Using my then-new SLR in 2005 and 2006, I photographed everything from my new son to otherworldly canyons we visited in Utah. The only problem: the photos were taken only in JPEG format.

JPEG is fine as far as it goes, and indeed for most folks it will suffice. But having rediscovered my enjoyment of photography in the digital era, I wish I'd used the raw image format that comes with SLRs and higher-end compact cameras.

My initial regret was from the realization that raw photos, although taking up about three times the storage space as a JPEG and requiring manual processing, offer higher quality and more flexibility. But what I've come to understand since then is a second advantage of raw: because processing software improves over time, raw photos in effect can get better with age.

For that reason, I've begun recommending friends who show some enthusiasm for photography that they should think about shooting important events in raw format alongside JPEG. You don't have to mess with the raw files today, but if it's an important event like a wedding, you might want them for later.

I've included below some samples of a noisy image shot in near-darkness at ISO 25,600 from my SLR. They may not convince you that shooting raw is a miracle cure for photo quality, but they do illustrate some differences with the camera's JPEG and that the raw-processing software isn't standing still.

Raw? What's that mean anyway?
But first, a little background. What exactly are raw images?

A digital camera's image sensor is a grid of pixels that captures light from a scene. Cameras can interpret this image, processing it in various ways to produce a JPEG. A raw file, though, is the unprocessed data from the image sensor. However, there's no raw standard; each digital camera has its own, usually proprietary, raw format, though they're sometimes related.

Although cameras can produce JPEGs, a subset of the image-editing industry serves those who shoot raw. Options include Adobe Systems' Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom, Apple's Aperture, DxO Labs' Optics Pro, Phase One's Capture One, and a handful of others.

The variety of proprietary formats means these applications must be constantly updated for the newest cameras. All SLRs can produce raw images, as can a variety of higher-end compact cameras such as Panasonic's LX3 and GF1, Canon's S90 and G11, and Olympus' E-P1 and E-P2.

Raw files vary from JPEG in several ways. Here are some of the nitty-gritty details.

Let's start at the individual pixel. Each one you see on a computer screen has a mixture of three colors of light: red, green, and blue. But with most cameras' image sensors, each pixel captures only one of those colors. A process called demosaicing converts this checkerboard-like arrangement of colors, called a Bayer pattern, so each pixel in the final image gets all three colors instead of just one.

Another difference is in white balance. Unlike film cameras of yore, digital cameras can make a snap judgment whether a shot is being taken under yellowish incandescent light, under white sunlight, or in bluish shade, then try to correct the image so white looks white. This processing change is baked into a JPEG image, but it's just a recommendation in a raw shot.

Finally, each color in a JPEG pixel is stored with an 8-bit value, providing 256 steps between, the darkest and lightest green, red, or blue. With raw, most cameras today record 12 or 14 bits per color, providing 8,192 or 16,384 levels, respectively.

What does raw get you?
The big drawbacks of raw images are that the files are larger and that you can't share them easily until you've edited them with some kind of software. But here are some of the first advantages I found shooting raw.

Some professionals with lots of experience and time to set up shots get everything right. For the rest of us, shots often are overexposed or underexposed. One of the main advantages of shooting raw is better flexibility to correct such problems—in part because of that better color depth than JPEG affords.

"Shooting in raw is usually more forgiving than just shooting jpeg files, so should you make a mistake when capturing an image you have a better opportunity with a RAW file to go back and correct any mistakes," said Richard Pelkowski, product manager of digital SLRs for Olympus Imaging America. "We typically encourage our Olympus consumers to shoot in both raw plus JPEG mode so they immediately have both a JPEG file you can easily share and use instantly and a more forgiving raw file that you can go back to later for post processing."

Take the example of Jonathan Machen, an artist I know in Boulder, Colo., who embraced raw as he moved from point-and-shoot cameras to an SLR.

"While I strive to understand my camera completely and hope to take images that approximate the balance of light that my eye sees, it's not always possible, especially in fast-moving family situations. I love to take pictures of the kids in unusual lighting and compositional situations, but it can be a distracting combination trying to watch them and trying to take a good picture," he said. Case in point: at dinner in a restaurant recently, a kid-friendly lap dog appeared, but Machen's camera was set wrong.

