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Hi asd123,

Welcome to the forums :)

Are you using the Mac or Windows version of the software please?

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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  • Staff

Thanks for confirming that, unfortunately the M50 - and in extension .CR3 files - aren't currently supported by Affinity for Windows, however on Mac you have access to a separate RAW engine which does support these files.

We're looking to bring M50/CR3 support to Affinity Windows asap, but we have no timescale for this currently, apologies!

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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Thanks for the response Dan even though its not very satisfactory.  M50 was released over a year ago, Canon R series now released, using same RAW format with probably all new Canon releases using same and Serif have no timescale for offering a solution.  Come on. You set yourselves up as an alternative to Adobe but do not offer same levels of support. Perhaps a disclaimer on your web site would be in order to the effect that we can not support everything RAW in the marketplace today.

I have no idea, nor care, about the complexities involved in providing support for CR3 but would at least expect a roadmap to be in place for your existing and future users to be able to see.

I am now aware that I can convert CR3 files into DNG format which Affinity photo can recognise, using an Adobe product.  Again I'm not aware of the technicalities that allow this but why cant Serif do this??.

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3 hours ago, asd123 said:

I am now aware that I can convert CR3 files into DNG format which Affinity photo can recognise, using an Adobe product.  Again I'm not aware of the technicalities that allow this but why cant Serif do this??.

Strange as it may seem, RAW file extensions like cr2, cr3, nef, orf, etc. don't define a single RAW file format but instead a family of them, up to one format for each camera model from the camera maker that uses that extension. Thus, RAW file support is in any app on a per camera model basis, & sometimes even a minor revision of a model that does not change the model name may require yet another addition to the app to handle it properly.

Even stranger, most camera makers like Canon or Nikon treat the details of this plethora of formats as proprietary & do not make them available to other companies like both Adobe & Serif. This means it can take a significant amount of reverse engineering to add support for a new camera model (or a revision of an existing one). To do this right takes a lot of work, including extensive testing of sample images made with that specific camera. Complicating things even more, different camera-lens combinations have different characteristics, so the apps need support for that as well.

That in turn requires obtaining the camera & a set of lenses for it (or at least a lot of sample files from that camera system), a lab with the appropriate testing instrumentation, a good testing methodology adaptable to whatever changes camera makers might make in new models, & of course enough time to sort everything out & make sure it all works in situ in the app without interfering with support for any other camera model.

Obviously I hope, Adobe is a large enough company (& makes enough profit) to be able to absorb the considerable costs of doing this without passing any of them on to consumers. By comparison, Serif is a tiny company that can't do the same thing, so as a few other companies do, they rely on a customized version of the LensFun library for part of this.

So the answer to your question is that they could do this like Adobe does, but it is unlikely they could do it without charging their customers a premium for that & still make enough profit to keep the doors open.

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15 hours ago, R C-R said:

Even stranger, most camera makers like Canon or Nikon treat the details of this plethora of formats as proprietary & do not make them available to other companies like both Adobe & Serif.

I have been baffled by camera companies' behaviour regarding this since the electric cameras came to my my attention years ago. What do they hope to achieve by it.

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I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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2 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

I have been baffled by camera companies' behaviour regarding this since the electric cameras came to my my attention years ago. What do they hope to achieve by it.

My guess is they want to support only their own RAW developing software & not be bothered with support questions about issues with 3rd party ones, & possibly in selling more advanced versions of their own stuff to users that didn't get it for free with their camera purchase.

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  • 7 months later...
7 hours ago, Miguel Angel Quintero said:

It's 2020 and affinity don't process .cr3 !

The 1.8.x beta versions of AP already do, but it may be some time before a stable retail version is released.

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On 5/15/2019 at 3:54 PM, Old Bruce said:

I have been baffled by camera companies' behaviour regarding this since the electric cameras came to my my attention years ago. What do they hope to achieve by it.

I have been baffled by software companies' behaviour regarding proprietary file formats since personal computers came to my attention years ago. - What do these hope to achieve by it.

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On 5/15/2019 at 6:18 PM, R C-R said:

My guess is they want to support only their own RAW developing software & not be bothered with support questions about issues with 3rd party ones, & possibly in selling more advanced versions of their own stuff to users that didn't get it for free with their camera purchase.

