Nikon Proprietary WB Encryption Has Been Broken
Last week there were a lot of rumblings on the forums after Photoshop's creator Thomas Knoll had posted a message warning that they (Adobe) might not be able to fully support Nikon D2X and D2H raw files in their Camera Raw module due to the use of encrypted white balance information. Decoding this information could violate the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and Adobe doesn't want to stir up the legal waters.Enter Dave Coffin, author of Dcraw, a popular program that reads raw image formats of Canon, Nikon and Kodak digital cameras and then writes the data out in a nonproprietary format. Dave posted the latest update of his 'dcraw.c' source code on his web site this past week after reverse-engineering Nikon's latest NEF format.
To quote Dave, "Canon and Nikon continue to ignore the needs of today's photographers and tomorrow's historians by providing neither documentation nor human-readable code for their "secret" formats. My unpaid, often arduous work aims to correct this error, ensuring that the photographs of our time will always be viewable, on any computer running any operating system."
Bibble Labs founder Eric Hyman said he had also broken the Nikon white balance code and had incorporated it in the latest version of his commercial image-manipulation software. Bibble Labs sells the full-featured version of its "Bibble 4" software for , and a less-capable version for .
Click here to read Nikon's April 22, 2005 Advisory.
Click here to read Engadget's interview with Steve Heiner of Nikon USA.
