I have the problem that my camera (Panasonic Lumix GX880 is yet not in the database. There is the almost identical GX800, but PhotoLab does not develop the pictures since the camera model is considered as unknown. When looking around in several forums that seems a fairly common problem - users ask for possibilities to change the camera model in the exif data only to outsmart PhotoLab. Looking into the results there are solutions for jpg but for raw pictures things are getting difficult. It would be much easier to tell PhotoLab to treat camera model xxx as camera model yyy (as long as camera model xxx is unkown…). This should be fairly simple to implement and helpful for many users of new camera models. If this is not in accordance with the strategy of dxo (users of new camera models shall by the new version of PhotoLab…) this feature could be available only as long as the camera model is not supported even by the newest version of PhotoLab.
I’ve long been asking/hoping for some kind of generic raw file support for years. Apple’s Aperture had this, where it would let you work with DNGs from unsupported cameras. You’d then get an optimized raw conversion once Apple shipped official support.
Something like this is very important with PL because there are plenty of cameras from years ago that are unsupported, and it’s unlikely that DXO will be buying old ones off eBay and profiling them.
Are you talking about RAW files that PhotoLab is unable to read, or files it can read but does not have an Optics Module for?
In terms of the former, many very similar cameras have completely different RAW formats, even though they may use the same file extension. If PhotoLab allowed the user to freely “map” one camera to another it might help some people where the RAW formats are identical, but it’d also potentially open up a support nightmare as people try stuff and end up with weird output at best or errors at worst.
One option you may have until support is provided for an unsupported RAW format is Adobe’s free DNG converter. If that supports it (and presuming it’s not something weird like the Fuji X range) then it can convert to DNG and PhotoLab can read the DNG — though you’re then not going to have an Optics Module.
In my case PhotoLab is able to read the RAW files (they can be viewed), but there are no Optics Modules for them. According to my research in the internet the camera is quasi identical to the predecessor GX800 (same sensor, …) and the lenses are of cause the same. In principle it would be sufficient to change the EXIF data from GX880 to GX800 and PhotoLab would do the job. But that’s not that simple for RAW files - the most convenient one for me is to do it with an editor (vi), which I can also do automatically in a batch job (then I use edlin). I tried it and this workaround works for me. On the other hand I realized that I am not the only one with this problem and thought the requested feature would be a benefit for many.
It seems to me that a general feature could open a can of worms and the smarter approach for DxO would be to research or contact the manufacturer to confirm the real equivalence of the two models’ RAW files and if found to be the same, then it should be simple to add a new Optics Module suite for it.