and print photos captured in RAW image formats from supported Canon and Nikon digital cameras.

This software offers the following benefits to digital photographers:

    * High image quality. This software uses the camera vendors' own processing libraries to provide the highest possible image fidelity for RAW images.
    * Superior color fidelity. Windows Image Color Management (ICM) is used to render images in the correct color space as determined by the photographer when the image was captured.
    * Familiar user experience. This software builds on the familiar Windows user experience and requires little or no learning curve.
    * Performance tuned for rapid previews. The software uses background processing and other techniques to ensure a good preview experience even for large images.

About RAW Images and Windows

Often likened to a ‘digital negative,’ a RAW image is the native image format for a growing number of quality digital cameras. RAW images typically contain the original camera sensor data recorded at the time of capture, along with camera settings and other information. Using special software, photogra-phers can “process” RAW images using a personal computer and can vary the exposure, white bal-ance, and other settings long after the image was captured. This creative flexibility and extra level of protection against mistakes are key reasons photographers choose to shoot RAW.

RAW images also preserve all of the quality capable of being rendered by the digital camera’s sensor. Capturing pictures in RAW avoids the inherent loss of color information and dynamic range that occurs when camera sensor data is processed to a compressed dynamic range format such as JPEG. For ex-ample, most current digital cameras are capable of capturing images with 12-bits of information per color channel. When processed to JPEG format, the image data is re-sampled to 8-bits per channel. As a result, some of the original information present in the image is lost, never to be recovered again. In addition, RAW images avoid any loss of fidelity due to image compression, as no “lossy” compression is used.

Today, RAW formats are not standardized across camera manufacturers. Each camera maker has its own RAW format (sometimes more than one). Additionally, the actual image data within the RAW file is specific to each camera model and sensor. As a consequence, only certain software programs can understand and process RAW images.

Some of the more common RAW image types in use today are: