Press Release: Nikon and Adobe Begin Talks About Standards


Adobe's Release: Adobe and Nikon are both enthusiastic about the continued innovation of digital imaging technology. Both companies recognize that ongoing advancement in current RAW formats is bringing a new level of control, precision, and quality to the photography community and are excited about helping to foster that innovation.

Adobe is committed to working with Nikon to ensure that our common customers have an excellent experience when using Nikon cameras with Adobe software, and the company is disappointed that there has been confusion about this in the market. Adobe wants to ensure that our common customers get the very best quality from their photos when using our products together.
Nikon has endeavored to develop the raw image concept for digital photographers through its Nikon Electronic Format (NEF) file, supporting software and compatible system components. Nikon envisions its role as an innovator, and values its participation within the industry’s organizations, so that the future for RAW images will expand in importance and acceptance among the market’s photographers.
Nikon believes that the NEF file has provided important image quality through Nikon’s pioneering developments. For the future, Nikon intends to cooperate with Adobe and other industry members in order to pursue its objective of providing images with better quality, convenience and usefulness
to end users.
SOURCE Nikon Inc.
It’s not entirely clear what either the Nikon nor Adobe statements mean at this time. However, Thomas Knoll, primary engineer on Adobe Camera Raw has indicated that Nikon has added a new “mini-SDK which has the sole function of reading the white balance parameters from a NEF file (while still allowing the host application to do its own raw conversion).” He goes on to say that “the upcoming Adobe Camera Raw 3.2 and DNG Converter 3.2 will use this Nikon “mini-SDK” to provide “as shot” white balance support for the Nikon D2X, D2Hs, and D50.” (see the original thread on the Camera Raw User to User Forum)
Camera Raw 3.1 could not decrypt the “As Shot” white balance metadata for the Nikon D2X, D2Hs, and D50 cameras. However, DNG Converter 3.1 did migrate the encrypted white balance metadata to DNGs made from those cameras’ raw files.

Posted: Tue - September 6, 2005 at 08:12 AM          

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