Software Companies & Developers support OpenRAW

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They are for openly documented RAW file formats because...
Proxel Software HB Products: X3F Tools (Open Source)	Roland Karlsson, Owner, writes: Three reasons: 1. The owner: The owner has the right to know the format of any files he produces with his camera. Some owners, like me, actually are capable of using the data. The camera is a personal tool - and the more it is know about the tool - the more powerful it is. 2. Third party: Third party software is an advantage. So is also free software and research projects. All those needs the file specifications. 3. The company: The product becomes more attractive if the format is open. It is a myth that it is an advantage to keep formats secret. Company management must understand this fact.
CEZEO software Products: X3F RAW format documentation project ACDSee plugin to show X3F raw files	Pavel Sokolov, CEO, writes: OpenRAW is only one right way, because all of us (photographers) wants to get best possible quality of the our digital work. Closed and encrypted RAW formats closes the way to the RAW software improvements. Most of cameras developers have a very ugly and unfunctional software, but cameras owners have no choice.
BAT Systems	Bruce Taylor, Director, writes: As long-time developers of embedded software we are only too well aware of the often substantial costs and time involved in trying to work with undocumented and proprietary data formats and communication protocols. The makers of digital cameras should learn from the mistakes of the wider embedded industry and release documentation on their RAW data files or work to a common standard. There is absolutely no need for Nikon and Canon et al. to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Iridient Digital, Inc. Product: Iridient Digital	Brian Griffith, CEO, writes: Iridient Digital supports the goals of the OpenRAW initiative. Openly documented digital file formats are critical to the preservation of our digital assets and help encourage software innovation and interoperability. It would be extremely valuable to all parties involved with digital photography if RAW image file formats were fully specified by camera manufacturers.
Atlantic Software Exchange Inc. Product: ThumbsPlus	Uwe Zimmermann, ThumbsPlus Support, writes: The German language versions of ThumbsPlus are maintained, distributed and supported by the company Atlantic Software Exchange Inc, licensed by Cerious Inc. Cerious Inc is responsible for the further development of the software. To our software we offer a free RAW plugin to import all those RAW files we can get specifications for. The plugin is solely based on the camera manufacturers released specifications and software development kits. However, in general it takes up to a year for the manufacturers to include their latest camera models in their SDK. This is not tolerable. Our customers want their expensive cameras to be supported by the software on the market the day they buy the camera! About 80% of the recent support questions I receive daily and a huge part of the ongoing development work at Cerious is "wasted" by just the chaos in the field of RAW files. Not only Kodak, but also Canon has started to exclude older cameras' RAW formats from their current software releases. We behind ThumbsPlus, which is a program to categorize and archive your digital images, are concerned about the possibility to access your digital images even in the future! There is no problem of taking out your grandparents' photographic negatives and make new prints, but what will your grandchildren say? After intensive tests with my own camera and studies of other peoples' RAW files I am personally convinced that you don't need RAW photography for everyday pictures and that many, many amateur photographers overestimate the possible gain with RAW files as compared to camera-processed TIFF or JPEG files. However, the decision which file format to use and how to access the contents of the files should be up to each individual photographer...
Jaewook Chung Product: FixNEF	Jaewook Chung, Author, writes: The freedom of digital photographers must not be restricted within the limit of raw converters that the camera manufacturers provide. I developed free software called FixNEF which corrects white balance data in Nikon raw formats. It clearly shows that the raw converters made by camera manufacturers are not perfect and that they sometimes produce wrong output. Camera manufacturers must either make perfect raw converters, or document and publicize their raw format so that other companies or individuals can make better raw converters.
Lemke Software GmbH Product: GraphicConverter	Thorsten Lemke, Founder and Managing Director, writes: I am for openly documented RAW formats, because we have to waste currently a lot of time to decode each new RAW format and to find the right color transformation.
AKVIS LLC	Sergey Galenko, CEO, writes: We would like to support OpenRAW as a developer of graphic plug-ins. Besides, I find openRaw indespensable as a digital camera user. In my opinion, it is not fair that digital camera producers place limitations on the usage of the taken photos. Without a software able to decipher the information in the Raw file, a photo taken with a digicam is just a set of numbers. Why should I pay to digital camera producers if they can not guarantee that my priceless photos will be readable in the future? It's understandable that it is in the interests of producers that users buy a new digicam as often as possible. However, those who are happy with their current camera also should be listened to. And if the Raw documentation is open, the problem could be solved. In this case it will be possible to develop software that could process and enhance photos taken with your old camera using up-to-date technologies.
Dave Coffin, Sole Proprietor Product: dcraw.c	Dave Coffin, Software Engineer, writes: Digital camera makers ignore the needs of today's photographers and tomorrow's historians by providing neither documentation nor human-readable code for their secret raw formats. I've worked hard to decipher all these formats, so that the photographs of our time may always be viewable, on any computer running any operating system.
