Fraser Speirs – If your proprietary RAW workflow dies

Fraser Speirs – If your proprietary RAW workflow dies:

My photography, however, is another story and it rather scares the pants off me when I think about it too much. I have hundreds of gigabytes and tens of thousands of images on my hard drive, all of which represent precious memories and some of which are pretty good photographs in their own right. Pictures of my children’s births, their first birthdays, family holidays, great trips I’ve taken, places I’ve been and so on. Years of my life in visual form.

But all of that is locked into proprietary formats. All of it. Firstly, the RAW files are Canon CR2 files from an EOS 350D and a 30D. That’s the first thing that scares me. What happens when the 30D is a twenty-five-year-old camera? I’ll only be in my early 50s when that situation arises and hopefully still doing a lot of photography. What will the computers and operating systems look like in the year 2032? Is Apple really committing to build a RAW decoder for the 30D into every future version of Mac OS X, Mac OS XI and the new-for-2030 A.D. Mac OS XII? What if Apple ’starts over’ again with another OS once X has seen better days? Will they build RAW converters for prehistoric digital cameras?

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So that’s just the RAW files themselves. I’m also locked into Aperture. I’m not locked in through metadata, but I am locked in through Aperture’s proprietary database of all the image adjustments I’ve made to each of my photos. This concern isn’t even one for the future. It’s one for right now. If I wanted to, how would I take all my RAW masters and move to Lightroom, preserving the edits I’ve made in Aperture and keeping all of those edits non-destructive? I simply don’t think this can be done today.

On the other hand, this just doesn’t bother me all that much — not nearly as much as data loss of the bits on disk does.

I’m not minimizing the issue, but I think people are looking at it the wrong way to a degree. There seems to be this thought that you should be able to move a post-processed image from one application to another, and on the other side, it’ll still be the same post-processed image. I frankly don’t think that’s a completely rational thing to expect even from one release of Aperture to another, much less from one app to another. There are so many variables here — including bugs and fixes to the Raw processor or the Aperture application itself — that even if you don’t change a thing, you might not get the same picture (heck, there are even going to be subtle changes in how jpegs get processed on export; it gets really ugly really fast if you let it get to you).

Now, this wasn’t necessarily very different in the wet-lab days — reproducibility of creating a print in a darkroom has similar problems. Depending on how particular you are, a favorite print could be seriously impacted by a change in the chemicals used for developing, or by a manufacturer discontinuing a favorite paper. At least in the digital world, you don’t need to worry about your original negative being the ONLY copy — backing up the RAW file means never having to say it’s missing. But everything from there down is up for grabs to some degree. But then, so was wet chemistry.

I”m not at all worried about losing access to the RAW files. I’m not particularly worried about losing Aperture (I am getting increasingly impatient waiting for Aperture 2.0, though, and I find myself thinking about how nice it’d be to have a workflow that has access to some of the REALLY NICE Photoshop filters (like some of the third party sharpening tools) without bouncing back and forth from Aperture to Photoshop. Gotta say if Aperture 2.0 doesn’t have capability to run Photoshop filters or a good plug-in interface to allow those developers to build for Aperture as well (and the evangelism to get them to DO IT), I’m going to have a tough call on my hands. But that’s a different discussion for a different time.

My view on this is that if I move my images from Aperture to some other processing environment, I am most likely going to want to reprocess them in the new workflow, not simply import what I did in Aperture and expect it to work right. My rationale for this is simple: I’m moving to this new environment. Heck, I expect to do that for whatever Apple’s “Raw processor 2.0″ or 1.2 or whatever it is when they update it. None of this is etched in stone, even within Aperture over time.

If this worries you, then you shouldn’t be thinking about moving the edits to a new environment. You should be thinking in terms of making sure that whatever future environment you have works with your “negative” (i.e., the RAW image), and if you want to guarantee an unchanged final image, you need to export it into an immutable format and not depend on Aperture or any other environment to not create changes down the road. To me, that means exporting the “final” image into uncompressed TIFF, and in all honesty, if/when I do move from Aperture to something else, I won’t do it by trying to preserve the Aperture edit metadata, I’ll do it by moving the RAW images into my new environment, and scripting an export of uncompressed TIFF of any processed image I want to guarantee to be preserved unchanged. That’s really the only way to do this — and then when I want to update an image, start from scratch in the new environment — and then save the final as uncompressed TIFF again.

I think the geek in us would love a world where everything interacts perfectly and you can move from application to application easily with reliability and no data loss; in the real world, that’s not going to happen. What can happen, though, is that you can guarantee easy access to the “negative” and the “final print”; the best way to do that isn’t by mucking with meta-data and Aperture internals, but by using standar formats we can feel comfortable will survive or be convertable from — and RAW formats qualify (when they go obsolete, there are enough images stored in them that there will be conversion tools when we need them), and TIFF files.

This is an important issue to think about; it’s not, however, an issue you should allow yourself to OVER think. the proper way to preserve your work here is to preserve the source and the result, not all of the pieces in the middle. Ultimately, they don’t matter — because if you decide you want to go in and rework an image, you’re going to rework it by starting over in the new (hopefully improved) environment. Those middle bits just don’t matter that much in that situation, so focus on making sure you keep copies of the result once you hit a form you consider “done”, and simply use the result until you think you can try again and do better….

Update: James Davidson chimes in, with a similar opinion to mine. And one of the best comments I’ve seen on the subject down in his comments: RAW is not an archival format. Very true.

Baking Copies of your Work – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog:

So what is one to do if they perfectly tweak an image to their liking and want to keep it for posterity? At this point, the only sane thing to do is to bake—my pet term for export—a TIFF or PSD file, preferably in 16-bit format. This will ensure that you can keep your currently processed image no matter what happens in the future with your choice of tools. Of course, now you have another file to manage. And that becomes another problem.

Maybe DNG could help us out with this. It’s already possible to include multiple representations of RAW data in a DNG file. Maybe if the keepers of the DNG spec were to add an ability to include “snapshots” in TIFF or PSD format into a DNG, we could package our processed versions of a photograph together with its RAW data in such a way that could survive the test of time in one handy package. That way, even if you move from Lightroom to SuperDeluxRAWTool in the future, you can always access how your photos looked when you made your edits in late 2007.

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