.rwl support

[paulpp]

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I realise this has been discussed before but am totally confused!!!!!

I use an iMac with Aperture and I realise that Aperture does not support .rwl (as yet I hope), BUT I thought I could convert the .rwl files to .DNG using Adobe converter which Aperture would then read. No such luck. If I convert at the same time an Olympus .orf file and a .rwl file both to .DNG, the Oly file will be read by Aperture, but the Leica file is an unsupported format. Happens regardless of what settings I use in the Adobe DNG converter. Even more confused in that Capture One will not process a .rwl file to a DNG file.

So, is this just how it is?

Or am I totally mssing something?

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[ho_co]

Paul, I don't use Aperture, so this is assumption:

 

As you know, Adobe had to rewrite the specs for the DNG file to allow the RWL file to be converted to a mosaicked DNG.

 

What is probably happening is that you're converting to the latest form of DNG, which Apple (I'm assuming) also doesn't yet support at the OS level.

 

Use an older version of DNG converter. Version 5.2 should work. Adobe made this converter available when the RWL format came out. It works fine, converting the RWL into a DNG that can be read by older software in my experience. The difficulty with doing this is that the DNG is de-mosaicked, i.e. written out linearly, but with the lens correction opcodes included. Unfortunately, the DNG is three to four times as large as a still-mosaicked DNG (ACR 5.4 and later). It works, but it's big.

 

 

Another solution, if available, is to use Capture One 4.5.2. That is the last version Phase One made that would still allow the conversion of RWLs to DNGs. But if you do that, be prepared for the fact that the C1 DNG does not include the optical corrections, and you'll have some work to fix the image, with a lot of both distortion and chromatic aberration.

 

Leica asked Phase One to discontinue the ability to output DNGs from RWLs after a lot of people opined that 'this wasn't Leica quality.' IOW, the JPGs were Leica quality, the TIFFs were Leica quality, but these sensor-original data (from which the JPGs and TIFFs were produced) weren't. The complainers were loud enough that the next version of Capture One no longer allowed output of DNGs from RWLs, as you mentioned.

 

I hope that helps, till Apple gets around to updating its system to read these new files.

[paulpp]

Thanks. I hadn't appreciated what had happened with Capture One. Think I will continue to use tiff or jpeg and hope Apple get round to full camera support in the OS asap (although with not a lot of hope).