Comment by xhrpost
4 years ago
Interesting, so are you saying that the RAW signal coming from the hardware is already often compressed even before hitting the main software compression?
4 years ago
Interesting, so are you saying that the RAW signal coming from the hardware is already often compressed even before hitting the main software compression?
Oh, no. What I'm saying is that cameras often take the raw signal from the hardware, but then the camera software frequently compresses that signal before writing it to a raw file (.cr2, .arw, .dng, whatever). This compression can be lossy or lossless. It's important not to confuse the raw signal with the RAW file (an actual format, often specific to the camera manufacturer). Just by saying RAW file, assuming it's lossless or uncompressed is false. So it should be specified - uncompressed RAW (lossless almost by definition), lossy compressed, lossless compressed.