Support for the RAW Format

Zoner Photo Studio supports work with RAW and related formats. These formats are specific to the world of professional and semi-professional cameras. Files in such formats contain unprocessed (“raw”) values obtained straight from the camera’s sensors. If you as a user want to obtain an actual picture from these values, you must use a special program capable of replacing the RAW converter that would normally be used in the camera itself. That is: a program that can interpolate the sensor values, perform white balance, set the hue, saturation, and luminosity values, control sharpness, convert to 8-bit color, and offer exposure adjustment.

The advantage of obtaining photographs from the RAW format directly is that you can adjust all of these settings your way - not “the camera’s way” - before the first time the file is saved to a lossy format. The disadvantage is that finding programs capable of work with RAW is hard, because making programs work with RAW is hard: each manufacturer uses a different method of recording RAW (and some even use a different method from model to model), and no camera manufacturer to date has made “their” RAW format public.

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

CRW, CR2	Canon RAW
MRW	Minolta RAW
NEF	Nikon RAW
ORF	Olympus RAW
PEF	Pentax RAW
DNG	Digital Negative (Adobe)

Converting data from Canon RAW

Zoner Photo Studio includes Canon's own RAW conversion libraries, and can use them to process (convert, “develop”) RAW files from Canon cameras - these files have the CRW, CR2, or sometimes TIF extension. When converting these files, you can output to JPEG or TIF files with an 8-bit color depth, or TIFF files with a 16-bit color depth. Zoner Photo Studio supports further editing for 8-bit images only, however. But for the vast majority of cases, this is sufficient.

The conversion dialog offers a variety of conversion settings. By default, they are set to the values that were set in the camera when the picture was taken. Next to the White balance dropdown, there is a slider called Lighting and an eyedropper button that you can use to set the intended white/gray color by clicking a point of that color in the picture. You can use the other settings to strengthen or tone down the picture’s color elements. You can also assign the sRGB or AdobeRGB color space to the image.

Models Where ZPS Supports Canon RAW Files

Full support for processing RAW data is offered for the following models of Canon cameras:

PowerShot S30, PowerShot S40
PowerShot S45, PowerShot S50, PowerShot S60, PowerShot S70
PowerShot G1, PowerShot G2, PowerShot G3, PowerShot G5
PowerShot G6
PowerShot Pro90 IS, PowerShot Pro1
EOS-1D, EOS-1Ds, EOS D30, EOS D60, EOS 10D
EOS Kiss Digital, EOS Digital Rebel, EOS 300D
EOS-1D Mark II, EOS 20D, EOS-1Ds Mark II
EOS Kiss Digital N, EOS Digital Rebel XT, EOS 350D

Overview of all supported Canon cameras...