Dear DXO Staff, when can we use Photolab 5 for Sony ARW-files from A7 IV too?

One of the main indicators that identifies an immature business bransch is lack of standardisation.

All these different RAW-formats that is not standardised even on a brand level despite the files might not differ practically more than a model number in the hexcode of the files, costs a lot for both users and the third party software manufacturers to handle. I have tried once myself changing old Minolta D7D and D5D-files with a hexeditor. I´m tempted to do the same with my A7 IV ARW just to try. I wouldn´t be surprised if it would work just to change these files to A7 III instead.

There are some new ARW-file types now but it might succeed at least with the Lossy compressed files because these we have also in A7 III.

Why has smaller camera manufacturers found Adobe DNG sufficient as a RAW-format when Sony, Canon, Nikon and Fuji hasn´t. We have talked about this since Michael Friedman at Luminous Landscape lifted this issue around 2005 but nothing happens. Why are we still in this mess? Isn´t it about time now that we get a common RAW-file standard that all manufacturers and photographers can relate to and use. We need to concentrate on more vital issues than these pseudo problems. A standard like that should save a lot of costs for the manufacturers and save the users from a lot of inconveniences and irritating non necessary incompatibility issues.

When there is none ISO-standard for RAW to lean on we can at least try to use DNG that is open to use for everyone. The de facto standard setting company in this business has a long time been Adobe. They have already given us TIFF, PDF and XMP for the metadata. Why can´t we trust them with DNG for our RAW?? Many museeums have already standardised on DNG and they are supposed to preserve our cultural heritages for ever. If they trust DNG why can´t the rest of us??

I just downloaded a nice and free hexeditor called “HxD” and tested to change all the three RAW-formats A7 IV supports, uncompressed, lossless and lossy. Lossless is new and is not a part of the RAW-support in A7 III.

From what I can see the only thing I needed to do was to change “ILCE-7M4” to “ILCE-7M3” in two places in the hexcodes of the images with “Search and Replace”. in order to get the A7 IV RAW-files to work with Photolab 5.

All the things that that normally are open with RAW in Photolab like Deep Prime and Lens Correction sharpening works perfectly fine as does the profiles for the lens used.

So what is the big thing they have to do at DXO to fix this when these cameras seems to have very close properties. And all I really have to do is change the model code in the hex code of the images to get it to work fully to my liking. … and what is so important for Sony when supporting different ARW-flavors for different models when these different ARW-flavors doesn´t seem to differ almost at all?

I´m not taking any responsibility if you start using this technique in production and it fucks up your database. I have just shown you an example of how this works - or why it doesn´t to be more precise.

A lossy compressed Sony A7 IV image slightly converted to the A7 III image hexformat. After this minor tweek it was possible to work with my A7IV-files in Photolab 5 in exactly the same manners as if it had been an A7III-file.

The image shows an unfriendly and wet south harbor in Vaxholm Sweden just after a heavy rain. The difference from the summer is striking because Vaxholm use to get around one miljon visitors a year normally and most of them during a very short summer. Vaxholm it is the gateway to the 30 000 islands outside Stockholm in the Stockholm Archipelago, that stretches about 200 kilometers from north to south.

Personally I think that what the camera manufactures forces us to put up with is a bad joke.

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Good morning @Stenis ,

Camera delivery and support is a question to @Marie. Let me draw her attention.

Regards,
Svetlana G.

Hello,

Support of Sony A7 IV RAW files is planned in March.

Regards,
Marie

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Bonjour Marie,

Deux questions :

  • serait-il envisageable d’ajouter les dates prévisionnelles dans la liste des appareils supportés sur votre site DxO.com ? (évidemment, pour ne pas générer de frustration il faut que les dates soient assez fiables). Il y a en effet des demandes récurrentes, sur le forum, sur les dates de mise à disposition des profils ; j’ai moi-même fait une demande sur DxO.com pour un objectif (sans grand espoir, il doit être assez peu utilisé : Laowa 50 mm macro pour MFT)
  • sans dévoiler de secrets, serait-il possible que vous nous expliquiez comment vous procédez pour intégrer un appareil ou un objectif aux profils de PL ?

Merci

Cdt

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@Marie : I know but your competitors has fixed this in Lightroom and Capture One in December. March is way to slow to be acceptable!

I suggest you change this control in Photolab that prevents us from opening RAW-files without camera profiles. Be aware of that there is people that choose to open their RAW-files even in Photolab without any automation activated since they themselves want to be in control.

As I have shown above you can let us use an A7III profile instead of a nonpresent A7 IV-profile. Sometimes Photolab makes mistake too with recognizing the equipment like lenses and suggests a Canon-lens instead of a Sigma for example.