"I got the shot, but the image was almost black," he said. "Later, editing the raw file, I brought it back to a place that brought a smile to my face as well as that of my wife."

Even if you don't make mistakes, raw images offer more flexibility in editing to bring out details otherwise lost in murky shadows or bright highlights. This is the particular ability I wish I had for shots of my newborn son held under bright heat lamps and of a twisty narrow canyon in both sun and shade.

Adjustable white balance is another nicety. On many occasions I've fixed the colors of conference speakers whose faces were turned to yellow putty by stage lights or of a friend's darling daughter whose position in the shade made her look like an ice queen in the making.

Computers also get more power to compensate for lens shortcomings or reduce the sensor noise that speckles images, said Cyrille de la Chesnais, director of sales and marketing for photography at the Paris-based DxO Labs. "Optical corrections and noise removal are much more precise and effective on raw files than on JPEG files," he said.

Many cameras let you adjust noise reduction levels when you take the photo—but again, with a JPEG, your choice is baked permanently into the image.

Moore's Law and the subtler promise of raw
Here's where I hadn't appreciated raw's advantages: computers get faster.

Demosaicing is a complicated process that benefits from more computing horsepower, and unlike many computing tasks, it happens to be one that can easily benefit from multicore processors.

When you take a photo with your camera, it uses a relatively feeble image-processing chip to produce the JPEG. It's remarkable to me how well those chips can perform the task, but even with the best quality on the market today, your camera will only have one chance to make that JPEG.

But if you're converting a raw image with software, you not only get more computing horsepower than a camera offers, you get algorithms that are updated.

"You can revisit this digital negative and reprocess it as technology improves," said Tom Hogarty, Adobe's product manager for Lightroom.

Hogarty likens the situation to what he saw looking at prints in a museum by the famed landscape photographer Ansel Adams. "You could tell the earlier prints didn't stand out. They didn't have same kind of depth that the later prints did. The printing technology and chemicals were getting better," Hogarty said. "Imagine if all you had was original print and you couldn't improve it going forward."

DxO Optics Pro 6, released in November, and the beta version of Lightroom 3, introduced in October, both are designed to extract a better image from the raw data. De la Chesnais said DxO Optics Pro improves noise reduction so that one F-stop's worth of noise can be fixed. That means that if you previously were happy shooting photos at ISO 800, you could push your camera to ISO 1600 for better low-light performance, for example.

Noise reduction is a complicated problem. In addition to getting rid of the color and brightness variations from pixel to pixel, lower-frequency noise patterns often lead to blotches of red or blue that span many pixels. Good noise reduction preserves original colors and fine details and doesn't give the image a smeary watercolor-painting look up close.

Another software matter: software can take its best guess what sort of editing settings to apply. In my experience, that's a good starting point if not always a good final result, but I expect improvements here, too, just as cameras are generally getting better at automatically gauging the right exposure, focus, and other settings.

Is raw for everyone?
No, but I think it's for more people than use it today.

If you're just uploading photos of your smiling friends to Facebook, chances are the core value of the image easily transcends a little pesky noise or skewed colors. Robert Balousek, from the San Francisco Bay Area, shoots raw—but mostly because Adobe Lightroom corrects some defective pixels in his SLR image sensor.

"Auto-fix is a gamble," he said. "I don't apply it to all photos, just ones that I would like to use but are a little off. Sometimes it does what I want, but more often than not I tweak a few knobs until it looks how I expect. I don't claim to be an expert, I just know what seems right to me."

If you're a bit more serious, though raw could be worth sampling. Give it a serious thought if you're an experimental students, a tourist who wants to compile memories in a photo book, a photo enthusiast sharing shots on Flickr, or a parent printing poster-size prints of your children.

I believe software will ease today's manual pains of handling raw photos. Aperture and Lightroom have made it easier to process large numbers of shots, though there's plenty of work to be done. Automatic adjustments will steadily improve, and perhaps Windows will get the better built-in support Mac OS X has so people looking at a folder full of raw files see thumbnail images rather than a list of filenames with generic icons.

