I’ve recently noticed that one of the downloadable modules is for the Minolta A2.
My dad had one of these. I have a number of MRW (Minolta raw) files.
When I use an EXIF tool to examine these files I see
Make: Konica Minolta Camera, Inc.
Model: DiMAGE A2
Software: DiMAGE A2 Ver.1.14
Photolab does not recognize these. When in ‘Customize’ mode, the metadata is blank, excepting pixel dimensions (6016 x 4016).
Is there any way I can get Photolab to recognize these?
I understand it’s an old camera, but my dad has passed away and there are a few of these I’d like to share with the family in as best quality as I can.
That said, I’m not expecting a lot. As best as I can tell MRW files are not TIFF type container files, but if there’s a module I’d like to give it a shot…
Thanks!
I had and used a DiMAGE A2 for a number of years. DxO has supported optical corrections for JPG images nearly from the time the camera was introduced in 2004 (the optical corrections work great), but has never supported MRW RAW files. (For years, I had hoped it would, but that never happened. After I realized that MRW was unlikely to be supported, I shot exclusively in JPG.)
In many ways, it was a camera ahead of its time (20-200mm zoom equivalent, convenient size for travel, etc.) but it was of course handicapped by its tiny 8MP sensor. But given the 8MP image size the images look pretty good when there was adequate lighting.
Several other programs will open MRW files [the DiMAGE Viewer as @andreP notes, Adobe products (including Photoshop),
Affinity Photo 2, and Topaz Sharpen AI (my version is 4.10)]. So you should be able to handle the A2 images with one or more programs. It’s a shame DxO doesn’t support MRW files, as I much prefer PhotoLab to the alternatives. The DxO Viewpoint module can be used with Photolab/Lightroom to provide optical corrections for A2 MRW images (I just discovered this, but haven’t tried it yet).
But it’s TIFF-like, and its raw data can be read by PhotoLab since v1.0 and LibRaw. However, the module database (CAFlist.db on Win) has only one row in Modules table with Body=‘MinoltaA2’, and it has NULL values for lens_id and lens_name fields.
Either A2 MRW metadata does not contain lens info (which you can check with exiftool), or PL does not read it even if it exists, or DxO didn’t take any lens measurements for lenses. You are left then with manual corrections, with unavailable Lens Sharpness Optimization.
I’ve just discovered that if I change the file extension of MRW to JPG, PL then can read some of the EXIF data (shot date, white balance, software version, but not model).
Guess I have to treat these all like JPGs then…
A better tool to read EXIF and other metadata would be ExifTool. If you don’t want to deal with the ExifTool command line, programs like Irfanview https://www.irfanview.com/ will let you look at the metadata (Image/Information) and you don’t need to change the file extension to do this.
I tried to open a .mrw file in PhotoLab 9 Develop after renaming the extension to .jpg, but it refused to open it, as I expected.