Petteri Kettunen Product: jpgind	Petteri Kettunen, Free Software Developer, writes: In my opinion, the owners of digital cameras must have unconditional freedom to view, modify and convert their raw format images without the use of proprietary software. I fully support the OpenRAW initiative which can provide this freedom to people.
Bibble Labs Inc Product: Bibble Pro, Raw Workflow Software for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.	Eric Hyman, CEO, writes: Bibble Labs is proud to support the Open Raw Initiative. As one of the first 3rd parties to support Raw Formats, we strongly believe that you own all the data in your Raw Images and have the right to access that data to process your images as you see fit. Only if Raw formats are fully documented will you be able to fully exercise that right and be assured of being able use the use the latest hardware, processing techniques and workflows. Hardware, software, proprietary formats, and even companies come and go. Priceless images and memories shouldn't. Documenting Raw Formats helps preserve them for the future.
Script Software Product: iWatermark	Julian Miller, Founder and Ceo, writes: Programmers like to eliminate redundancy. Having hundreds or perhaps thousands of people reverse engineering the same thing is a huge waste of the worlds time. We believe that all it will take is for one camera company to sign on and they will get such an avalanche of support from pro and regular consumers for their bold move that other companies will have no choice but to follow suit or perish. Having a readable and documented format now and into the future by as many different software and hardware options as possible is sensible and will give photos the greatest longevity.
Glass Lantern, LLC Product: Pixfer, PocketLoupe	Jeff Blum, CEO, writes: Glass Lantern, LLC has spent endless hours examining undocumented RAW format images in order to implement RAW support in our software. Since products like PocketLoupe and Pixfer are written for Microsoft Windows Mobile Pocket PC devices, binary RAW toolkits from the camera manufacturers are not an option for us. We support OpenRAW in the hope that we'll be able to continue providing RAW support as these formats evolve.
Vinland Corporation	Bertho Boman, President, writes: Vinland Corporation backs the OpenRAW initiative. It will enable Vinland to provide and support additional software and hardware features not provided by the camera manufacturers. To be able to guarantee Vinland's customers future functionality of Vinland's products, it is critical that the camera data format is properly documented and not all of a sudden made unusable to our customers.
Tidalwave Product: blueMarine (open source software for photo workflow)	Fabrizio Giudici, Freelance Consultant, writes: Open specifications are a key for innovation and competition, that lead to customer satisfaction. They also open the door for open source, which in turn is another key for innovation and competition.
Extensis, Inc. Product: Extensis Portfolio	Dan Harlacher, Portfolio Product Manager at Extensis, writes: Access to RAW file information is a valid issue for all photographers shooting digital. An open specification will provide photographers reassurance for long-term archiving needs by unifying a collection of images under a single standard. As the developers of Portfolio - the leading digital asset management solution, Extensis encourages the development of an open file format for managing raw data.
Pro Shooters LLC Product: Digital Pro 3	David Cardinal, CEO, writes: As photographers we need to be able to get full value from our images and a documented Raw file format is essential for that. We also need to be sure that our images can be safely archived, which requires a documented Raw format. And as software developers, our thousands of customers --all photographers-- demand that we faithfully render and manage their Raw images which in the long run is only possible with documented Raw file formats. In particular reading and writing metadata safely requires a documented and supported format.
DataRescue Product: PhotoRescue	Pierre Vandevenne, CEO, writes: Digital Photography is still a young technology: there are many unfortunate circumstances that may lead to data loss. We should not knowingly create future problems by obfuscating file formats. DataRescue fully supports the OpenRAW and the DNG initiatives.
Udi Fuchs Product: UFRaw	Udi Fuchs, Free Software Developer, writes: As a photographer I believe that I have the right for full ownership on the pictures I take and full control over the development process of these pictures. The realization of this right requires OpenRAW specifications and OpenSource programs. At the moment, Dave Coffin supplies us photographers with ad-hoc specifications and an open source raw converter. I am making my small contribution by developing a user friendly interface to this converter. But these efforts are not an excuse to ignore the problem.
Pixmantec ApS Product: RawShooter	Michael Jonsson, Co-Founder/CTO, writes: Pixmantec applaud the OpenRAW initiative. Hopefully, camera manufacturers will soon appreciate what can be gained from publishing the specifications for their proprietary RAW file formats and eventually converge towards open standards for RAW file encoding. Supporting present and future developers in this way will encourage that RAW files are treated in a permissible way, promote innovation, offer more choices for the end-user and help to oppose the widespread digital amnesia in the years ahead as present day technology becomes obsolete.
