Redmond, Washington — After years of having to adopt third-party solutions to manage their RAW image sets, those with immense love for photography can now rejoice, as software behemoth Microsoft, over the weekend released Camera Codec Pack that supports more than 120 RAW file formats from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Pentax, Leica, Minolta, Panasonic and Epson, from within Windows Explorer as well as Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011.
It just seems too much to take for getting pristine quality images. If you use the RAW image format to take photographs and upload them onto a Windows based machine, DSLR users with Windows PCs will be pleased to know that Microsoft last week unfurled a new updated called the Camera Codec Pack, that delivers RAW files support for Windows.
According to an official Windows Live blog post, the news looks pretty promising for directly viewing images in the RAW format by just connecting the DSLR camera to the computer, with the installation of a simple codec from Microsoft, however, the user, on connecting his DSLR onto his computer to view a RAW image will get a notification, wherein he will be asked to download the Microsoft Camera Codec Pack from the Download page.
The Microsoft Camera Codec Pack
“This latest release unfurls the power of every photo on your computer so that your PC is capable of organizing, viewing and editing your digital memories, whether they were shot with a camera phone, point-and-shoot camera, or a higher end DSLR,” said Brad Weed, Group Program Manager, Windows Live.
mage Courtesy: (Geeky-Gadgets.com/)
Previously, Windows has never extended support for RAW file format used in most of todays DLSR camera’s. This forced users to adopt third party applications that enabled them to view and edit the files. RAW files are so named because they are not yet processed and therefore are not ready to be printed or be edited with a bitmap graphics editor.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with raw format, it is the uncompressed output from each of the original pixels on the camera’s image sensors. RAW files, often dubbed as digital negatives, contains all the data that a camera captures electronically. That data is usually processed in some way to produce a viewable image, a bit like film negatives need processing to create prints.
Besides, many photography fans prefer shooting with a RAW format because 1) those files include much more data than a JPG and 2) RAW gives them greater control over what the final image will look like, much like doing your own darkroom work instead of sending film out to be processed.
“Managing raw images on Windows has not always been easy,” accepted Weed, in a blog post.
Besides presenting viewing capability of RAW image files, the new codec pack also enables Windows Live Photo Gallery to edit these RAW images, without modifying the original: “Photo Gallery will also support editing copies of your raw images. We know your originals are precious, so if you want to alter a raw image, Photo Gallery makes a copy of the raw original and converts it to either JPEG or the far superior JPEG-XR (or HD Photo) format. With JPEG-XR, all of the quality of the raw original is there so you can fine-tune different editing effects.”
In addition, after installing the codec pack the mentioned OSes will enable RAW files to be viewed in Windows Explorer, while Windows Live Photo Gallery will be able view RAW images and will enable users to edit copies of those pictures.
With the new codec pack, Windows will now support viewing and editing a wide range of photo file formats including raw, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and more.
Also, the new codec pack includes support for more than 120 cameras, whose files can be viewed without having to be converted first. The Microsoft Camera Codec Pack 16.0.0652.0621 is available here, and both comes in 32-bit and 64-bit variants, and can be used on Windows Vista, Windows 7.
Watch the quick video below for a great overview of the Microsoft Camera Codec Pack and how it works with Windows Live Photo Gallery:
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