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Converting CR2

Taiyosan
Contributor

Just discovered that the Canon RAW files shot with a Canon 20D in 2005, are no longer openable. (is that a word?) I have a few thousand of them and in '05, '06, etc., i opened them, worked on them in PS and saved them. Now i want to work with some of them and they are not viewable, openable, etc. Not with Canon software, Adobe DNG Converter, etc.. I don't know what to do ... do one of you know what to do? Who to ask? Where to search? Have you had this kinda problem?

 

The larger question, how did 5000 Canon files get corrupted and will that happen again as the years go by (yes, i'm converting them to dng, but not so at that time) ??? i've no idea how to address. Yes, all files are backed up in triplicate but they are copies of the unopenable files - sigh ... all help appreciated.

 

Thank you,

 

Taiyo

41 REPLIES 41

kvbarkley
VIP
VIP

The takeaway here is to save the originals.

 

This sounds like a PS problem, did you ask them?

 

Saving a CR2 after editing with PS is problematic.

 

Which version of DPP are you using to view the files? did you try DPP3?

KV: these are the originals and they are .CR2 - i just checked to be sure and my referance to files not opening are not referring to .tif or .pdf. Specifically, it is the CR2s that i cannot open; am using or trying to use, DPP 4, v 4.5.0.0. Yes, i tried DDP 3 with the same results - they seem to be well and truly corrupted.


@Taiyosan wrote:

KV: these are the originals and they are .CR2 - i just checked to be sure and my referance to files not opening are not referring to .tif or .pdf. Specifically, it is the CR2s that i cannot open; am using or trying to use, DPP 4, v 4.5.0.0. Yes, i tried DDP 3 with the same results - they seem to be well and truly corrupted.


Have you tried it on more than one computer? What operating system are you using?

Bob
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA

Good question and, nope, not tried other computers. Am using a new (1 yr old) Mac Pro with OS 10.11.6; have two other Macs, each using the same OS as this. I think that's an interesting idea and i'll give it a try and learn if computer/OS has any particular effect. Thanks—


@Taiyosan wrote:

Good question and, nope, not tried other computers. Am using a new (1 yr old) Mac Pro with OS 10.11.6; have two other Macs, each using the same OS as this. I think that's an interesting idea and i'll give it a try and learn if computer/OS has any particular effect. Thanks—


There's your problem.  It would seem that Apple's latest OS update is causing issues across the board, not just with Canon software, Adobe software, but for everyone's 3rd party software.  Apple forums are in an uproar.

--------------------------------------------------------
"The right mouse button is your friend."

Except 10.11.6 is El Capitan, not Sierra the latest.

 

And his problem is not that the software is not running, but that it can't read his files.


@kvbarkley wrote:

Except 10.11.6 is El Capitan, not Sierra the latest.

 

And his problem is not that the software is not running, but that it can't read his files.


The Apple OS is the problem. Try browsing their forums. 

 

If the OP has not updated their Canon software, then they should.  I don't think it will help.  It was a new machine, not an OS upgrade, which most likely means old drivers are not installed.  I got the impression that it has never worked on the new laptop.

--------------------------------------------------------
"The right mouse button is your friend."


@Waddizzle wrote:

@kvbarkley wrote:

Except 10.11.6 is El Capitan, not Sierra the latest.

 

And his problem is not that the software is not running, but that it can't read his files.


The Apple OS is the problem. Try browsing their forums. 

 

If the OP has not updated their Canon software, then they should.  I don't think it will help.  It was a new machine, not an OS upgrade, which most likely means old drivers are not installed.  I got the impression that it has never worked on the new laptop.


I'm not sure how you could conclude that the OS is the problem.  I don't think there's enough information to make a determination.  Apple's own Camera RAW support for the operating system claims it still supports RAW files from the 20D.  See:   https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205272

 

Apple's own Camera RAW support is used by Finder (and "Quick Look"), iPhoto, Photos, and Aperture.  There may be other components that use Apple's RAW support to open & view the images.

 

However... Apple's RAW support is NOT used by Canon DPP or Adobe... they provide their own RAW support.

 

Ultimately it helps to understand what a RAW file actually is.

