Quick suggestion - I had a pretty modern Panasonic camera set to ouput HEIF files. It saved them with a .HIF extension. I had to convert it to JPG to post in a message here because that file extension is not allowed, though I notice .heic is. Maybe HEIF are getting more popular. Trying out this camera, was the first time I think I ran across one. I guess iPhones are using it now also, but their proprietary container is .heic, based on the brief research that I did.
Happy to add .heif but I’d guess that the out of camera file is larger than we’d generally want for posting here.
The .HIF files are not that big -
Max res (5400x3600): ~5.1 - 5.4 MB
Low res (1920x1280): ~1.5 MB
That’s straight off the memory card.
Small for a SooH (?), but too big for here unless you want people to edit it, but I’d think they’d still prefer a raw file.
Added hif to the list of extensions.
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The HEIF ( same as HIF) format can potentially provide 16 bit pixel depth per channel, same as most RAW formats. However camera support is not there yet. And software to decode at that depth nonexistent. At this time loading a HIEF results in a 8 bit per channel depth image. Can’t compete with Raw in most cases.
I still believe that standard HEIF will replace at some point the multitude of RAW formats… We’ll see, time will tell.
Why? A dump of the sensor data is exactly what I want. I wish vendors would just use dng or establish another standard format so we could stop all the reverse engineering, but that’s about it.
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Well that was the idea behind DNG and that didn’t wipe out propriety RAW formats. But as you say time will tell and I find hindsight is always crystal clear so lets see what happens.
As I said, before a few days ago I was unfamiliar with HEIF files. I got excited when I read about them in the camera’s manual:
Record HEIF images with the wide dynamic range of the HLG format.
You can record in very bright light where overexposure can occur or in dark areas where underexposure can occur, maintaining the rich yet subtle colors you can see with your naked eye. Recorded HEIF images can be played back on devices that support HLG format for viewing.• HLG (Hybrid Log Gamma) is a tone curve (gamma curve) format for HDR images.
HLG format HEIF images
• Compression format: HEVC
• Color sampling: 4:2:0
• Bit value: 10 bit
Extra bit depth, decent compression? I was excited. Sounded like a promising middle ground between JPG’s 8-bits and a raw file. But when I loaded the 10-bit files, the colors were flat, like an undeveloped raw. I wasn’t sure if that was because my monitor is 8-bits sRGB, or because my viewers (Gwenview and GIMP) couldn’t interpret the colors correctly or what.
Another interesting thing was that I could switch between 8-bit color in the HEIFs and the 10-bits. But when the 10-bits are active, the minimum ISO goes from 100 ISO to 250 ISO. Between that and the color issue, I wound up leaving it at 8 bits.
I rented the camera for a week to try it out so didn’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole for something I may not use in the future.
I wonder if that may only be to provide more room for recording highlights. The camera would use a shorter exposure or slower f-stop to get the same level of midtones.
Can you expose for ISO 100 and then process a raw in-camera to reverse the exposure compensation and output a hif? I sometimes do this when I shoot stills in Panasonic V-log so I can use Spektrafilm luts in-camera, but I don’t always want to use such a low exposure that the adjusted high base ISO would require. (Base ISO in v-log becomes 500 for one of my cameras and 640 in the other).
According to Nikon’s documentation, you need proper monitors.
They definitely look good on an XDR. I’m not entirely sure what happens when you share them and they are automatically converted to sRGB jpegs.
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