We just need to get in! As long as we can get in we’ll manage and know how to handle the job. Closing us out like you do will force professional photographers to look elsewhere for a converter.

Imagine a pro decides to buy an A7IV, do you really think a person like that who has to get up and running directly can wait 3 or 4 months for you to make a profile? … a profile that doesn’t need to bee any different than the one for the previous version A7III to work perfectly fine. What is it that takes you so long to fix?

Suggestion: Even if it’s pretty easy to change the hexcode in my A7IV-files as I have shown you above it’s not a solution I like. It would be far better to be able to open these files in the same way as Windows lets us run old software in a “compatibility mode”. So instead of rejecting my A7IV-files you could open a dialogue box and let me “emulate” an A7III-profile by letting me select that camera in a drop down box instead or just let me in. You need a logic that uses a profile I select if there is no matching profile and use the right profile when you have made one.

As it’s now it’s totally unacceptable. I know this isn’t really your fault that the camera manufacturers still use proprietary RAW-formats but you could easily help us a lot if you open a way to handle the problem in the mean time we are waiting for a matching profile. In doing so you will be able to give us a feature your competition not really have and make Photolab even more useful to your customers instead of forcing them to look for other software that happens to get updated far more rapidly than yours.

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Unfortunately, the major camera manufacturers seem to believe they have a competitive edge by keeping things proprietary (more ‘stickiness’ to try to keep users stuck on their brand). I suspect it would be to their collective advantage to go the standardization route, but there isn’t much evidence they’re considering it.

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@jch2103 : Still it’s not really obvious what a manufacturer like Sony gains when they in the reality creates a unique RAW-variant for every single camera they make. Or maybe they are just not aware fully of the problems their habits are causing downstream in the workflow. Sure, their own converter Imaging Edge, which isn´t bad, will support A7IV-files from day one, but that is of no use for people who has decided to stick with Photolab instead.

I also have hard to understand why DXO is doing what they are doing with these profiles. The difference between an A7 III and an A7IV-file is minimal. An A7IV-profile will give us a slightly different starting point in Photolab but from that startingpoint most people will still change the image to their personal preferences, så what’s the point to be as rigid as DXO is in this matter?

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Here you can see the differences in the metadata between A7IV and A7III. Despite these differences I haven’t experienced any praktical problems opening an A7IV-file in Photolab with the profile for A7III. That’s why I think it would serve us well if DXO could make it possible even to open and work with RAW-files lacking kamera profiles

A7 IV

    <ID make="Sony" model="ILCE-7M4">Sony ILCE-7M4</ID>

    <CFA width="2" height="2">

        <Color x="0" y="0">RED</Color>

        <Color x="1" y="0">GREEN</Color>

        <Color x="0" y="1">GREEN</Color>

        <Color x="1" y="1">BLUE</Color>

    </CFA>

    <Crop x="0" y="0" width="-10" height="0"/>

    <Sensor black="512" white="16383"/>

    <ColorMatrices>

        <ColorMatrix planes="3">

            <ColorMatrixRow plane="0">7460 -2365 -588</ColorMatrixRow>

            <ColorMatrixRow plane="1">-5687 13442 2474</ColorMatrixRow>

            <ColorMatrixRow plane="2">-624 1156 6584</ColorMatrixRow>

        </ColorMatrix>

    </ColorMatrices>

</Camera>

A7 III

    <ID make="Sony" model="ILCE-7M3">Sony ILCE-7M3</ID>

    <CFA width="2" height="2">

        <Color x="0" y="0">RED</Color>

        <Color x="1" y="0">GREEN</Color>

        <Color x="0" y="1">GREEN</Color>

        <Color x="1" y="1">BLUE</Color>

    </CFA>

    <Crop x="0" y="0" width="0" height="0"/>

    <Sensor black="512" white="16300"/>

    <ColorMatrices>

        <ColorMatrix planes="3">

            <ColorMatrixRow plane="0">7374 -2389 -551</ColorMatrixRow>

            <ColorMatrixRow plane="1">-5435 13162 2519</ColorMatrixRow>

            <ColorMatrixRow plane="2">-1006 1795 6552</ColorMatrixRow>

        </ColorMatrix>

    </ColorMatrices>

</Camera>

@Marie and @sgospodarenko

I got a very interesting link from a friend that is also using Sony A7 III. In this link below Dpreview makes a review of Adobe Camera RAW 13 vs Sonys free converter Imaging Edge 3.0.

