I am glad to announce a major update to Rawzor that adds support for 5 new raw formats and 54 new cameras. As always, the compression is completely lossless, zero loss of quality or meta-data.

For a complete list of supported cameras and formats and the compression results for each of them, see www.rawzor.com/formats

The new raw formats now supported by Rawzor are Canon SRAW, Panasonic RW2, Hasselblad 3FR, Nikon NRW and Sony CRAW.

This release of Rawzor adds support for following cameras,

• Canon’s 1000D, 450D, 50D, 5D Mark_II, G10, A460, A530, A650, A720 and SD300.
• Canon’s SRAW format for 40D, 50D, 5D Mark_II and 1D Mark_III
• Contax 645
• Fujifilm’s IS Pro and IS-1
• Hasselblad’s .3fr format
• Kodak’s C603, C603v C603y and EOSDCS1B
• Leaf’s AFi7
• Leica DIGILUX_2, D-LUX_3 and V-LUX_1
• Nikon’s D3X, D60, D700, D90 and P6000
• Olympus’s E-420 and  E-520
• Panasonic’s DMC-FZ18, DMC-FZ30, DMC-FZ50, DMC-FZ8, DMC-L1, DMC-LC1, DMC-LX1, DMC-LX2, DMC-FX150, DMC-FZ28, DMC-G1, DMC-L10 and DMC-LX3 including the new .RW2 format.
• Pentax’s K200D and K20D
• Sinarback_54_FO
• Sony’s A200, A300, A350, A700 and A900 including the new craw and uncompressed ARWs.

For a complete list of supported cameras and formats and the compression results for each of them, see www.rawzor.com/formats. (Latest Rawzor SDK already supports these new formats).

ps, I will be at PMA09 on Tuesday and Wednesday (March 3rd and 4th, 2009), if you plan to be there, drop me a line.

I am very excited to release an updated version of Rawzor SDK which fixes some minor issues and includes support for a whole bunch of new raw formats and cameras.

We are no longer ‘windows only’, with this release SDK supports Linux too. Now all your favorite applications on Linux can add native support for Rawzor compressed images.
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And on both Windows and Linux, we are now fully 64-bit compatible. We heard that a lot of you are on 64-bit platforms making full use of added memory and processing power for your heavy duty image editing needs. The SDK includes binaries for both 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Linux.

Where is Mac support you ask? We anticipate all of you using Mac would be wondering if we plan to support Mac or not. Give us more time, please. It is definitely on our roadmap and we will get it out soon. Thanks for waiting.

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Change Log:

• Minor big fixes.
• Support for a lot more raw formats and cameras.
• Support for Linux.
• Support for 64-bit Windows and Linux.
• Smaller 32-bit Windows DLLs to reduce application’s installed size.
• Simplified directory structure (see included readme for details).
• Mac support coming soon.

Grab it from the developer’s page or tell developers of your favorite photo editors.

Konvertor now comes with native .rwz format support and you can use it to work with Rawzor compressed raw images directly. Konvertor lets you convert between a very large range of graphic/audio/video/archive formats, along with a easy to use browser with thumbnails and powerful meta editing features.

(Konvertor on Vista, showing Rawzored raw images in Fuji and Olympus formats)

Thanks to Jean Piquemal.

Oh, and a very happy new year. There are some interesting updates coming very soon (but don’t hold your breath).

Version 0.36 fixes a few minor bugs, its recommended that you update even if you are not facing any issues.

Thanks to everyone who reported the bugs (and sent in all the suggestions that still aren’t implemented, that will take ’some’ more time :-)

The latest beta of XnView by Pierre-e Gougelet can work with Rawzor compressed Raw images, providing for RWZ files all its power of browsing with thumbnails, quick access to exif information, and editing features.

This XnView release is still a beta, so might be a little unstable. Its working great for me but you might want to wait till its final release before dipping in. Update: Rawzor support is now in the latest stable release, you can just download the latest version from XnView website.

(Screenshot of XnView v1.95 Beta 1, thats a 7.9 MB Nikon D80 nef along with its 6.3 MB rwz copy. 19% compression, totally lossless.)

To see support for Rawzor’s RWZ files in more of your software, just send a message (or maybe lots of them ;-) to author/support/forum of your favorite software.

There is no reason for them to wait other than knowing that their users want it, so tell them that you do.

Phil Harvey’s ExifTool is an excellent set of Perl scripts for reading, writing and editing meta information in image, audio and video files. It supports all raw formats, now including Rawzor’s RWZ files :-)

ExifTool's supported formats list, from its website

What this means is that now we can use ExifTool to work with the meta data in our raw images even if they are Rawzored, no need to decompress them first.

Thanks Phil.

After many months, finally a beta release. No more geeky command line tools, just a nice simple to use GUI :-)

Whats New:

• A GUI and some minor speed improvements.
• The core is still more or less the same. If you were using the previous command-line builds, this version maintains full compatibility with files created with them.
• I have added the results graph on the home page. You can now get a quick glance at what to expect for your images.
• There is also a supported cameras list now. Its not complete yet, Rawzor supports more cameras than whats on the list but it will atleast give you some idea. I need help from you to confirm support for other cameras and the list will expand accordingly (keep sending in those sample images, loads of them).

Whats missing:

• Multicore support, it will use only one cpu even on your dual core machine :-(
• The ‘time remaining’ estimate in progress bar isn’t as accurate as it should be :-(
• Its windows only :-(
• I know all this is painful , but its a beta after all.

Other than this everything should be rock solid, its already been in a private beta since a while. So grab a copy and give it a shot, I will wait right here for your comments.

I have updated the Rawzor SDK, it now includes both statically and dynamically linked versions of DLLs. Another minor addition is a function to get SDK’s core version number.

Like last time, everything is built in Visual Studio 2008 (9.0) but there shouldn’t be any issues even if you are using a different build chain (atleast we can hope). Anyway, if this creates any problems for you and you can’t upgrade yet, I can add binaries from some older version of msvc. Let me know.

I am very excited with everything built so far and the warm welcome received by Rawzor (thanks), time to take this a level further.

I am hoping this blog will be a great way to share with you everything happening with Rawzor - on the stage or behind the scenes, and listen to what you have to say.

To know more about me, you can check my homepage but there isn’t much to know besides that I love programming and data compression technologies.

So, hit me with any questions or suggestions on how you would like to shape Rawzor’s future. Leave a comment here or drop me a mail.

Lets get this ball rolling… :-)