Extracting HD jpegs from RAW

[IanNYorks]

Any advice on this one will be gratefully received. I chanced upon a reference to the utility IJFRWin.zip in this forum a few days ago: it's a great little program that enables you to extract the HD jpeg that's contained in every RAW file recorded by the A700. It's this JPEG that makes the RAW file size so large, but enables Sony Bravia HD TVs to automatically display an HD picture from RAW files played back through them by the camera.

If you highlight a group of RAW files and right click on them, IJFRWin provides a menu option to extract the embedded HD JPEGs automatically to a new folder that it creates. I've done this then copied the new folder onto an SD card and put it into the SD card slot on my Panasonic HD TV. I can then see all the extracted HD JPEGs as a slide show on the TV - brilliant!

This is excellent if, like me, you always shoot in RAW, but you'd like to see all the pictures quickly as a high definition slideshow on the TV, but without having to convert them and post process them. The only drawback is that the pictures are all in the 3:2 aspect ratio that I always use and, hence, do not completely fill the 16:9 HD TV screen!

I thought of a solution; why not alter the aspect ratio on the A700 to 16:9, then all the extracted HD JPEGs will be in 16:9 and will fill the TV screen. It works and they do. When you change the aspect ratio on the A700 it doesn't actually alter the RAW file, that's still recorded in 3:2, but it (presumably) puts a flag in the EXIF data to mark the aspect ratio used. I want to retain the 3:2 RAW aspect ratio when I post process the files.

Now DxO appears to take no notice of this EXIF flag and gives me the RAW files to process in the full 3:2 aspect ratio. However, Photoshop CS3 and Bridge, and Lightroom 2.3 do take notice of the EXIF flag and alter the RAW file to 16:9 format, which I don't want.

The question to you all is, therefore, can I make Photoshop and Lightroom ignore this EXIF flag and leave the RAW files in the 3:2 aspect ratio? There is the companion question, I guess, of whether DxO can be made to use the EXIF flag rather than ignoring it (just for completeness).

Any suggestions would be very welcome.

Best wishes

Ian

[David Kilpatrick]

I think if you set ACR/LR etc to build high quality thumbnails and previews and not to use the fast preview you will get access to 3:2 not 16:9. I will try to check this. Maybe I have never shot with 16:9 enabled.

David

[IanNYorks]

Thanks David, just about to leave on holiday, I will try this on my return!

Ian

[Winston]

...It's this JPEG that makes the RAW file size so large...

What makes the file so large is 12.2 MPx. Each takes one or one and a half bytes depending on the format (cRAW/RAW). The jpeg, exif, maker notes, and the rest of the overhead is only about 900k.

[harvey]

I thought of a solution; why not alter the aspect ratio on the A700 to 16:9, then all the extracted HD JPEGs will be in 16:9 and will fill the TV screen. It works and they do. When you change the aspect ratio on the A700 it doesn't actually alter the RAW file, that's still recorded in 3:2, but it (presumably) puts a flag in the EXIF data to mark the aspect ratio used. I want to retain the 3:2 RAW aspect ratio when I post process the files.
Ian

I don't have an A700 but if I did this is what I would try.

Download exiftool and look at two files (one for 3:2 and one for 16:9) to see if you can
spot something that controls the display ratio.
If you find it then you could write that into the file without setting 16:9 in the camera.

And note that exiftool can extract the JPEG for you as well.

(This assumes you can run exiftool on your computer and you are comfortable with command line use and that is not for everyone)