Adobe Camera Raw vs. Sony Imaging Edge Desktop: Which is your best bet?: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

Don´t miss out on the user comments. In these some Sony-users are complaning over the lousy support ACR has for the parameters the users have set in their Sony-cameras. What ACR just ignores but Imaging Edge doesn´t are for example the styles used that Sony calls “Creative Looks” (and the setting made in these styles like sharpness, contrast, saturation … and DRO (Dynamic Range Optimizing) just to name a few. If the photographer has selected BW (black and white) they will still get a color image. So ACR just ignores a lot of the settings the photographer might have done.

Imaging Edge is pretty strong converter today and it´s so good as a tethering tool now, even supporting wireless tethering, that I myself has decided never to upgrade my Capture One 20 again, that I mainly has been using for tethering.

Please also observe a really important point in this discussion:
Imaging Edge has had support for A7 IV RAW (ARW) from day one!!!

So DXO can´t afford lagging like you do with the support for Sony RAW or continue to locking us out from our DXO RAW-converter tools just because you have not managed to fix a profile yet for A7 IV-files or what ever comes in the future.

If you don´t solve these problems promptly and for good, you might even risk that some of your more impatient present Sony-users will migrate to a pretty decent and free alternative like Imaging Edge that always will support their Sony RAW from day one, once their cameras hit the market.

I say this as a warm friend:

DXO, the clock is ticking and the ball is yours now!

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Agree! I don’t see that either.

If there is somebody who wants to try a working macro that changes one camera version code with another in the HEX Editor “HxD”, I have a working makro now for the macro recorder named just “Macro Recorder”. The free version has a limitation at 10 files at the time but you have just to wait a few seconds to run it again or pay yhe price for the full version. The macro is resonably fast if you empty the check boxes as in the dump below.

Macro_5 replace.zip (1.2 KB)

Make sure the first row of the script is selected when you start.

The only thing you need to do before you start is placing the HEX editors window in the upper left corner of your screen and open the HEX Editor HxD:s “Replace”-dialog and type in the values of the camera codes (look in one of the respective files) in the editor first so you get it right.

Then place the open Macro Recorder -window to the right of the Editor, import the macro file and open the paly back window and fill in the speed and repeat values before testing running the macro. Start with a small sample of say five files in a separate folder first.

You might have to change the mouse positions x - y numbers in the Macro Recorder if it doesn´t work for you since it´s relative. The position of the “Mouse left click” shall be in the middle of the “Replace all” button in the “Replace”-pop up dialog.

I have tested it myself on about 70-80 files yesterday that I switched from ILCE-7M4 to ILCE-7M3 several times back and forward to optimize the script and clear it from wait states of different kind. Than I processed the images converted to ILCE-7M3 and it worked fine for me. The experince developing didn’t differ anything to developing ordinary files from my A7 III.

It ought to work with any kind of RAW that isn’t encrypted.

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https://forum.dxo.com/t/photolab-5-color-rendering-picks-w

When it comes to the restrictions we have been talking about in Photolab when it comes to not reading non supported RAW-files this is kind of strange, isn’t it?

If I understood this right Photolab is in this case referring to another camera than the one the images are taken with.

Reading what DXO:s @Marie is writing in the other tread I linked to made me totally confused. I just can’t understand why I can’t open an “unsupported” fileformat like an ARW from my A7IV or Nikon Z9-RAW when you are allowed for example to select an A7III-file color rendering for say an A7II ARW.

I can’t even imagine how you possibly will be able to explain this for me when it’s not even possible for me to open an A7IV RAW. This is really getting more and more weird.

It’s really late now so I guess I’m too tired too.

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Hi, today is already 24th March. Still no sign. I wonder why it is so difficult to add a new camera model. The A7iv has been out since last year. Really disappointed.

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It will come with the V5.2 probably next week

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It is really high time now! Tomorrow is April 1st, meaning Q2 of 2022. Then, why is the promised update v5.2 that will include also Sony A7 IV in DxO PhotoLab still missing? It should be published by now, according to the best informed people. This is not only one of today's absolute top mirrorless cameras, it is actually one of the most advanced consumer cameras available, also very useful for professionals that do not like to spend a fortune on the most expensive equipments if not necessary.

Every A7 IV body sent out in this time of semi-conductor shortage gets immediately bought by eagerly waiting photo enthusiasts. In this situation it is incredible that the inclusion of some and new easily added data into PL has become such a long-lasting story of waiting and torn hair. Please, come on now!

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As a result of last minute changes to PL 5.2 the release was recently rescheduled for April. Based on my understanding, it will likely be in early April. My guess, and it’s only an educated guess, is that it might be available as early ss next Wednesday. But, of course, it could be later.

Mark

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Hello,

Release of PhotoLab 5.2 was done on April 7th, sorry for the delay, support of Sony A7 IV is part of it.

Regards,
Marie

Thank you Marie. I have installed and tested it and it seems to work now.