Nope!

As an example for the Nikon Electronic Format (NEF), see that they also offer public accessable related developer SDKs for various aspects of their cameras etc., like NEF/NRW file format reading or camera remote controlling. Further influential software companies, with market-dominating products (for example Adobe, C1, Apple, MS etc.) have here even completely different, more advanced access and cooperation options and thus possibilities in terms of using newer none public SDKs. The same applies to Canon, Sony etc. and their cam products. - All in all camera manufactors have an interest in it, that their products are overall good and well supported also by third party software products, at least here by the major big players in the software domain/field. - Nobody buys a cam that isn't supported by any major software product and thus only lives in it's niche market world. Such cameras will then sell poorly in large quantities on the market and will therefore hardly make a profit and justify the production costs.

Though there are also certain aspects which manufactors don't make explicetely public (be it in hardware or in code), so that the competition does not get a too deep insight into some used technology, or more advanced custom offered features/solutions. - Pretty much the same as with specific software which has unique selling points and advantages over their software competition (things the others don't offer), or as with specific own proprietary file formats which they keep unspecified secret etc.

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34 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

As an example for the Nikon Electronic Format (NEF), see that they also offer public accessable related developer SDKs for various aspects of their cameras etc., like NEF/NRW file format reading or camera remote controlling.

True, but Nikon rather infamously also goes to great lengths to make it very difficult for third parties to decrypt & use certain aspects of their proprietary in-camera RAW processors, & of course all the major camera makers are free to add new features at any time & either not document them at all or omit critical details they think might give the competition too much info.

Besides, even with all its market clout Adobe has been remarkably unsuccessful in convincing most of the major players to adopt the DNG format, even though it was designed to be extensible & to support strong encryption of some proprietary info.

Basically it is pretty simple: protecting whatever they consider to be proprietary technology that gives them a real or perceived advantage in the market trumps everything else. :(

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39 minutes ago, R C-R said:

True, but Nikon rather infamously also goes to great lengths to make it very difficult for third parties to decrypt & use certain aspects of their proprietary in-camera RAW processors

 
In its NEF format, Nikon uses partially encrypted information within the file, which programmers can, however, automatically decrypt in their own applications with the mentioned SDK, which is available free of charge BTW. At the end of 2005 Nikon disclosed the encrypted white balance information, which means that since then even non-Nikon software can decrypt that data. However, since the NEF format is also used for film scanners and their long time own image processing software, it can also contain processing steps and other settings in addition to the actual image data. Some film scanners are equipped with an infrared channel for dust and scratch removal. The HDRi raw data format can record this infrared raw data as an additional 16-bit channel. - So their NEF format is quite complex in some aspects, further it also contains Nikon specifics like D-Lighting, picture control settings, scene mode data etc. which other common third party software usually don't have clues about and can't/won't make use off.
 
Things are similar in the Canon world here, they also have and offer an Canon EOS SDK and their RAW format also contains Canon specifics, though varies much more among their different camera models.
 
58 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Besides, even with all its market clout Adobe has been remarkably unsuccessful in convincing most of the major players to adopt the DNG format, even though it was designed to be extensible & to support strong encryption of some proprietary info.

Well DNG has not only advantages, but also some disadvantages. First of all cameras with native DNG support are rare. And since the big cam players had and established their own vendor specific RAW formats long time ago/before, software which deals only with the DNG format needs the individual image processing process which must be then supplemented by the intermediate step of the conversion (aka NEF or CR2/3 to DNG). Further those rare cameras with DNG support also often do not fully implement the DNG format (for example, no lossless compression, limited or incomplete creation of metadata etc.). Another point is converters, beside Adobe's converter I actually know only that digiKam can convert those too. - Another point might be that companies would then also have another greater dependence on Adobe here.

And of course every company also want's to protect their own technologies, knowledge and main market interests.

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1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

So their NEF format is quite complex in some aspects, further it also contains Nikon specifics like D-Lighting, picture control settings, scene mode data etc. which other common third party software usually don't have clues about and can't/won't make use off.

