Shooting to RAW with Canon PowerShot (DIGIC II Only) // DNG4PS homepage

Shooting to RAW with Canon PowerShot (DIGIC II - based only)

Introduction

Q. What does the HDK firmware do?
A. After loading of HDK firmware you can get the following functionality:

     * Shooting in RAW
     * Live histogram (RGB, blended, luminance and for each RGB channel)
     * Zebra mode (blinking highlights and shadows)
     * DepthOfField-calculator
     * Battery indicator
     * Scripts execution (exposure/focus/... bracketing, intervalometer and more)
     * File browser
     * Text reader
     * Calendar
     * Some fun tools and games

Q. Where do i can find the most recent information?
A. Here:

     CHDK usage (Enghish)
     CHDK usage (Russian)
     CHDK Wiki (Russian)

     Q. In short, why (and when) do i need raw support on my PowerShot?
     A. :

     * white balance could be set AFTER shooting, in raw converter. A different settings could be tested
     * although ADC in Canon A-series is only 10bit :-( RAW provides wider dynamic range than camera jpeg
     * easier to edit with greatest-quality raw converters
     * you can recover more highlights in case of slight overexposure with highlight recovery mode, especially with non-standard lighting
     * in-camera image processing tends to loose saturation badly in deep shadow areas, so you are limited at recovering them using Photoshop Shadows/Highlights function. Fill-light function of raw-converter can be used in case of RAW

If you don't have an idea what RAW-files are, look here: Wikipedia article about RAW

     DNGForPowerShot 1.1.4d dng-converter with metadata support
     DNGForPowerShot 1.1.3 (old)
     DNGForPowerShot 1.0 alpha 6 (even older)

     Alternative headers for DNG4PS. Compatible with software with bad DNG support (RawShooter2006, ACDSee, ...). "Add metadata from jpeg" option must be turned off.

     DNG4PS-2 Another RAW-->DNG converter from different developer. More fast and featurefull, with compression and metadata support

     The uploader

Advantages of raw shooting (samples)

Advantages of raw shooting (my Canon PowerShot A610 samples)
Advantages of raw shooting (Canon PowerShot A6?0 samples)
(Dis?)advantages of raw shooting (Canon PowerShot S3 IS samples)

My old instruction on raw-enabler usage, etc. (now outdated)

http://digicanon.narod.ru/rawenabler.htm

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