IJFR

Our friend Michael Tapes (he of the WhiBal), along with his colleagues at Imagenomic, have created a neat new free utility called Instant JPEG from RAW (IJFR). IJFR is not an application; it's a utility that attaches itself to the Win or Mac OS. It also doesn't process or develop RAW files; it merely extracts the JPEG that's already in all your RAWs. Its functionality isn't unique, but for many people it will be handy. Take a look at how it works:

What does it mean for you? No more shooting "RAW + JPEG" with most cameras, for one thing—no need. No more waiting for your converter to create JPEGs from large directories of RAWs—it's actually instant unless you're also resizing for the web, in which case it's just very fast. And no more waiting for frame-by-frame rendering when you zoom in. And, really, no more reason to shoot JPEG at all—the JPEG is there in the RAW file anyway, so when you shoot RAW you already have both.

More info:

Scott Kelby's post about it

Michael's post about IJFR on his newly redesigned RawWorkflow.com site

Michael's guest post on Scott's blog (includes a brief history of RAW converters)

IJFR download page

______________________

Mike  (Thanks to David E. and Michael T.)

Send this post to a friend

Featured Comment by Eamon Hickey: "The noodge in me can't resist a historical nitpick re: Michael T.'s history of RAW converters, and, since there are 103 comments under his post on Scott Kelby's site, I'll be a noodge here: Although for many, many regular folks, the history of DSLRs and associated software seems to begin with the Canon D30 in 2000, there were, in fact, many news photographers working with Kodak DSLRs going back to the early 1990s. They shot RAW (the only option on early Kodaks), and the pioneering RAW browsing/management application (not primarily a converter) was Photo Mechanic, which really did invent a lot of the paradigms we take for granted now in photo browsing applications. Its author, Dennis Walker, was even given a prestigious award by the National Press Photographers Association for his pioneering work. I wrote a couple of paragraphs about him in an article on the early history of DSLRs, if anyone's interested (Walker is on pg. 3)."

Michael Tapes responds: "Eamon, thanks for setting history straight. I did not mean to slight anyone, and clearly I did not join the raw club until the D30 era, and the club was formed long before that. Thanks for your post and giving credit where credit is due. Appreciated."
 

Comments

[psu_13]

Photo Mechanic already does this too, and it automatically uses the embedded JPEG if it is there for its browsing view to make editing quick.

Lightroom, I believe, also uses these previews initially before generating one on its own. You can see this because the color between the machine generated JPEG and the initial Lightroom conversion is never quite the same. Also, stuff you shot in "black and white" mode in camera will magically turn colors once LR finally converts it.

[JasonP]

It IS an excellent utility, but it won't kill RAW+JPEG, not totally at least. The JPEG preview in my Canon (can't speak for others) is the same size as a small-normal JPEG... I believe other cameras might embed bigger though. It works great (and FAST) for getting a quick JPEG of a photo instead of waiting for PS or LR to open and render the RAW, but when you need all of your megapixels, sometimes you don't have a choice.

[Marek Krol]

Once you save a NEF file in Capture, I believe that it may write a full sized JPG to the file incorporating any edits. This app could then be used to quickly batch extract processed jpgs. Although, if I recall that is the way NX2 batches NEF-JPG if no new changes are applied.

Marek

[Peter]

Similar to JasonP's comments, my camera (admittedly a now ancient Maxxum 5D) scrolls and zooms much more slowly in playback mode with pictures captured in just RAW vs. RAW+JPEG. If I need to take a couple of shots, chimp quickly, and re-shoot, even that small amount of delay is intolerably frustrating.

[Hans Van Rafelghem]

That's all very nice but I can't download it because they think I can't spell my name correctly!!

[Chris Combs]

The JPEGs this makes from D70 photos are teeeeeny, but that is of course the Nikon's fault.

[Chris Combs]

Which is to say that for those news photogs using Nikon, this really doesn't touch RAW+JPEG. Sorry...

[Thomas Comerford]

@Chris Combs:
Every Nikon DSLR since the D2H has included a full-resolution "Basic" quality JPEG in each and every NEF file produced. It's what you're seeing when you zoom in on the rear LCD.

If an extraction program is pulling small JPEGs out of your NEFs, my guess is it's because you edited them with Nikon Capture 4.x which only includes a small preview JPEG when it creates the new NEF file. It can be configured to store larger JPEGs, but not quite full-size. The newer versions of Capture (NX 1 and 2) go to the other extreme and insist on including a high-quality full-resolution JPEG in each NEF.

[Dave Sailer]

Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com/) is an application that can read raw files and export in any format you want. I use it for my Canon S50 and 10D, usually exporting to TIFF (when I don't want to muck with the Canon software). I have been using this product for close to 10 years and I'm still nuts about it. You'll have to see the web site, and then actually try it to find out all of what you can do. Though primarily an image viewer, not an editor, you can nevertheless make some changes to images. And it has batch move / copy / rotate / rename / export options. Highly recommended.

[Andreas]

I just tried it for Pentax K20D files. Granted it is nice and more handy then the Pentax Photo Browser which can do the same. To my disappointment the extracted jpeg is the same "low" quality as the one PPB extracts.

This is fine for some occasions, but if you need high quality jpegs instantly you still need to shoot jpeg.

This may vary with different cameras.

But anyway, thanks for the tip, and I will use it occasionally.

best always
Andreas

[Chris Combs]

"since the D2H" -- right, that's the problem. but find me a newsroom with new cameras!

[Chris Combs]

(Never used Nikon Capture.)

[Thomas Comerford]

@Chris Combs:
I think you misunderstood my post... the D70 is newer than the D2H! In any event, I have a D70 myself and I wrote a utility that can extract JPEGs from NEFs (http://www.pixelfixer.org), and out-of-camera NEFs from the D70 definitely contain a full-resolution JPEG.

[Borf]

RAW processing software dcraw allows the option -e, which extracts the embedded jpeg from the RAW archive.

At the bottom of this web (it's in spanish) http://www.guillermoluijk.com/tutorial/dcraw/index.htm there is a method for using dcraw -e from the SendTo Menu in the right button of the mouse (Windows only).

That's a really fast and easy method. Downlad RAW files from the camera, right-click on them and SendTo->dcraw: you have jpgs in one second...

[Carl]

I was really looking forward to trying it out, but when I downloaded and installed it, I discovered that it doesn't work on 64 bit Vista. What a shame because it looks really interesting. It would have been helpful if that bit of information had been included somewhere.