Yes, that is an excellent example of the kind of proprietary technology I was referring to. :)

As for adoption of DNG as an alternative to the many & ever changing proprietary RAW file formats, Adobe has gone to great lengths to fully document, maintain, & update every aspect of the format & to make all that info freely available to anyone. It includes support for proprietary data & its safe preservation; a variety of tags that greatly simplify the challenges of cataloging, classifying, uniquely identifying photos, & otherwise managing digital image assets (including comprehensive rights management); & even provides optional levels of compliance for those who do not want to fully commit to adopting it.

AFAIK, It is the only RAW format that even comes close to meeting the needs of both vendors & end users, & is flexible enough to continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

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2 hours ago, R C-R said:

AFAIK, It is the only RAW format that even comes close to meeting the needs of both vendors & end users, & is flexible enough to continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

While that may be true, DNG is really only a container for the information, and all the applications would still need special coding for the additional vendor- and camera-specific information contained in the DNG file. So it isn't an complete cure for any problem, as each new camera, or each new firmware release, would still require software changes from everyone if they want to support the new information.

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12 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

While that may be true, DNG is really only a container for the information, and all the applications would still need special coding for the additional vendor- and camera-specific information contained in the DNG file.

I suspect if the camera makers adopted DNG as their native RAW format, there would be far less need for any special coding than you might think. It already includes comprehensive support for camera-specific information & provides several different ways that can be implemented, including provisions for including more than one of them in the same file.

Basically, it just provides a uniform set of standards that greatly simplifies how post-processing software can identify & use whatever data the file might contain, including what that software can or should safely ignore, modify, or leave untouched. It doesn't even require camera makers to share anything they don't want to with anybody else.

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Another DNG disadvantage that one shouldn't keep silent ...

  • Backing Up – Saving changes to a DNG format means having to create a new DNG file. With RAW files, they have XMP sidecar files that make the saving of edited images faster.

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6 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Another DNG disadvantage that one shouldn't keep silent ...

  • Backing Up – Saving changes to a DNG format means having to create a new DNG file. With RAW files, they have XMP sidecar files that make the saving of edited images faster.

I once got bit by choosing to have the sidecar files hidden in the finder (made for a cleaner looking file structure) and backed up by selecting the raw files and copying them to the new hard drive with the result being that all my edits were lost. Live and learn, I should have used the program to copy and not the finder.

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I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Another DNG disadvantage that one shouldn't keep silent ...

  • Backing Up – Saving changes to a DNG format means having to create a new DNG file. With RAW files, they have XMP sidecar files that make the saving of edited images faster.

Are you sure about that?  It's been a while since I used LR, but I saved all my files as DNG and there were associated XMP files.

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16 minutes ago, IanSG said:

Are you sure about that?  It's been a while since I used LR, but I saved all my files as DNG and there were associated XMP files.

LR but what's with rest of the RAW converter software world, those who support it? - I think this page here gives a good short overview of DNG:

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17 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

LR but what's with rest of the RAW converter software world, those who support it?

I don't know!  I've always treated DNG as a RAW file format, and my only experience has been with LR (uses XMP sidecars with DNG), RAWTherapee (uses pp3 sidecars with DNG) and AP (doesn't use sidecars).  

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19 minutes ago, IanSG said:

I don't know!  I've always treated DNG as a RAW file format, and my only experience has been with LR (uses XMP sidecars with DNG), RAWTherapee (uses pp3 sidecars with DNG) and AP (doesn't use sidecars).  

Looks like other software follows that Adobe LR route too nowadays, at least those writings here suggerate that ...

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3 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Another DNG disadvantage that one shouldn't keep silent ...

  • Backing Up – Saving changes to a DNG format means having to create a new DNG file. With RAW files, they have XMP sidecar files that make the saving of edited images faster.

Huh? XMP sidecar files are created, read, & maintained after the fact by various editing applications. They are not an inherent part of any of the myriad of proprietary RAW file formats themselves. They are useful for saving edits made by those apps but as one of your links mentioned, DNG is a superior backup/archival format, in part because it is an open standard, & also because DNG files tend to be smaller than the original raw files while still retaining all the raw image data within the file itself.

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