New Year, New Raw Samples Website

PIXLS.US
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![](upload://ldYObvxMUrZN12mylyVoG8NT4bb.jpeg)

New Year, New Raw Samples Website

A replacement for rawsamples.ch

Happy New Year, and I hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday!

We’ve been busy working on various things ourselves, including migrating RawPedia to a new server as well as building a replacement raw sample database/website to alleviate the problems that rawsamples.ch was having…

rawsamples.ch Replacement

Rawsamples.ch is a website with the goal to:

…provide RAW-Files of nearly all available Digitalcameras mainly to software-developers. [sic]

It was created by Jakob Rohrbach and had been running since March 2007, having amassed over 360 raw files in that time from various manufacturers and cameras. Unfortunately, back in 2016 the site was hit with a SQL-injection that ended up corrupting the database for the Joomla install that hosted the site. To compound the pain, there were no database backups… :(

On the good side, the PIXLS.US community has some dangerous folks with idle hands. Our friendly, neighborhood @andabata (Kees Guequierre) had some time off at the end of the year and a desire to build something. You may know @andabata as the fellow responsible for the super-useful dtstyle website, which is chock full of darktable styles to peruse and download (if you haven’t heard of it before – you’re welcome!). He’s also my go-to for macro photography and is responsible for this awesome image used on a slide for the Libre Graphics Meeting:

![PIXLS.US LGM Slide](upload://aSME1nYgyOt0GTa1Mx1C4V6uVgV.jpeg)

Luckily, he decided to build a site where contributors could upload sample raw files from their cameras for everyone to use – particularly developers. We downloaded the archive of the raw files kept at rawsamples.ch to include with files that we already had. The biggest difference between the files from rawsamples.ch and raw.pixls.us is the licensing. The existing files, and the preference for any new contributions, are licensed as Creative Commons Zero - Public Domain (as opposed to CC-BY-NC-SA).

After some hacking, with input and guidance from darktable developer Roman Lebedev, the site was finally ready. The repository for it can be found on GitHub: raw.pixls.us repo.

raw.pixls.us

The site is now live at https://raw.pixls.us.

You can look at the submitted files and search/sort through all of them (and download the ones you want).

In addition to browsing the archive, it would be fantastic if you were able to supplement the database by uploading sample images. Many of the files from the rawsamples.ch archive are licensed CC-BY-NC-SA, but we’d rather have the files licensed Creative Commons Zero - Public Domain. CC0 is preferable because if the sample raw files are separated from the database, they can safely be redistributed without attribution. So if you have a camera that is already in the list with the more restrictive license, then please consider uploading a replacement for us!

We are looking for shots that are:

  • Lens mounted on the camera
  • Lens cap off
  • In focus
  • Properly exposed (not over/under)
  • Landscape orientation
  • Licensed under the Creative Commons Zero

We are not looking for:

  • Series of images with different ISO, aperture, shutter, wb, or lighting
    (Even if it’s a shot of a color target)
  • DNG files created with Adobe DNG Converter

Please take a moment and see if you can provide samples to help the developers!

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://pixls.us/blog/2017/01/new-year-new-raw-samples-website/
4 Likes
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Do you care if it’s using an adapted lens and appears to be f/0 in the metadata?

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I’ll defer to @andabata or @LebedevRI on specifics of what they’d like to see.

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Just my two cents: Having special samples from manual lenses (additionally to samples from chipped lenses) is useful for the case you can dial in lens parameters in camera and want your raw converter to show them. The only case I know of is using manual lenses on (semi-)pro Nikon cameras. For rt I implemented this functionality long ago (because I mostly use manual lenses on Nikon). Don’t know whether this is supported by other converters or planned to support.

5

I don’t really care to be honest. As it was said already (i think it was?), there should be just one sample. I explicitly do NOT want more than one sample per camera unless the raw format is somehow different. DIfferent lens do not count.

I.e. [quote=“system, post:1, topic:3057”]
We are not looking for:
[/quote]
should maybe also state that samples with different lens are not wanted.

1 Like
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shouldn’t this rather be stated (along with the list from this post) on the rpu page also?

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The user has to agree that “The file is manually copied from card/camera, without using any software like Nikon Transfer.”

But the user does not have to agree that they didn’t modify the file after copying it from the camera. I’m surprised. You will receive files that have been modified on the PC to include GPS data, date-time shifts, and other metadata changes, as rawsamples.ch did.

8

Yes.

sigh i think i did suggest that, but i guess it was lost, not this time! :slight_smile:

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I’m struggling a bit about the definition of “properly” exposed. First of all it probably means no clipped highlights and shadows.
However, many cameras provide features that allow to deal with high contrasts (DR stuff in fuji cameras or ADL for Nikon and whatever it is called by other vendors). Since these features influence the light metering of the camera, the histogram of these raw files appears to be shifted to the left. This may be considered as under exposure, but it is actually correct and intentionally meant to be corrected in post processing. The relevant parameters that allow to detect the use of these features (and probably also allow an automatic compensation) should be noted in the meta data (at least in case of a Fuji X-E2, exiv2 was able to read them).
So my question is: Should it be avoided to provide samples, which make use of such dynamic range features? Or is there any interest in series that show different settings of these features?

11

I was trying to say that it should not be a completely black, underexposed image; and not completely white, clipped image. So just a normal picture that you’d keep and use. Other than that, does not matter.

Probably, but it does not deserve being mentioned in “what we do NOT want”.

Absolutely not. The interest for more than one sample per camera is if the raw format is somehow different. E.g. raw size is different, raw crop is different, raw aspect ratio is different, bitness of the data is different, compression is different.

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Thanks for clarification!

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@andabata & @LebedevRI when I visit the new site I get an error popup saying “DataTables warning: table id=repository - Invalid JSON response. For more information about this error, please see http://datatables.net/tn/1” and nothing is loaded into the repository table.

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Fixed, connection with the db was lost.

15

How long does it take from uploading an image to seeing it in the repository?
I ask because I uploaded yesterday a raw sample from my GoPro Hero5 Black and can’t find it now in the repository.

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As soon as @LebedevRI or i validate the sample. I might have been slacking a bit yesterday :slight_smile:

17

Thanks for validating. Perhaps you should add this info to the homepage. I was wondering, if I had made something wrong.

1 Like