Support for the RAW Format

Zoner Photo Studio supports work with the RAW format, or, you might say, with the various RAW formats. RAW files are the output from professional and semi-professional digital cameras. It is a set of unprocessed (thus "raw") data obtained directly from the camera sensors. To turn this data into an actual picture, you must use a program that will do the work that would normally be done by the camera itself—that will interpolate sensor values, perform white balancing, and set the picture’s brightness, contrast, hue, and sharpness.

The advantage of working from a camera's output to RAW instead of to JPEG is that you can work do this work as early along the line as possible. Work with RAW is complicated from the standpoint of photo software developers due to camera makers' each using a slightly different RAW (sometimes it even differs among models of one manufacturer) and to the fact that no camera maker has officially publicized "its" RAW format.

RAW Previews

Since the structure of a given RAW file will generally be unknown or at best only partially known, it's not possible to save to RAW. Zoner Photo Studio normally uses an external program named dcraw for decoding RAW files.dcraw. With its help it can support - in the Browser - the loading of thumbnails and EXIF information from the various RAW "sub-formats" for Canon, Minolta, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, Pentax, Fuji, Epson, and Mamiya cameras.

The Browser in Zoner Photo Studio can read in previews and EXIF information from the following RAW formats:

ARW/SR2	Sony RAW Image
CRW/CR2	Canon RAW Image
DNG	Adobe Digital Negative
ERF	Epson RAW Image
KDC	Kodak Digital Camera Image
MEF	Mamiya RAW Image
MRW	Minolta RAW Image
NEF	Nikon RAW Image
ORF	Olympus RAW Image
RAF	Fuji Camera RAW Image
RAW	Digital Camera RAW Image

In the Editor you can then load these pictures at full resolution and full color depth, although without the possibility of modifying RAW conversion settings. ZPS has Canon and Nikon RAW-processing libraries integrated inside of it. These enable the loading of RAW files from cameras by these manufacturers at the same level of quality as, or a better one than, what was achieved when using JPEG files straight from the camera. In this case, RAW’s advantage lies in avoiding JPEG compression and in 16-bit color depth.

Converting Data out of Canon RAW Format

Zoner Photo Studio contains the original Canon libraries, using which you can convert ("develop") RAW files from Canon cameras with the CRW, CR2, or TIF extensions. These conversions can be into the JPEG or TIF format, with 8 bits per pixel, or in TIF format with 16 bits per pixel.

The conversion window lets you fine-tune the conversion process. By default, the settings here match those given by the camera when it took the shot. The white balance control offers, among other options, a Lighting setting and a chance to set an intended neutral color by clicking it with an eyedropper. The other settings can strengthen or weaken the various colors in the picture. You can also set a target sRGB/AdobeRGB color space.

More about supported Canon camera models

Converting data from Adobe DNG

Zoner Photo Studio lets you process RAW files stores in the universal DNG (Digital Negative) format, which is a standardization, of a sort, for the otherwise variegated RAW subformats. To convert ("develop") the data inside, you can use the "demosaicing" method used for interpolating RAW data.

Acquiring data from the DNG format opens the way to converting data from many more RAW formats. This is because specialized convertors exist that can convert data from RAW files into DNG, which can then be processed using Zoner Photo Studio's DNG capabilities. Zoner Photo Studio supports automatic conversion using the free Adobe DNG Converter, which can convert over 150 different RAW subformats.