It's true raw shots take up more space on your flash card, hard drive, and backups. But storage is cheap these days with 1.5 terabyte hard drives costing less than $100 and 8GB SD memory cards costing about $20. Today's large image files will look gradually more ordinary as storage technology gets roomier.

Standardization could help
One big change that could help raw catch on is standardization of the file formats. Today's profusion of formats ensures that operating systems or editing software have a hard time keeping up. The most promising avenue here is Adobe's Digital Negative format, which the company controlled for years but more has submitted to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as a proposed standard.

DNG has been improved to address a number of earlier shortcomings, for example by adding profiles that can mirror camera tonal settings such as neutral, landscape, or portrait. Another more recent example are "opcodes" that can register lens settings used to so software can automatically correct optical problems such as vignetting or barrel distortion. DNG already could gracefully accommodate metadata such as copyright notices or editing instructions, and it for those worried about how well a specific raw format is converted into a generic format, the DNG can house the original raw file, too.

Pentax is the most prominent company to build DNG support into its cameras, but SLR leaders Nikon and Canon still don't. Hogarty hopes the standardization process will improve its prospects.

"I believe the gating factor in camera manufacturer adoption is the fact it is a format controlled by Adobe," Hogarty said. "Clearly it's not available in the majority of cameras shipped in the world today. That's why we're pursuing the ISO standard, so other companies can feel comfortable with the standard format."

Ultimately, Hogarty believes raw usage will spread more widely

"If you look at images shot by the mainstream market, they need the most latitude in editing and correction capabilities. They're not as passionate about getting the perfect image," Hogarty said. "I think they'd be able to take that raw product to a finished product that would make them happier."

I suspect it'll be a long time before raw processing is simple enough that mainstream snapshooters will embrace raw. But the trajectory is clear: the technology is improving.

So if you care about your shots and have a camera that'll do it, set it to shoot raw+JPEG next time you're photographing something important. You may not want to mess with the raw shots today, but why curtail your options if you don't have to?

This story originally appeared on CNET

I took the same [480p Hulu] Office clip I'd been using for all of the other tests and ran it on my Mac Pro at full screen (2560 x 1600)….Going from roughly 450% down to 190% (or a bit over 10% of total CPU utilization across 16 threads) made full-screen Hulu playable on my machine. In the past I always had to run it in a smaller window, but thanks to Flash 10.1 I don't have to any longer.

Meanwhile, Nvidia Ion-accelerated video was deemed "almost perfect." Just take a look at the table. CPU-utilization of 70% generally makes video unwatchable, but updating to Flash 10.1 made full screen high-def (1920 by 1200) Hulu a smooth stream on the Ion test system.

ATI chips and integrated Intel graphics ran into a few problems, but they've been attributed to the Flash 10.1 player still being a beta. I recommend giving the full test info a read over at: [AnandTech | Flash 10.1 Download]

This is, to be clear, just the desktop version of Flash 10.1—the full-fledged Flash for Android, webOS, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile is still a ways down the pipe. It's worth getting excited over anyway, since I've watched an HP Mini 311 with an Ion graphics chip tear through an HD YouTube clip without breaking a sweat. For now, graphics acceleration is limited to Windows, unfortunately. But still, perfect timing, really, since YouTube's launching 1080p video this week (perhaps not so coincidentally).

The new version of AIR acts more like a native app, with full support for mass storage, multitouch gesture support, communication with actual native apps, and access to USB peripherals, p2p networking, and faster WebKit rendering, among other perks for developers. Maybe I'll stop hating it so much now.

They're both in beta, but god knows, they can't be any crashier or resource-whoring than anything else Adobe's foisted upon the internet. [Adobe via TechCrunch]

Flash Player not available for your device. Apple restricts use of tecnologies required by products like Flash Player. Until Apple eliminates these restrictions, Adobe cannot provide Flash Player for the iPhone or iPod touch.

