How to view RAW image files on Windows 7 (and Windows Vista).

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My photography posts appear to be a bit like busses. I don’t make one for a while then two together …

Some while back I wrote a tale of two Codecs bemoaning the patchy support for RAW files.  Basically we (Microsoft) don’t provide codecs for anything other JPG, TIF, PNG and our Windows Media formats. Everything else is down to whoever is responsible for the format showing a bit of leadership. Pentax fell a bit short with the codec for their PEF format – no 64 bit support. Still, a 32 bit codec works in 32 bit apps –like live Windows Live Photo Gallery, and if one of those previews the image and creates the Thumbnail it then shows up in explorer. At least Pentax’s Codec will install: they support Adobe’s DNG format as an alternative and Adobe’s rather old beta codec won’t install on 64 bit Windows 7. I discovered Ardfry's Codec for DNG, which is pretty good, though not free.

Putting QuickTime player onto my rebuilt PC I find that it has partial codec support for WIndows – i.e. some Mov files can be played in Windows Media Player and show a thumbnail in Explorer , and some can’t (it appears the “can” use H264 video and “the can’t” are CinePak or Sorenson). Before I had a chance to get the latest build from Ardfry, someone sent me a link to this page of Codecs from Axel Rietschin Software Developments.  I’ve only installed and tested the 64 bit ones PEF and DNG ones but the initial impression is very good indeed. The only gripe is that there doesn’t seem to be a way for the Codec to return the meta data information from the picture but tell Windows “For this format the meta data is read only” – with both Axel’s and Ardfry’s codecs you can enter new data only to get an error when Windows tries to save it.

The full list of supported formats is as follows.

Adobe Digital Negative (*.dng  )
Canon Raw Image  (*.cr2, *.crw )
Fuji Raw Image (*.raf)
Hasselblad Raw Image (*.3pr, *.fff)
Kodak Raw Image (*.dcr, *.kdc )
Leica Raw Image (*.raw, *.rwl)
Minolta Raw Image (*.mrw)
Nikon Raw Image (*.nef, *.nrw )
Olympus Raw Image (*.orf)
Panasonic Raw Image (*.rw2)
Pentax Raw Image (*.pef)
Sony Raw Image (*.arw, *.sr2, *.srf)

A nice bonus is that these were created to support Fast Image Viewer, which I hadn’t come across before: this supports tethered shooting on Cameras with PTP support (like my new Pentax K7). I’m going to give this a try and I’ll hand over the small pile of pennies required if it works. Update there are different levels of PTP support, and the K7 doesn't do what I need it to. Sigh.