 

The color camera sensor in your camera is ultmately really just a monochrome sensor with a color filter array in front of it.  The filter array used by Canon (and by most camera makers) is a "Bayer Mask".  It's a checkerboard of red, green and blue squares.    When you capture an image, light hits the various color filters.  For example light hitting a "red" filter will end up eliminating blue or green wavelengths of light and only recording the amount of "red" wavelength light for that partiuclar location.  The same is true of the green and blue.  This means you end up with a filter that records how much "red", "green", or "blue" light reached each "photo-site" on the sensor.  These are called "photo-sites" because each light sensitive point is sensitive to only one single color channel.  A true "pixel" would actually have three-channel color (red, green, and blue) which provided a blended hue -- but a RAW file has no blended hues.  The RAW file only stores the mono-chrome photo-site values (they are not blended to create "pixels" yet.)

 

So ultimately the RAW processor understands how to read all the values and create blended 3-channel color for each "pixel" by analyzing the value of the photo-site combined with the values of all of it's neighbor photo-sites on the sensor.  

 

It turns out there's no single "right" way to do this.  If you were to take a RAW file from a camera, and open that very same RAW file using Apple software (and convert it to a TIFF), then do it again with Canon DPP (and convert it to a TIFF), and do it again with Adobe software (and convert that to a TIFF) and then compare all three TIFF files on a pixel-by-pixel comparison, you might expect to have 3 identical TIFF files... but that's not what will happen. Each TIFF file will have slightly different hues for each pixel because they all use their own algorithms to do the RAW conversion.

 

You can use ANY software that can support the 20D's ".CR2" files and it can be on any operating system.

 

Why you cannot open these .CR2 files using any software you've attempted (I'm not sure how many different programs you've tried) is a bit concerning because it might be indicating a more serious problem.

 

Several years ago I had a hard drive which was failing "slowly".  The mechanical heads that have to align to each track to either read or write data were getting a bit sloppy in their alignment.  This meant that if the head was supposed to be aligned precisely over one single "track" on the platter, it was actually slightly off the track and the "writes" were bleeding data into the adjacent track (corrupting whatever files happened to reside there).  Instead of failing all at once, the drive kept "working" while slowly corrupting data as I (unaware of the issue) continued to use it.

 

I discovered this because I had files I had shot, opened, and processed with no problem and then didn't need to touch them for months...    somewhere around 6-12 months later I had an occasion to open the files again and discovered they were corrupt.  I started going through my album and found lots of my files were corrupt (I also started noticing other problems with the drive).  I performed a filesystem "repair" and litterally within half a day there was more corruption.    No worries... I make TWO different backups.  One is a simple disk clone, the other is an incremental backup.  I went to the cloned disk and found the files were also corrupted on the clone (so apparently I backed up already corrupted files.)  However I also went through my "incremental" backups and found that while my most recent backups were corrupt... if I went back about 1 month in backup history I could find versions of the files that were NOT corrupt and I ended up getting all of my data back and lost absolutely nothing (I also replaced the failing drive.)

 

BTW... that incremental backup solution was Apple's built-in "Time Machine" backup.  I HIGHLY recommend (if you didn't already do this) that you either purchase an Apple "Time Capsule" router (which has a hard drive in it and does the backups) -- or buy a large external disk that you will dedicate as your "Time Machine" drive.  This saved my bacon at least twice so far.

 

There is the very distinct possibility that nothing is wrong with the "software" but that something is (or was) wrong with a computer hard drive on which these files were once stored.

 

Tim Campbell
5D III, 5D IV, 60Da

Hi Tim, that sounds like what could have happened to my corrupted files. The fact that months, maybe years had passed 'fore i looked at those files keeps me from discoverning the 'when' of the corruption. I don't have an incremental back-up as with slightly less then 4 TB of files ... well you can image what size i would need. So i gambled and lost some files, actually, a lot of files. I've thought about using Apple's Time Machine but that too has limits and i doubt that i could keep years worth of backed up files that i no longer want or think i don't want. All three backup HD are relatively new and i know they will go bad at some unknown date and i'm keeping a closer eye on them then i have in the past. Your discovery of how your HDs went wonky is very useful knowledge and i hope will help me keep my files safe.

 

Thank you for responding to this question we have been pondering.

 

-taiyo

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