Often likened to a ‘digital negative,’ a RAW image is the native image format for a growing number of quality digital cameras. Because of the camera-specific nature of RAW files, they are not supported natively within Microsoft Windows. As a result, photographers shooting RAW have not been able to take advantage of the built-in features provided in Windows XP for viewing, organizing, and printing RAW photos--until now.
After installing the Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer Powertoy for Windows XP you will be able to view, organize, and print photos captured in RAW image formats from supported Canon and Nikon digital cameras.
This software offers the following benefits to digital photographers:
Download: Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer | 47.7MB
News source: Microsoft.com
After installing the Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer Powertoy for Windows XP you will be able to view, organize, and print photos captured in RAW image formats from supported Canon and Nikon digital cameras.
This software offers the following benefits to digital photographers:
- High image quality. This software uses the camera vendors' own processing libraries to provide the highest possible image fidelity for RAW images.
- Superior color fidelity. Windows Image Color Management (ICM) is used to render images in the correct color space as determined by the photographer when the image was captured.
- Familiar user experience. This software builds on the familiar Windows user experience and requires little or no learning curve.
- Performance tuned for rapid previews. The software uses background processing and other techniques to ensure a good preview experience even for large images.
Download: Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer | 47.7MB News source: Microsoft.com
What's New: (continued)
DivX Player:
- Features the latest DivX decoder for enhanced quality and performance
- Integrates support for DivX media file playback
- Incorporates enhanced HD playback capability
DivX Codec
- Offers up to 40% better quality and compression than the DivX 5 codec.
- Features enhanced playback performance and quality
- Adds DivX media file playback support to all popular media players
The DivX® codec is included in all DivX bundles. The DivX Pro™ codec is included in the DivX Create Bundle.
Full version: A complete download package containing the PowerToy software along with version 1.1 of the Microsoft .NET redistributable software. This is approximately 47Mb in size.
Lite version: A "lite" download package containing the PowerToy software only. This package is approximately 6Mb in size.
6mb, that sounds a whole lot better....
There's a whitepaper with plenty of screenshots...
Whitepaper
http://www.photo.net/learn/raw/
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/RAW-file-format.htm
Imagine that you were a photographer working with film, some time during the 20th century. Many of us don't have to make too great an effort to imagine this, because we were.
You shot your transparency or negative film, had them processed (or processed them yourself), made your prints, and then filed the negatives safely away in acid free storage boxes, so that the next time you or your clients needed a print the negatives were be safely available.
And, sure enough, whenever needed – even ten or twenty years later, we'd go back to our negatives, put them in the enlarger, and make a new print. And often, because over the intervening time our darkroom skills had advanced, or maybe because we had a new enlarger or we were using an improved paper or chemistry, our new prints turned out to be superior to what we had been able to produce before.
Now, imagine the following scenario. We retrieve our files, find the negative or slide that we want to reprint, and then discover that it has become opaque. The image is gone or otherwise inaccessible. We still have the piece of film that originally went though the camera, but the image itself cannot be accessed!
Good Lord – what could have happened? Well, imagine if the answer was that the company that made your original roll of film had manufactured it so that the film only fit into one type of enlarger, and that those enlargers aren't being made anymore. Or that the chemical properties of the dyes used to make that roll of color film were such that they would only interact to form an image with matching dyes in a printing paper from that same company; but – sorry, that company was sold a few years ago and the new owners decided to stop making that type of paper.
Totally unacceptable of course. But really, this is a pretty far-fetched scenario – isn't it?
No. Actually it isn't, because this is exactly the situation that we now face with our digital camera's RAW files. Let's see if we can understand what's going on and why the current situation has come to a head.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/r.../raw-flaw.shtml
Wich is quite stupid for microsoft to do, because adobe has an open project wich combines all manufacturers & allows you to interpret basically all current raw formats, as well as convert then to DNG wich they propose as a digital universal negative format!
Microsoft could have justc used theyr resources. But then again if they support DNG, you can just download ADOBE's DNG converter, wich is free of course, & convert all your raw's to DNG & probably remain safe that your inages will always be viewable!
it's intergrated with Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1
http://www.fixit-4u.net/mrk/root/photos/windows_raw_preview.png
Works in IE6, but not FF
No need to download this huge file just for thumbnails preview.
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