Many moons ago, I was pondering the switch from PC to Mac, and I finally did do it. This thread concerns the evils of doing digital photography with my Mac.

My camera is a Canon PowerShot G1 -- two years old now, but still a fine 3MP camera, and one of the first consumer cameras to support a "raw" mode, so you don't have the camera using JPEG to destroy all the sutble details of your picture for you. But I digress...

On the PC, you can run Canon's official software, which has somewhat improved since it was first released. (The original version would re-prioritize itself, to make you painfully aware of just how slow the conversion code was. Gee, maybe you should learn about performance tuning? But I digress.) And, while the software was far from perfect, it did work.

Enter the Mac. I had missed the part where Apple should have said that iPhoto "supported" my camera only in as much as they support cheaper consumer cameras. Likewise, and Apple will rot in hell for this, my SanDisk USB CompactFlash reader originally appeared on Apple's list of supported input devices. SanDisk seems to think it works with no additional drivers. It doesn't work unless you boot into OS 9. But, even after you can get the data into the Mac, it still sucks to be you. Funny that. I also missed the part where Canon should have said that their "support" for the Mac is a joke, and that they refuse to release sufficient specs that a third party could do it themselves. Canon's Raw Image Converter is an OS 9 app, and it has a habit of failing.

So, I'm sitting here right now, at 2:30am, with my CF card in PC laptop, running the raw conversion software and writing to my Mac's hard drive. (And don't even get me started on what it took to get the PC to properly mount volumes from the Mac, and I can't seem to get the Mac to mount a volume from the PC, but I digress...) If I had only stayed with the PC universe, this whole operation would have taken half of the time.

And, how about this dialog box: An internal error has occured while converting the RAW image. (** Yes **) (-- No --)

Moral of the story

It's not the hardware, it's the software. I can't believe I'm seriously thinking about dumping my Canon camera for a Nikon, just to get better driver support. Nikon, to their credit, seems to be working to actually support the Mac. But the Nikon "prosumer" cameras can't focus in low light because they don't have a focus-assist lamp. Guess where I tend to take a lot of pictures? So, the only way to really solve my camera problem is to drop $2000 on a Nikon D100 and more on lenses. Arrrgggghhhh. That would work, technically, but my travel weight would go from one pound to over three pounds, which really does matter.

Maybe the right answer is to say "screw it" and get a Casio Exilim. No fancy features, but at least it's tiny.

What are you talking about man... haven't you heard? "It just works!"


psh.

Have you tried:

http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=15691&db=mac

Oh come on, the PowerShot 600 had a raw mode at least 5 years ago when people wouldn't have known what a megapixel was. I nearly bought one back then, but Olympus came out with a consumer SLR... But I digress.

My personal solution to your problem would be to set up a linux server and investigate linux software to do this. A quick google searched turned up one promising project (http://www2.primushost.com/~dcoffin/powershot/). Samba them over to the file server, run script, store on file server (or move back to the mac, if you really want).

Theoreticaly the project above is standard C code, so a real mac programer could probably get it all going on a mac, but that goes against the mac ideals of not viewing a computer as a computer. (sorry, couldn't resist, I'll stop now)

Good Luck,
Matthew

> Theoreticaly the project above is standard C code, so a real mac programer
> could probably get it all going on a mac

The JCrw tool I linked to does just that.

The problem with a Mac is that it has limited hardware support. However, if your hardware is supported, it will work way better than in a PC.

If only manufacturers would just implement standards instead of reinventing the wheel everytime they do something (why not just have the camera be a firewire/USB storage device that contains jpgs/pngs/tiffs/whatevers that are your picture?), then all of this would be moot. And you wouldn't have to worry about the manufacturer's crappy drivers and utilities under Windows either (only Microsoft's).

BTW, I think you're the only artist-type guy I've ever heard badmouth Apple.

I'm pleased to report that Crw (and the Java front-end JCrw) works significantly better than Canon's Mac software. They're still not as good as the official Canon software on the PC, which lets you click on an image and say "this is white", and preview the result, but they're light-years ahead of the garbage Canon software.

Now, it wouldn't be all that hard to hack all of this up, given all the pieces that are here. Hmm...

I wasn't badmouthing apple ... i bad mouth PC's AND Macs...heheh. I've used both for since before i was in double digits, and they both have their faults. I've been mostly on PC's for the past 3 years since there was no decent 3d software (IMHO) out for Mac... but now that Maya is on OSX i've been seriously thinking about switching back to a Mac for my main computer. If it weren't for my MAME cabinet sucking my money away i probably would have by now.... The games still aren't there and the variety of apps are always going to be stumbling blocks. Either way, i was just poking fun at their ad campaign. I'll always have a place in my heart for Macs. =]

Get Janie Porche to come to your house and save Christmas.

She can come over to my house for any reason.

Her and the DJ.

If you know what I mean.

She can come over to my house for any reason.

If you know what I mean.

Let's just leave it at... I find the first sentence of www.apple.com/switch/stories/janieporche.html incredibly hard to believe.

Canon publishes specs on their CRW format. There are a number of third party utilities that support this format. Mostly for Windows of course.

Sandisk has a number of products that work with both verions of Mac OS. However, they're not supporting their older line. In fact, the newer stuff should work with drivers built into OS X. I won't ever buy another Sandisk product anyway though. My Imagemate worked fine, but there's no need to keep releasing new versions of the same product without making any improvements - just making the old ones incompatible with the new driver software. Their products are very overpriced as well.

I'm using a Nikon 5700 right now. Low light problems or not, Canon doesn't have a single camera to touch it at this time. It can't be beat for image quality, features, size, ergonomics and control. You can aleviate the low-light focusing problems by using a laser pointer if you want to be creative. If you're using a tripod this is quite easy. Something I'll be investigating myself soon. Anyway, I'm currently not using a reader for my Windows machines nor Macs. Just connect the camera through USB as a mass-storage device. I'll grab a firewire reader soon. I'm not touching USB 2 with a 10 foot pole.

Stuff on the Mac does just tend to work. You just can't do as much with them nor as fast or stable as on a good Windows machine. Despite what the switch ads tell you. Hey, I make my living off Macs, so I'll always try to push them and our Mac products.

Bruno

I don't know, I took some very nice shots of people around a fire on a moonless night with a15 second exposure with my S30 and it came out quite well. There is a focus light/IR beam for focus assist. The controls are virtually identical to my A2E and playing with exposure settings with immediate feedback is a great learning tool. Granted it's not an SLR 6.0 MP job, but it's a pretty nice camera for $500.

Raw is still so much nicer than jpg. I'd be irritated too if I couldn't use them.

-Zeke

*bump*

Seems that a new CRW tool has been released.
http://www.frostyplace.com/CRW/index.html