RAW digital image format recovery

The RAW files are something like “negative” in ancient film cameras. The main feature of RAW images – they store digital image data just as CCD or CMOS sensor of the digital camera has captured an image. No post processing effects such as sharpening, saturation, and white balance are applied. Sure after transferring files from digital camera to your computer you can do anything you want with these pictures and edit them anyhow.

Many people save their pictures in JPEG file format. It is ok and even good for simple digital photos. But everyone should know that JPEG compression is not very fair. Because JPEG files are being compressed for the price of the quality of digital images. Yes you can even not notice it, but if you try to enlarge you favorite photo to discern detail or print image on the poster for your room, you may be disappointed with digital image quality. Even if you set 100% quality for your JPEG files the will be worse than they could be as saved as RAW files. It is simply impossible to reach lossless quality with JPEG files.

But ok, we can suppose that you are completely satisfied with 100% quality of the JPEG files or you have an option to save your digital images in another lossless file format. There comes another problem: to create more attractive images every digital camera applies different post processing effects to all the images made. Except RAW images of course. Every digital photographer knows – you need different settings for every picture, even if you take an image one by one. So you take an image in the middle of the night and another just in front of the setting sun and both of them got almost same settings and filters applied. Sure you cannot get quality digital image under these circumstances. Quality here means quality of the international glossy magazine. Sure as I said before not everybody and not every time needs such a high quality. But you would better remember this as you taking the "the best shot in your life".

I hope you are now certain of RAW images utility. Let us guide you through most popular RAW file formats.

First of all I should notice that every RAW image is unique since it is almost impossible to create two identical CCD or CMOS sensors. Another interesting thing is that RAW image contains many metadata that is usually lost after editing. So if you see an unedited RAW image you can be sure that a picture is real and nothing was cheated. There are some programs that allow editing RAW meta data fields, but it is still too hard to fabricate original RAW image. Most of famous and worldwide known companies that produce digital cameras use their own RAW file formats. SoftAmbulance Photo Undelete is able to recover all the formats described below.

Canon uses two of them — CRW (Canon Digital Camera Raw Image Format) and CR2 (Canon Digital Camera Raw Image Format version 2.0)
CRW is a RAW image format for some older Canon digital cameras. It just stores the data as it comes directly from the CMOS detector in the camera. Also it can contain some text information about the picture and conditions in the camera when the picture was taken. The text information is organized by EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) specification to ease exchange and printing of the digital images.
CR2 (Canon Digital Camera Raw Image Format version 2.0) file format is based on the TIFF image standard. These RAW files can also contain text information about the picture and conditions in the camera when the picture was taken as CRW do. Viewers will display these EXIF metadata.

SRF (Sony DSC-F828 Raw Image File). CCD-Sensor RAW Data File from Sony DSC-F828 8 megapixel digital camera. Adobe Photoshop CS with Camera-RAW-Plug-In v2.2 can open and edit this RAW file type.

Nikon uses NEF (Nikon Digital SLR Camera Raw Image File) as his RAW image file format. Mostly these files contain the data as it comes directly from the CCD detector in the camera.

RAF (Fuji CCD-RAW Graphic File) used by Fuji company it also contains EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) information is within the file along with the image. Some graphics programs are starting to recognize this RAW format; e.g., Qimage, Thumbnails for Fuji, and others.

MRW (Minolta Diamage Raw Image File) Raw image file format used for some Minolta digital cameras. Minolta RAW images are usually the data as it comes directly from the CMOS detector in the digital camera. MRW also supports EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) extension to store additional information about conditions and settings conditions in the camera when the picture was taken.

BAY (Kodak/Roper Bayer Picture Sequence) is a Kodak RAW file format. A quite specific Kodak picture format used by some high speed video cameras such as Kodak HRC-1000.

X3F (Sigma Camera RAW Picture File). These file format is used by SIGMA Photo Pro software provided with different cameras to download and manipulate the photos. The Foveon X3 direct image sensor captures all three colors at every pixel location and requires special software to manipulate the RAW files.

ORF - Descent 3 Outrage Room Format.

RAW - Image Alchemy HSI Temporary Raw Bitmap.

Here we have created a list of most popular digital cameras that are supported by SoftAmbulance Photo Undelete.

SoftAmbulance Photo Undelete is build as advanced but fully automated easy-to-use product that is able to recover the entire described above file formats.