Bad Adobe BAD! Next time, please put this in every single Adobe Flash box inside every single page using Flash on the web? [Check it here from your iPhone via Gear Diary]

The tools are basic—you can crop, adjust exposure, saturation, and tint, among others, with some standard special effects like soft focus, colors and filters like "warm vintage" and pop—but using entirely swipe-based gestures as a virtual slider for how intensely or lightly the effect is applied is natural and easy. Here's a photo I made with it:
[iTunes, Thanks Weston!]

Using the next version of Flash Authoring—which is now in private beta—developers will be able to turn any Flash app or widget into an iPhone/iPod touch application. Some apps will require optimization, taking into account the iPhone's hardware limitations and its multi-touch user interface conventions:

The iPhone has a significantly slower processor and less memory than what can be found in a typical desktop computer. As such, existing content may need to be optimized for performance, and / or user interactions (given the smaller screen and different UI metaphors).

However, publishers will be able to easily adjust their existing code at a small cost, developing a full app that would be available at the App Store. While this doesn't fix the lack of Flash in Safari—which Chambers says they are still working on—it's a huge advance. Just imagine Web publishers creating iPhone-capable versions of their sites—or part of them—which would feed on the same online data as their browser-based counterparts.

Now, if Adobe introduced a Flash video player, and Apple enabled Safari to recognize Flash video like they do now with YouTube H.234 material, everything would be fine. [Flash apps for iPhone and Mike Chambers]

Nothing for the iPhone. "Still a closed device and not much progress there," Adobe told us as they gleefully detailed that Flash was invading basically every other smartphone. Also, we gotta wait until mid-2010 for the full rollout.

But, betas for Windows Mobile and WebOS are coming this year, with Android and Symbian early next, meaning you can get your mobile Hulu on before then. BlackBerry will be a bit longer, since RIM just joined Adobe's Open Screen project. Supposedly, Flash won't run like total garbage on phones, either, like Flash Lite. Fingers crossed, guys!

The GPU acceleration for Flash is the real deal, for sure, though—I watched a Star Trek trailer on YouTube HD on an Nvidia Ion-powered HP Mini 311 output to an external monitor, even, and it ran flawlessly. Which, if you've ever tried to play an HD Flash clip, even on full-fledged systems it molests CPU cycles, so just working on a $400 netbook very nearly deserves applause.

Flash 10.1 has a few other tricks too with full support for multitouch, gestures and accelerometer input—meaning it'd be perfect on the iPhone, if Apple would ever let it through. And make no mistake, Apple is the roadblock there, since Adobe said engineering work has continued (10,000 years later). The fact that full Flash will be on basically every single smartphone platform also makes that pretty clear.

If you want to spin that positively (my coffee cup is half-full, after all) the iPhone is now basically the only place you can go to flee from Flash, which basically covers everything like a pulsating squid thing with icky tentacles and stuff, ceaselessly stretching out to ensnare more. There is no escape. Except the iPhone. (Which kinda makes no Flash a feature, right?)

Oh, and the new Adobe AIR—TweetDeck, the NY Times Reader and other software runs on top of it—will slightly be less abominable, gobbling less memory and acting more like a real application, with USB mass storage support, multitouch and gesture input, and p2p powers for stuff like Skype and gaming.

Bottom line, It's a Flashy world, we just live in it.

Adobe Unveils First Full Flash Player for Mobile Devices and PCs

Close to 50 Open Screen Project Participants Support New Browser Runtime for Multiple Platforms

LOS ANGELES - Oct. 5, 2009 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today unveiled Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1 software for smartphones, smartbooks, netbooks, PCs and other Internet-connected devices, allowing content created using the Adobe Flash Platform to reach users wherever they are. A public developer beta of the browser-based runtime is expected to be available for Windows® Mobile, Palm® webOS and desktop operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux later this year. Public betas for Google® Android™ and Symbian® OS are expected to be available in
early 2010.

In addition, Adobe and RIM announced a joint collaboration to bring Flash Player to Blackberry® smartphones, and Google joined close to 50 other industry players in the Open Screen Project initiative.
Flash Player 10.1 is the first consistent runtime release of the Open Screen Project that enables uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and high definition (HD) videos across devices. Using the productive Web programming model of the Flash Platform, the browser-based runtime enables millions of designers and developers to reuse code and assets and reduce the cost of creating, testing and deploying content across different operating systems and browsers. Flash Player 10.1 is easily updateable across all supported platforms to ensure rapid adoption of new innovations that move the Web forward.

