raw to dng to tiff to tiff

[elliotnewmam]

My current process for raw image conversion is as follows:

.raw -> [dng converter] -> .dng -> [dcraw] -> .tiff -> [exiftool] -> .tiff -> rvio -> .exr

It's a lengthy process, the reason I am doing this is as follows:

dng converter to use linear dng debayering. dcraw to convert dng to tiff without converting colour. rvio to convert to exr as this is the preferred file format I need to work with.

I am having to deploy exifTool to copy metadata from the dng back into the tiff as dcraw kills pretty much all the metadata I need. I wonder if there is a way to encapsulate part of this process and perhaps copy the metadata into memory during the dcraw process so I don't have to essentially write the tiff file twice over?

Many thanks,
Elliot Newman.

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Elliot,

2 possibilities:

1) Pipe the dcraw output through ExifTool (dcraw -c ... FILE.dng | exiftool -tagsfromfile ... - > out.tiff)

2) Use a RAM disk.

- Phil

[elliotnewmam]

Perfect. Thanks Phil, I will go with the pipe method, seems to work fine.

[elliotnewmam]

I managed to get the following working with an existing dng file:

dcraw ... file.dng | exiftool -tagsfromfile ... out.tiff

I wonder how much more I could leverage the pipe command? When I try and encompass a greater scope of my conversion chain, I don't get much luck:

Adobe DNG Converter ... file.raw | dcraw ... file.dng | exiftool -tagsfromfile ... out.tiff | rvio ... in.tiff out.exr

ERROR: No files in sequence EM1A0065.tiff (0)

I get a .dng file, but it seems to error at the exiftool step as it's expecting a .tiff that it cannot find, this should be generated from the dcraw step as above.

[Phil Harvey]

For ExifTool, you read from the console using a file name of "-".   See the PIPING EXAMPLES in the application documentation.

- Phil