adobe.digital.negative

Subject: Notes on NEF and WDP (Windows Media Photo) news

Nikon have announced Capture NX, which implies an extended role for NEF.
Microsoft have announced Windows Media Photo, for lossy & lossless images.

I've tried to make sense of the various announcements, to see how these formats compare with familiar formats such as DNG, TIFF, JPEG, etc. Don't rely on my interpretation!

NEF - "Nikon Electronic Format"

It is the news about NX that is suggesting an extended role of NEF. NX appears to be one of the new-style products like Aperture and Lightroom, offering a new user interface paradigm and lots of non-destructive editing. I'll talk about NEF rather than NX. See:

Apparently, you can open any JPEG or TIFF in NX and save them as Nikon raw images in the NEF format. NEF files can include raw data or regular TIFF-like data. In addition, Nikon can put its edit list (a small XML file) directly into the NEF format.

People will ask: why are Nikon putting so many different roles into one file format with one extension? (NEF is already used for images from Nikon scanners). I think a more interesting question is: why didn't Adobe do the same?

In September 2004, I'm sure Adobe could have launched "Super-TIFF", as an extended version of the familiar TIFF (6.0), to act as a common raw format as well. Super-TIFF would have had both the familiar TIFF format, and the current capability of DNG, as proper subsets. I find it hard to imagine that Adobe didn't consider this.

This would have confused the industry. Part of the TIFF brand is "familiarity" and "stability", with so many products supporting it. Super-TIFF might be seen as destabilising that part of the industry. Super-TIFF doesn't SOUND like the sort of thing you want in your camera, because it has too much "baggage", albeit optional, such as CMYK, etc! Going for a new specialised format gave the opportunity to build a focused brand, with words like "Digital Negative" and the film-frame logo convincing people that they knew what DNG was about.

I suspect the reasons Adobe created a separate format were more marketing reasons than technical ones. And I suspect that, with totally different marketing objectives, and reduced historical constraints, Nikon found it convenient and logical to go for "Super-NEF".

Technically, I see little problem in theory with what Nikon are doing. NEF is based on TIFF anyway. In fact, I believe it is based in ISO's TIFF/EP, which was based on TIFF. Compare this with DNG, which is also based on TIFF and TIFF/EP, can hold JPEGs within it, and also holds an edit list based on XML, (XMP, in fact). There are probably more similarities than differences between the Nikon and Adobe formats. (I wonder if Adobe could create Super-TIFF overnight, using copy-and-paste, if they wanted to?)

WDP - "Windows Media Photo" (hm!)

In brief, WDP covers the roles of TIFF, JPEG, JPEG2000, etc, but not raw imaging. In other words, lossless or lossy RGB and CMYK digital images, and even more, but nothing to support colour filter arrays, hence no way of holding raw sensor data. See:

Windows Media Photo is a new file format for continuous-tone still images that surpasses the limitations of existing image formats. Windows Media Photo supports a wide range of features including:
- Multiple color formats for display or print
- Fixed or floating point, high-dynamic-range image encoding
- Lossless or high-quality lossy compression
- Extremely efficient decoding for multiple resolutions and sub-regions
- Minimal overhead for format conversion or transformations during decoding
Windows Media Photo delivers a lightweight, high-performance algorithm with a small memory footprint that enables practical, in-device encoding and decoding.

I don't think Microsoft are intending WDP to be a "raw file format" competitor to DNG. (Certainly not with this vers

Reply