Major issue with DPP.

[AllanLoveJr]

After editing my RAW images. I'm trying to prosess them from RAW over to JPEG. But this box pops up and says: "Can not wright to file". Can someone help? Thanks.

Allan Love Jr.

Blair, Neb. 

[shadowsports]

Greetings Allan,

We need a better picture of your environment. 

Operating system?

Version of DPP?

How many images are you trying to convert and save?

What is the destination (where are you saving to)?

Please ensure you are not trying to save files with the same name in a directory.

[BurnUnit]

Instead of using "Save" or  "Save As", make sure you're using the "Convert and Save" function.

[Waddizzle]

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@AllanLoveJr wrote:

After editing my RAW images. I'm trying to prosess them from RAW over to JPEG. But this box pops up and says: "Can not wright to file". Can someone help? Thanks.

Allan Love Jr.

Blair, Neb. 

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For some curious reason, DPP does not let you overwrite an existing file when you do a conversion.

[RobertTheFat]

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@Waddizzle wrote:

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@AllanLoveJr wrote:

After editing my RAW images. I'm trying to prosess them from RAW over to JPEG. But this box pops up and says: "Can not wright to file". Can someone help? Thanks.

Allan Love Jr.

Blair, Neb. 

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For some curious reason, DPP does not let you overwrite an existing file when you do a conversion.

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It does if you use "Convert & Save", which converts oinly one picture at a time. It doesn't if you use "Batch Process".

[ebiggs1]

Can someone help? Thanks."

Yes!       Get Lightroom.

[TCampbell]

You never want to over-write your original RAW files... treat those like film negatives.. they are stored for future use without being altered.

"Save" and "Save as" assume no image format conversion is happening.  It would be appropritate to use if you opeend a JPEG and wanted to save over that JPEG (or to a new JPEG).  

RAW files are a bit more complicated because RAW files don't actually have "pixels" (with three channel color per pixel).  Instead, RAW files have "photo-sites" which indicates the luminosity value at each site but each site uniquelly captures just one color channel (just red or just green or just blue).  To create a "pixel", the RAW decoding software uses an alorithm (and there are lots of them) which comares the luminosity of each photosite with the luminosity value of it's neighbors of different colors.  If we have a "red" phososite, it will be surrounded by others (above & below, left & right, and the diagonals) and many of those others will be "blue" or "green" photo-sites.  By comparing the neighbors, the software derives the missing color.  Thus a "red only" photosite can be displayed with a "blue" and "green" channel (because it uses the neighbors to derive color) even though the photosite itself had no blue or green when the image was captured. 

You can get more details here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demosaicing

You normally wouldn't save back into RAW format.  

When it's a RAW file, you want to do a "Convert and Save..." (and pick the new format such as JPEG or TIFF) ... as opposed to just as a "Save" or "Save as".

[BurnUnit]

Well let me just put this out there to see if I'm thinking about this the right way.

When editing RAW files in DPP, I think of using "Save" and "Save As" to save the edits that you've made to a specific file, along with the corresponding, unaltered RAW file.

Does that sound like the correct way to look at it, or is it more involved than I'm imagining?

[TCampbell]

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@BurnUnit wrote:

Well let me just put this out there to see if I'm thinking about this the right way.

When editing RAW files in DPP, I think of using "Save" and "Save As" to save the edits that you've made to a specific file, along with the corresponding, unaltered RAW file.

Does that sound like the correct way to look at it, or is it more involved than I'm imagining?

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Yes that's technically correct... but it gets tricky.

You can see it by doing this test:

1)  Make a copy of any RAW file.

2)  Open it in DPP

3)  Make an extreme adjustment (e.g. grab the "Brightness" adjustment and slide it down to about -3)

4)  "Save" the image (don't convert it ... just save it).

5)  "Quit" DPP

On a Mac (I am guessing you can do this on Windows too), I get multiple date-time stamps on a file... the Mac tracks the "created" time (when the file was originally created) as well as a "last accessed" date-time as well as a "last modified" date time.   When I over-write the file I can see that DPP really is modifyng the RAW file (the "last modified" time does update).

6)  Re-Open DPP and re-load your saved image.

You'll see that DPP remembers your change and that the "Brightness" is still set to whatever you used (e.g. -3).

So that sounds good so far.... 

BUT... now open this same .CR2 file in any other software  (I opened it in LIghtroom) and what I see is the ORIGINAL un-altered image.  In other words, Lightroom doesn't know how to read the changes that DPP made.

So that's the tricky part... you can adjust the file in DPP... but if you then use the file in any other program (or share it to anyone else who opens it with anything other than DPP) then your changes are lost.  The changes are not a permanent part of the original image data.

When you use digital-asset-management (DAM) software that deal in RAW workflow (such as Adobe Lightroom) you'll find this is a common theme... the original RAW is treated like a film negative in that it isn't altered.  You see the changes on your computer monitor as you work on the image.  But the changes are not _really_ applied until you export the image.

If using DPP you choose to do a "Convert and save" then your changes will actually be applied to the new saved image such that any software that can open that new images will see the adjusted version of the image... not the original version of the image.

[AllanLoveJr]

Well. I didn't want to do it. I had no choice but to do a complete 100% factory restore of Windows. Installed all of the Canon software. Everything is good now. Later 🙂