How to rotate a .CR3 image in DPP or elsewhere

[ThomasFiducia]

Hi, how do I rotate a .cr3 image?

Either using DPP or any other method would be ok.

I can rotate the thumbnail in DPP, by right-clicking on the thumbnail and clicking rotate, but it doesn't change the image orientation in windows file explorer even after saving (I exit out of DPP and it asks if I want to save the changes and I click yes). I know it that hasn't changed the image orientation because in windows file explorer you can add an 'orientation' tab that displays it. See the image below. I want too get them all back to normal rotation.

If I rotate a specific image in DPP and click save, it only lets me save as a jpeg or tiff but I want to keep it as a .cr3. This seems like it should be an easy thing to do, am I missing something? Please help! We have three EOS 90Ds in our lab and need to be able to sort out the image rotation.

Tom

[johnrmoyer]

I cannot see any reason to rotate a CR3 image since it is raw. But then I do not use Windows.

[ThomasFiducia]

Hi John thanks for the reply. Clicking 'Adjust' --> 'Rotate left/right' just rotates the thumbnail in DPP. The orientation of the saved .cr3 file is not changed. Tom

[wq9nsc]

.CR3 (and other RAW files) are a data file not meant to be directly manipulated and saved, orientation is via a tag in the file meta data. 

You may be able to find an editor to let you change the "orientation flag" but the intent behind these Canon RAW files is the file remains intact and any manipulations you wish to perform on it are saved in an associated group of instructions that will be applied to the file for any subsequent work.  But the RAW file itself is intended to remain as it was when it was originally created at the time of capture and isn't meant to be directly edited by a program which is why DPP and other programs don't make changes to the base file.

Rodger

[ThomasFiducia]

Ok that makes sense. I took the photos remotely using 'Digicam' software. So that must be what is introducing the random rotation. I just want to get them back to the original orientation. I posted on the Digicam forum but I'm not optimistic I'll get an answer on there. Thanks

[johnrmoyer]

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@ThomasFiducia wrote:

Hi John thanks for the reply. Clicking 'Adjust' --> 'Rotate left/right' just rotates the thumbnail in DPP. The orientation of the saved .cr3 file is not changed. Tom

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For some cameras, the orientation is saved in multiple locations in the CR3 metadata. For example, exif:orientation can be horizontal or vertical, but so far as I can guess, this is intended to be applied to the embedded JPEG image and thumbnail.

makenotes:rollangle and makernotes:pitchangle are recorded by some cameras and the orientation will change as one of these numbers passes a threshold.

There is no intrinsic orientation to raw data. Some sort of viewable image must be made from the raw data before it can be seen to have an orientation. Maybe your windows software does not know how to do this.

Rawtherapee on Debian Linux can rotate the image when editing a raw file and save the instructions for doing so in a pp3 file and will automatically rotate the image next time it is loaded.

Canon DPP can save the rotation in a dr4 recipe file, and might also be able to save the CR3 file with the recipe embedded. In Canon DPP if one goes to the menu File->Save, then it will save the CR3 file with recipe information embedded. For example if I rotate a CR3 file left ninety degrees, then "

[CanonVRD:CanonDR4:Image:Copy1] Rotation        : 270

" will be saved as metadata in the file and it is not a problem for Canon to fix if some Windows software does not know to read it.

I do not save the recipe in a CR3 file, but leave the CR3 file unchanged as an original. I save the edit recipe in a dr4 file when using DPP and it is automatically saved in a pp3 file when using rawtherapee.

The recipe determines how the raw data will be processed to create an image for viewing.