@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
