Canon RAW into ASCII

Hi to all,
does somebody know is it possible (and how) to convert Canon G5 raw format photo into the ASCII file without loosing any information of each pixel? I want to process such photo as a worksheet of numbers.
Thanks,
Missa

not sure i understand. do you want to see your image composed of letters and numbers (ascii art http://aa-project.sourceforge.ne​t/gallery/alfons.png ?) or you want to see the actual data that comprises your image?

I guess you could open it in Notepad, but I'm not sure why. There are some wonderful conversion apps out there. My favorite is RAW Shooter Essentials. Why reinvent the wheel?

Now if you mean you want the binary code straight fron the sensor, that's way beyond me.

4nR wrote:
not sure i understand. do you want to see your image composed of letters and numbers (ascii art http://aa-project.sourceforge.ne​t/gallery/alfons.png ?) or you want to see the actual data that comprises your image?

Thank you for reply. Let me be more precise. I want to use my Canon G5 as detetector of spectra that I mesure. So I need all informations that pixels accept during exposure without any "ironing" such are TIFF or JPEG.

If you convert from RAW to 16 BIT TIFF, you will lose very little (no compression). Maybe a bit because of the (minimal) sharpening that you have to select, but certainly not as much as JPG.

Best regards,
Andy

You might look at Canon's SDK, which will provide you with the format for the RAW data:
http://consumer.usa.ca​non.com …=222&modelid=92​13&id=3464

That's probably non-trivial.
In a simlilar vein, you could convert the files to Adobe's DNG format, and get the specs on that from them, but it's the same programming challenge.

If you set a custom white balance with each shot (or each lighting environment) and convert the Raw to TIFF, as Andy suggests, using the 'as-shot' white balance, the color rendition should be accurate.

Also, depending on what wavelengths you're after, you might look at removing the hot mirror on the G5, which cuts out the IR range. Search here for 'IR photography' for a number of threads on modifying the camera.

The solution to your problem lies in open-source tools. For example, dcraw will do exactly what you want. I don't know if it runs under Windows, but it's definitely available under Linux and should be easy to port to Mac OSX if it's not already running there. The output of dcraw is in the standard PPM format; you may have to pass it through pnmnoraw to turn it into plain ASCII. It would then be trivial to process it further. (Actually, if you're writing code, you should just use the libpnm functions to read the dcraw output directly into an array for further processing.)

Yes, DCRAW may be your best solution, but would probably require some programming knowledge and effort on your (or somebody's) part.

DCRAW is an extremely compact, platform independant, command line app. You feed it a RAW file, and it spits out (curiously) a .PSD file. The key is that its source is open and available. It is a bit obtuse, as its written for compactness (not a single carriage return in the file), but in theory you could discect it, find out where it parses and reads the individual sensor readings, and then replace the code that converts those into .PSD pixels to instead write out the info in text form. (That would probably be one huge file, depending how readable you made it!)

Here are some links:
The author's source page (includes a link to the source file)
A DCRAW "fan" page (good source for background, usage and update info)

Why (I think) the Canon SDK won't work is because, as I recall, the process that they make available for converting RAW files still returns processed data, not the direct sensor readings your looking for. As far as I can determine (based mostly on comments from the David Coffin page), the RAW format Canon uses is technically not an open specification - its up to those who write RAW converters to interpret the RAW file structures themselves. (This may not be true for the "big boys" like Adobe and Phase One.) So this source may be the best chance you have of getting that info without having to decode it yourself.

DCRaw available for Windows: http://www.insflug.org …are/download/wi​ndows.php3

ScottK, you need to get yourself a better source viewer, one that understands the conventions used on different systems. dcraw is written in the standard Unix format, with newlines separating the lines of the source. It is very well formatted and (from a very quick glance) should be easy to work with or modify.