What software can process Canon RAW files, and do Canon cameras record RAW video?
Asked 3/25/2011
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I’m shooting Canon RAW stills (.CRW/.CR2; I may also convert/archive as DNG) and want to know what software can handle a full RAW workflow. I’m looking for tools that can do tasks such as noise reduction, hot/false pixel correction, demosaicing, white balance and color correction, sharpening, lens distortion/vignetting/chromatic aberration correction, gamma/contrast adjustments, and possibly deblurring, with export to standard output formats.
Would Adobe Photoshop plus Lightroom cover most of this, or is other software needed?
Also, can any Canon camera capture RAW video, or is RAW limited to still images?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
15y ago
2 Answers
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First off, I do not believe there are any Canon cameras that produce a DNG directly. You would need to convert your .CRW/.CR2 files to DNG if thats what you want to store/archive your images.
As for the feature requests:
- I do not believe there is any single tool that does everything you are asking for. I am a heavy Lightroom + Photoshop user, and as far as I know, those two support the following:
- Noise Removal: Lightroom 3.x has amazing noise removal capabilities, far superior to any other product outside of a custom deconvolution algorithm. You can apply judicious luminance noise reduction, and maximum color noise reduction, and get near perfect results. Lightroom 3.x's noise management tools can easily correct for stuck/hot/false pixels, and it usually doesn't need that much correction to eliminate them.
- Lens distortion correction: Lightroom 3.x also brings lens profiles to the table. There is a pretty large out-of-the-box library of profiles for common lenses from Canon. It is also possible to create your own profiles for other lenses. This feature can also remove color fringing, as well as correct for a variety of other optical aberrations.
- Color & Exposure tuning: Both Lightroom and Photoshop w/ ACR offer extensive tools for color correction, white balance (automatic, preset, or selected from pixels in the image), exposure control (exposure, highlight recovery, black level/clamping, and fill light adjustment), contrast/brightness control, as well as vibrancy/saturation control (either overall, or for several key color channels.)
- Vignetting: Lightroom has some very convenient vignette tools that allow you to either correct for mechanical vignetting, or add your own post-crop vignetting for artistic effect.
- Image sharpening: Photoshop has a fairly extensive set of features that can help with image sharpening, including the Unsharp mask, noise-based sharpening, and the ability to use layers and masks to achieve various forms of sharpening or contrast enhancement.
- Debayering: I think you are referring to demosaicing here, in which case when working a RAW file in Lightroom or Photoshop+ACR, this is done automatically for you when you save to a non-RAW format. Generally, RAW editors simply apply your edits in a non-destructive fasion directly over the raw bayer pixel information, and only demosaic upon final output to print or another image format. If you want more control over the demosaicing algorithm, you might look into some OSS programs based on DCRAW. Another tool that offers some useful low-level demosaic tuning is Deep Sky Stacker, an astrophotography stacking tool.
- Color space conversion: Photoshop is an excellent tool for color management. It does not directly support YUV, as far as I know, however it does support editing in Lab* space. I am less familiar with YUV space, however I do know that it is similar to Lab space as both are Limunance/Chrominance color spaces. You can definitely save to .BMP format, as well as .TIFF or even .PSD if you need to store more than just pixel information. You may have to look at custom file format plugins to save to a .YUV file, or look into third party/OSS programs to handle YUV space editing.
- RAW video capture is a very new concept. I do not believe that any off-the-shelf DSLR cameras support RAW video capture yet. The rumormill has it that the Canon 5D III or Canon 1Ds IV will be the first DSLR to offer full-frame RAW video recording...however it is just rumors at the moment. Canon has supposedly demonstrated prototype full-frame RAW video in Europe somewhere, however I have not seen any real evidence of this yet.
Originally by user124. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user124
15y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Photoshop + Lightroom (or Adobe Camera Raw + Photoshop) will cover most of a normal Canon RAW still-photo workflow: demosaicing, white balance, color correction, noise reduction, sharpening, lens corrections, vignetting/chromatic aberration correction, tone/gamma/contrast adjustments, and export to common image formats.
However, there generally isn’t one single RAW editor that exposes every low-level operation on your list as separate controls. Some items may require Photoshop actions/scripts or other specialist tools, and deblurring is limited—Photoshop sharpening may help, but true blur recovery is situation-dependent.
Also, Canon cameras generally do not write DNG directly; Canon RAW is typically CRW/CR2 (and later CR3), and DNG is usually created by conversion afterward.
For RAW video: based on the answers provided, Canon cameras do not normally offer RAW video capture in standard operation. RAW is essentially limited to still images unless unofficial firmware hacks are involved, which are not standard supported features.
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