The browser-based runtime leverages the power of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for accelerated video and graphics while conserving battery life and minimizing resource utilization. New mobile-ready features that take advantage of native device capabilities include support for multi-touch, gestures, mobile input models, accelerometer and screen orientation bringing unprecedented creative control and expressiveness to the mobile browsing experience. Flash Player 10.1 will also take advantage of media delivery with HTTP streaming, including integration of content protection powered by Adobe® Flash® Access 2.0. This effort, code-named Zeri, will be an open format based on industry standards and will
provide content publishers, distributors and partners the tools they need to utilize HTTP infrastructures for high-quality media delivery in Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe® AIR® 2.0 software.

"With Flash Player moving to new mobile platforms, users will be able to experience virtually all Flash technology based Web content and applications wherever they are," said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Platform Business Unit at Adobe. "We are excited about the broad collaboration of close to 50 industry leaders in the Open Screen Project and the ongoing collaboration with 19 out of the top 20 handset manufacturers worldwide. It will be great to see first devices ship with full Flash Player in the first half of next year."

"We are excited to join Adobe and other industry leaders in the Open Screen Project," said Sundar Pichai, vice president of Product Management at Google. "This initiative supports our common goal to move the Web forward as a platform and to spur innovation in the industry through technology such as Adobe Flash."

"Adobe Flash technology provides a key experience on new Windows phones, enabling people to enjoy rich Flash based games, videos and other interactive Web content on the go," said Stephanie Ferguson, general manager, Product Management, Microsoft Corp. "We look forward to bringing in the new capabilities of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 to the Windows phone browser when it becomes available."

"Motorola is excited to be one of the first handset manufacturers to ship Android based devices with Flash Player support early next year," said Christy Wyatt, vice president of software applications and ecosystem at Motorola. "As the No.1 platform for video on the Web, uncompromised browsing of Flash technology based content is essential for a rich mobile experience and something users expect from Motorola today."

"As a longtime partner of Adobe, and more than 400 million Nokia phones shipped with existing Flash technology to date, we are excited to see Flash Player becoming a reality for mobile phones and other mobile devices," said Purnima Kochikar, vice president, Forum Nokia. "Nokia is excited about full Flash Player coming to devices and we are committed to supporting Flash Player 10.1 on mobile devices in 2010."

[Adobe]

Nvidia has been demonstrating builds of the GPU-accelerated Flash player around, and it's making an announcement on October 5. According to those who have seen it, it provides ultra-smooth high definition video playback, even on portable Tegra platforms.

About time. [Notebookjournal.de via Hexus]

To make a long story short, Adobe says that they've tested CS4 compatibility with SL and it doesn't need any software updates to be compatible with the new OS. But CS3?

Older versions of Adobe creative software were not included in our testing efforts.

In other words, they don't give enough of a shit to even test it. Even if anybody thought enough to throw the disc in to "see what happened", the results weren't included in this report.

That's about all the FAQ says. Except that it takes two pages to do so. [Adobe]

Unfortunately he can't get us a usefully specific release window beyond by "next summe,r" by which time Android, Windows Mobile and heck, maybe even the iPhone, will have been ridin' high on a wave of banner ads of choppy YouTube videos for months. But still, full Flash on BlackBerry!

Silverlight support is said to be in the cards too, though I'm pretty sure every suit with a BlackBerry would be a little happier if RIM just dropped that little project until Flash is done. Also, let's put this into a little perpsective: BGR is just claiming that BlackBerry will have Flash within the next year. Skyfire can already play back almost all Flash content on BlackBerry handsets, so it'd be kind of pathetic if RIM couldn't pull that off. [BGR]

Basically, the software examines each frame and warps it to form a steady line of shots based on a 3D projection of the cameras path (courtesy of off-the-shelf Adobe software), giving a buttery-smooth look almost as good as if the camera was on rails. It's got a few downsides, namely that it can only be applied after the entire film is shot, and the resulting product will need a little bit of cropping. But it still looks like a pretty great tool for amateur filmmakers, and should be available in about two years. [New Scientist]

The full list: Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments. Google is quick to note that it's a partial list, but we can see a range from primarily small-form computer makers like ASUS to bigger PCs like HP and Lenovo, and the addition of Qualcomm and TI means they've got low-powered chipset makers on board. Adobe is an interesting pull—can we expect heavy use of Flash in the OS's core?