Irfan Skiljan Product: Irfanview	Irfan Skiljan, IrfanView Author, writes: It is a nightmare for every developer to decode undocumented file formats. Specially if the format is changing with each camera model. The SDKs from camera manufacturers are usually not up to date, buggy, slow, badly documented and contain a large number of 'required' DLLs. It makes no sense to include the SDK of each camera manufacturer into the own distribution. The world needs small and easy software, not such monsters. Dave Coffin is showing how this can work. Thanks David!
Digital Domain Inc. Product: QImage	Michael Chaney, Founder, writes: As one of the first developers to reverse engineer and support decoding of D1 raw images, I thought my work on the D1 would be a "stop gap" measure to give people access to raw files while the industry came to some agreement on raw image formats. I never expected that no standard would ever be developed and that each new model camera would have its own proprietary raw file format. As a developer, I stopped supporting any new raw formats in my best selling Qimage software in order to concentrate on more important tasks as the list of new camera models (and raw formats) grew exponentially over time. I certainly support the Open Raw concept and would encourage camera manufacturers to go one step further by sitting down and developing an international standard (similar to TIFF) for raw images and to use that format as the native storage format on the memory card so that intermediate conversions are not required. Having open specs will certainly help but to really reduce programmer "busy work", a standard raw file format needs to be developed and used across multiple manufacturers.
Leo Davidson Product: Directory Opus	Leo Davidson, Plugin Author, writes: I fully support the idea of open documentation for all RAW image formats. The camera makers are doing their own customers a disservice by making it difficult for the software industry to provide tools which manage and manipulate their closed image formats. It is insane that we have to resort to reverse engineering when we are effectively adding value to the camera makers' customers. Camera makers should consider that the more they document their formats the more they will be supported by a vast range of third party software. This surely justifies the small financial cost of tidying up and publishing format specification documents, which I cannot believe do not exist already. The companies who do this sooner will gain a competitive advantage over those who do it later because what you can do with a photo after it's taken by a camera is almost as important as the process of taking it in the first place. I wrote the free RAW plugin for Directory Opus (a Windows file manager made by GP Software) in my spare time, and I was lucky enough to have Dave Coffin's excellent work to base mine on, but writing the plugin was still far more difficult than it should have been. Documentation on the image formats would have helped a great deal.
DxO Labs Product: DxO Optics Pro for Macintosh and Windows	Luc Marin, Vice-President Photography, writes: DxO Labs fully endorses the goals of the OpenRaw initiative. Our company has demonstrated in its brief history that there remains great scope for innovation in the digital photography software field and that the distinction between photographic hardware and software is becoming more and more blurred. Realizing the objectives of the OpenRaw project would result in faster innovation, more extensive hardware support, lower development costs and a better user experience. All things which would directly benefit digital photographers around the world. Product:
photools.com Product: IMatch - The digital image management solution	Mario M. Westphal, Owner, writes: photools.com supports the OpenRaw initiative because we develop software for photographers, photo agencies, artists, libraries and others who need to archive and manage large photo libraries on a long-term basis. Image Management is all about reliability and longevity. We don’t think in terms of "product cycles" or "the next camera model". Our customers need to be able to retrieve, display and manipulate their archived photos in three, ten or twenty years from now. Open, well documented and supported standards are an absolute requirement in this area. This includes both the image data and also the metadata stored inside the image. No hardware or software vendor should own these standards or have copyrights/patents on the technology used to store or display digital image data. Only freely accessible image and metadata guarantees archival safety and reliability for photo archives."
ProFotoSoftware Ltd Product: PFS Image Darkroom	Andy Bell, Managing Director, writes: We work very hard to keep our Raw processing and editing software up to date. However, the ever increasing number of Raw formats makes this a challenge, and an error-prone one at that. We're happy that some camera manufacturers provide us with their SDK's. However, using them is not always easy, especially as different areas of these SDKs need to be used depending on the camera model in question. In addition to this, we are concerned that the longevity of some of these formats will not be guaranteed. Granted, this is something that may not have an impact for many years, yet it would be a tragedy if classic images taken today become hard or impossible to access in the future simply because of the diversity of Raw formats. Given the rapid progress that is being made in the field of digital imaging, which shows no signs of abating, the rate at which Raw formats go 'out of date' may be faster than anyone anticipates. Our desire is to provide the best imaging software that we can. It is frustrating to spend a large percentage of our development time developing ways to access all these Raw image formats. We are committed to providing seamless Raw integration into our products, but the day there is just one Raw format to support cannot come quick enough for us.
dpMagic Software Inc. Product: dpMagic	Mikhail Stolpner, Managing Partner, writes: We fully support the goals of the OpenRAW initiative and we believe that publishing RAW formats is eventually beneficial for everyone including photographers, camera manufacturers and software vendors.