Problem opening Sony RAW files in Sony Imaging Edge software

[ipollen]

Please forgive me if this is not the correct forum...

I cannot view or edit any Sony ARW RAW files in the Sony Imaging Edge software once their metadata has been modified with EXIFTOOL via IMatch DAM, they are reported as possibly corrupted. These same files open perfectly in Lightroom, Capture One,  Camera Raw and Affinity Photo.

Unmodified images straight from the camera open OK.

Any ideas?

Many thanks,

Ian

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Ian,

This is a known problem.

Unfortunately it seems as if the Sony Imaging Edge software is either extremely poorly written (likely), or that they are intentionally excluding modified images from being processed (less likely).  And more unfortunately, I doubt that you would be able to get Sony to fix this, but you should try reporting it to them anyway.  The only alternative at the moment is to use any other raw processing software.

Note that Sony's own IDC software (that Imaging Edge has replaced) doesn't have a problem with these files.

Also note that there have been similar bugs in other software over the years, but that they have eventually been fixed to solve these problems.  However, Sony is one of the least responsive companies I have seen when it comes to addressing problems with their software.

- Phil

[ipollen]

Hi Phil,

Thank you so much for the super fast reply, much appreciated.

I suspected it would be this sort of problem. At least it is a known issue and not something specific to my workflow. I only use Imaging Edge to process multi shot sensor shift images from the A7RIII so not a problem, I can find a workaround in my workflow. Also I believe the developer of Fast RAW Viewer is developing an application to also process these images from the A7RIII.

In my 30+ years of shooting I have never seen a decent piece of software from ANY camera manufacturer.

I have reported the problem to Sony via my Sony Pro Support membership so something may happen... one day ;-)

Thanks again.

Ian

[hk1020]

I've just run into this myself using the latest Imaging Edge Desktop v3.3.0 on Windows.

I've got one question though. Is it possible to remove the part that is causing the problems in Imaging Edge? I'd like to use Imaging Edge because it can reproduce the in camera result almost perfectly. Neither Lightroom and certainly not Capture One do.

Not sure if the following is of any use but I was trying to see what is the difference between the working and the not working version. So I did a

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exiftool -v DSC00001.ARW > out.txt on both files. The funny thing is exiftool warns about three tags being out of sequence in SubIFD in the original file.  There are no warnings in the files written by exiftool. The tags in my case are

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  | | Warning = Tag ID 0x011a XResolution out of sequence in SubIFD
  | | Warning = Tag ID 0x7000 SonyRawFileType out of sequence in SubIFD
  | | Warning = Tag ID 0x0111 StripOffsets out of sequence in SubIFD


[Phil Harvey]

I'm guessing that fixing the order of the entries in the SubIFD isn't the problem.  More likely the Sony software is being lazy and assuming a fixed offset for something rather than looking up the offset in an IFD.  ExifTool does move things around when it rewrites a file.  I've seen this sort of thing before, and if this is the problem there isn't much that may be done.

- Phil