The biggest name that's missing is Dell, although smaller PC makers like Sony and Toshiba are also AWOL. We're not sure what Dell is doing to leave them out of the equation: They make pretty popular netbooks and Chrome OS could be as big a boon for them as anyone else. We'll keep you updated on future Chrome OS developments. [Chrome Blog via Engadget]

Documents to Go supports file formats up to Office 2007&,dash;technically those file extensions include .doc .xls and .ppt, along with Adobe's .pdf for good measure. But apparently that $20 price is only an introductory deal, with the app price bumping to $30 after some arbitrary amount of time. Get it now through Android Market. [DataViz via UberPhones]

We've no idea from the press release whether or not Flash will be usable on the G1 that's already available, but it seems like the next phone (the G2?) should almost certainly, definitely, probably, most likely have it. Maybe. [Bsquare via Engadget]

Apple has said repeatedly that regular desktop Flash is too heavy (on CPU, and thus battery life) for the iPhone, whereas Flash Lite is too lousy. Jobs has coerced Adobe to create a custom solution. From Narayan's words of "the ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver," the engineering effort lies more in Adobe's engineering team than in Apple's.

Adobe actually said, back in September '08, that there would be a version released "in a very short time" if Apple approved it. Obviously either Apple rejected it, or Adobe themselves decided it wasn't quite resource-friendly enough to launch. [Bloomberg via Apple Insider via Engadget]

The magnets have the look of CS3 on a Mac, and include a number of contextual windows, palettes, and the all-important menu bar for creating the perfect fake destop. They retail for $65-95 depending on size and number of magnets, and can be found at the designers' website. [Technabob]

Now, when you click "View" on an attached PDF, you'll get to view it inside your browser with no mess. All the pages show up thumbnailed on the right, and you can view the current page in the main pane. It's quick and easy, as it should be.

Unfortunately, it only works in Gmail. How about a browser plugin so we can avoid Acrobat Reader all the time? [Gmail Blog via Boy Genius]

Not to be confused with Sony's giant actual zoetrope, Adobe's Zoetrope, which was co-developed by people at the University of Washington, is more of a metaphorical movie maker, says Technology Review: You load a web page then drag a slider from present into the past. As you use Zoetrope with, say, a major news site, it changes—dates go backwards, the price of oil goes up (then back down again), George Bush looks younger and more confident, etc.

My favorite aspect is the "time lens," which lets you time-shift just a portion of the webpage. A great example would be the price of a TV or Blu-ray player on Amazon.com. As you slide, you see the price go up and up. Tracking price changes is a big part of this technology.

But for brainier people, there's a whole lot more you can do, since the tool also allows two web pages to be tracked at the same time. For instance, you can open a weather page and a traffic page, and scroll backwards, watching how traffic patterns are affected by variations in the weather. You can also tie the oil-price page with an international news page, and see if there's any correlation between peaks of strife in the Middle East, and peaks of oil prices in the days following them.

When tracking numerical values such as pricing, the Zoetrope tool is capable of generating graphs of the data, so if you want to know when to buy a TV, you can look at a graf of historical data to show trends, much like how investors today use stock charts.

The software is still in the early stages, so don't expect a browser plug-in anytime soon. Also, if you're wondering how they're going to index the entire world wide web for this, the answer is, they aren't even going to try. They're going to focus on sites in categories like those above. After all, if you need a time machine to watch the Gizmodo home page zip by, you are doing too much of one thing, and not enough of another.

Be sure to check out TR's video, for a vivid demonstration of Zoetrope's capabilities. [Technology Review via Kurzweil AI]