Lossless ARW limitations are the nonsense!

DxO PhotoLab
1

Hello,

I will write straightforwardly because I am so frustrated and angry with the behavior of your software.
I hope I will find here the same colleagues who are frustrated with an idiotic decision of the DxO crew to force disable the support of Sony’s compressed M and S RAW despite they support full-sized lossless.

I have already talked with the support, but got a ridiculous answer which sounds like a kindergarten or from the religious sect “this is not a real RAW” (I wonder what our Japanese friends think on this) and “CaptureOne doesn’t do that precise processing like us”. At least CaptureOne does the processing, and if C1 could also offer that good noise removal, then DxO wouldn’t be needed at all! Probably yes, something is not as good as DxO did, but I can edit the photo, edit the photo, and post it to Instagram/Flickr! Meanwhile, all that DxO does “this image cannot be processed”! I don’t care about some phantom precision your staff talk about if I can’t get anything at all!

Explaining you a situation - you are in Austria, in the middle of Styria, mountains and forests, you took 2 memory cards - 256 and 128GB. Racing weekend goes well, lot’s of great opportunities for photos… and you are starting to be running out of memory… You have two options: keep shooting like it is, or, oh, thank you unknown Sony engineer, let’s use RAW lossless compression. 14mp also would be enough since 300mm is enough from my position… I thought it could be not a problem! 500 shots left remaining, absolutely happy went home before I didn’t open DxO… Because it’s better to shoot “unreal raw” rather than shoot nothing! But no, DxO crew appeared to have some idiotic vision on things, meanwhile, what Adobe and C1 does, DxO can’t! Why do you destroy all the great job you have done with a minor stupidity?

Sony guys are more clever than you and introduced compression of the RAWs. I am on the Sony system since 2014, I have baked thousands of RAWs from A7II, A7RIII, and I have got A7 IV now. Every time I tried to compare I found no real-world difference between them.
It’s the same with the new lossless RAW. And since I have a master’s in telecommunications, I don’t really understand from your perspective what’s the problem to work with the compressed data! It sounds like an idiotic phanatism, like the people who shoot with Fujifilm S5 Pro and nothing different.

Do you damage the data if make the zip??? Was the image resultion redused by camera hardware-software? yes? Was it reduced in photoshop? No! From my perspective you must not care at all what happens on the side before writing the ARW file on the memory card. Real, unreal, Sony (Canon, Nikon, Fuji, even Leica, whatever) decided, then you must work with this.

If we think in the same way, then you must not support in general A7S III at all, because it does internal downsampling from the Quad Bayer sensor…
This is not an exact data from all 48mp sensor physically has, yes?

DxO crew, how do you think, is it better to take photo and have some data lost that in 98% case won’t make any difference , or not to take the picture at all? Do you want to say Sony engineers are idiots?

I call you to remove this artificial limitation on image processing because there are different use cases and not all the photos are done in the studio where everything goes as expected. Please give us a tool that can handle everything and on which we can rely.

I have left with a choice - wain until miracle happens and you fix this or to process it in C1, yes, with way more noise, but already post it to my blog and get excitement from the people. Ugh.

No best regards or liebe grüße for now. Fix this nonsense then I will love you again.

“sega does what nintendon’t”

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1 Like
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Please note that despite the URL of this forum including the term ‘feedback’ this is actually a user forum. DxO are extremely unlikely to respond to your post.

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It is unlikely that DXO responds to any message regardless of the terms the users post might carry.

This is just another example of irritating file opening limitations we have seen so many of during the last years with Photolab that just make Photolab less usable than both Capture One or Lightroom.

One might have believed it should be if a mutual interest to fix these limitations in a dialogue between the user and DXO for the benefit of both the users and the company but instead of having that dialogue we meet just silence, that I have to interpret as a solid lack of interest.

It’s like a big sign is hanging over DXO forums saying “Don’t disturb”

1 Like
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The non-support of mRAW and cRAW formats is a basic data that is documented:

DxO PhotoLab does not support compressed RAW formats such as mRAW or sRAW because these are not true RAW formats, despite the name: in these cases, the processing is applied to the images by the camera, which limits DxO PhotoLab’s range of processing options.

It’s possible for a camera to be supported (RAW included) without its various compression modes:

  • Canon: mRAW and sRAW are not supported, while cRAW is supported.*
  • Nikon: RAW-S.*
  • Sony: mRAW and sRAW are not supported*

You seem to be mixing two different things:

  • Sony’s “lossy” compressed raw format (which was also the only one originally available), corresponding to the full definition of the sensor. It has since been supplemented with an uncompressed raw format, and finally a lossless compressed raw. It should be noted that the “lossy” compressed format has been supported by DxO from the outset.
    DxO takes all these formats into account because they are based on the real definition of the sensor.

  • The Mraw and Craw formats, from Sony, (and others from Canon or Nikon) are not real raw (in the sense that DxO understands it), they are not “zip” type compression, but recomposition of a reduced definition raw file, therefore with the loss of a significant number of photosite values, incompatible with DxO processing, in particular noise processing.

Obviously, you seem to consider 14Mpix lossless compression to be… lossless. Certainly the 14 Mpix are transcribed without loss in the file, but the 14 Mpix are a considerable loss compared to the native definition of the sensor!

If you want to save space on your cards, use Sony’s lossy compressed format (with which the differences are negligible compared to the uncompressed format), in the definition of the sensor.

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While I understand that you are upset – learn from this and check your options BEFORE you go out.
:man_shrugging:

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Personally, I’m using mRAW and sRAW from Nikon Z7 camera with full success as they are “real” RAW not processed by the camera.

It was not the case from other previous Nikon camera which had some mRAW and sRaw not supported as they where not real RAW but interpreted already.

So the issue is not to support compressed RAW but that your camera produce an interpreted RAW which can’t be work as such in PL.

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RTFSP: Read the following support page:

Other than that, this self-inflicted limitation is one of the dumbest decisions DxO took, based on the urge to deliver the best. This feels like having a histogram that deliberately displays values at 0 and 255 values only.

Be helpful instead of “the best”!

1 Like
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One quick question - if you shoot in ordinary, not compressed, RAW format, do those images work in PhotoLab?

If so, maybe you can use some other software to copy your compressed files and save them as non-compressed.

When I watched the detailed video on the Nikon D780, the message was to capture images in standard RAW format, and not anything “special”.

Good luck! …and welcome to the forum!