Photographer Juergen Specht says, “You wrote about the Nikon encryption issue on BoingBoing, but the problem is much bigger, so we founded the OpenRAW project.” Here’s a snip from the group’s launch statement:
Digital technology is revolutionizing the photography industry, and an emerging part of that technology is the set of RAW camera file formats. Most professional photographers prefer using RAW image capture because it offers the highest quality and the greatest creative control.
The grassroots OpenRAW group arose out of photographers’ frustration with camera manufacturers’ refusal to openly document their proprietary RAW file formats. That lack of file format information inhibits innovation, limits image processing choices, and endangers the long-term accessibility of millions of photographs. The goal of the new website is to obtain complete documentation by manufacturers of their RAW file formats.
“Our primary strategy is to educate the public and the manufacturers,” said Juergen Specht, the Japan-based German photographer who is spearheading the OpenRAW group. Specht also founded the highly regarded D1scussion mailing list for Nikon dSLR photographers, and hosts a similar 1Dscussion group for Canon photographers. Specht continued, “Once photographers understand what’s at stake, and once digital camera manufacturers understand how their profitability will be enhanced by the release of the RAW file format specifications, our goals will be realized.”
Link to press release (which explains why Sprecht and his colleagues feel that RAW file formats are so important), and link to project website.
Previously on BB: Nikon responds to RAW / DRM / Adobe debacle, Space Shuttle photos with Nikon D2X
Update: BB reader Richard Quinn says:
Relating to your recent coverage of Nikon’s white balance encryption, a l337 hack0r has created a nice tool to decipher the protection. So much for lame encryption :)
And BB reader James says:
There’s one thing to remember with all this guffaw over Nikon’s ‘encryption’ of the white balance data in the NEF format and that’s that all this commotion has arisen from an Adobe press release. Adobe have their own agenda to push as they’re having difficulty getting any manufacturers to support their own ‘RAW’ format DNG (Link).
I haven’t looked at the ‘encryption’ scheme either but from what I’ve heard it’s simply an obfuscated lookup table that’s perhaps not as simple as it used to be. Although the change looks suspicious we’d be cautious to remember Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”.
BB reader Tom responds:
The DMCA doesn’t contain an exception for weak crypto. It does contain an exception for interoperability, but Adobe made clear in their treatment of Dmitry Sklyarov that they think it’s meaningless; at least they’re being consistent. For their part, Nikon’s public statements have made clear that the NEF format is indeed designed to force photographers to use Nikon’s software.
BB reader Richard Earney says:
Some of the statements being added to Boing Boing about this Nikon-DRM flap are just plain wrong. [Responding to BB reader James’ comments above,] Adobe has **not** released a press release about this situation. It was simply a statement in response to a users requesting swift ACR support for the D2X made by Thomas Knoll (of Adobe) on the Adobe Users-to-Users forum.
Thomas alerted users that support for the D2X would not be 100% perfect because Nikon has encrypted the “As Shot” Auto White Balance facility – therefore Camera RAW will not read it – users will have to fiddle to get the same results. Chances are they would already. His *main* concern was that he *could* decrypt the info – but was worried that doing so would leave Adobe open to legal action by Nikon under the DCMA.
Many sources have said that the settings *are* encrypted, but it is weak and relatively simple to crack. To do so leads to the same possibility of legal action – though Bibble and DCRAW (RAW converters) have already gone own that route.