PaulBrit Loc: Merlin, Southern Oregon

I have a photograph taken in 2006 with a Lumix camera in England before I met Jean and subsequently came to be in the USA. Jim, of our local Caveman Camera Club, wishes to use the photograph in an exercise to see how we members of the Club edit the image.

But Jim requires the image to be converted to ‘RAW’ format.

I am using DxO PhotoLab 4, which is splendid for my Nikon files, but I don’t have a clue as to whether I can do anything with that Lumix image.

Any ideas would be more than welcome.

(I should add that it is a little after 4 am and I am not yet out of bed!)

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Last I knew, the JPEG is like a finished dinner served on a plate,
you can't take that and create the original ingredients (RAW) to prepare the meal differently.

nikon_jon Loc: Northeast Arkansas

To my knowledge, you can't convert jpg to raw, only the other way around. When you shoot jpg, the camera edits and disposes of some of the information captured in the picture. Unless something new has come along, I don't think it can be reversed. If Jim is persistent, I would ask him to show you how to do this.

Now for the mild insult. If this cannot be done, but Jim insists it can, then Caveman might be a good name for the club. Nothing personal. I have been involved in photography since I was 14 yrs old, (now 74) and I worked at a daily newspaper when jpeg was developed. It was developed to reduce the size of photo files so they could be transmitted over the wire faster.

PaulBrit Loc: Merlin, Southern Oregon

Thanks Longshadow. I suspected that.

PaulBrit Loc: Merlin, Southern Oregon

It’s not Jim that raising the query it’s me!

In terms of your involvement with photography, do you think you will like it? 😎 (From a 76-year-old!)

Larryshuman

Just shoot a copy of the print while in raw mode.

Bayou

https://topazlabs.com/jpeg-to-raw-ai/

Not cheap, and surely not ideal, but it can be done.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Y'all do know that what you see on the screen of an editor when working with a RAW file is not a JPEG, or a TIFF, or anything, it is a graphic rendering of the data the editor has to work with, displayed by the editor. You're not literally looking at a RAW file, you are viewing the contents of the RAW file.
That's why one has to "convert" and/or save(as) to a JPEG or a TIFF, or, a....

dave.m

both previous posters have correctly confirmed you can't convert jpeg to an original raw format or content. (alhough there is a cludge and maybe an answer at the end of this post.)

Almost all (all?) RAW formats are proprietary and contain additional information in a structure the camera manufacturer decide. i.e. Canon RAW is .CR2 or CR3, Nikon is NX-D etc. There is a generic RAW which is adobe DNG.

Again, most if not all are variations of TIFF. The reason for this is that TIFF has a 16 bit structure which will store anything a modern digital sensor can produce (most modern sensors record up to 14 discrete bits which in round figures is 16,000+ shades per colour (R,G,B) so BIG files.

JPEG can store only 8 bits for each colour, a maximum of 256 shades - A huge difference from 14 bits.

So the JPEG image you have has been pre-processed by the camera from potentially 14 bit to 8 (and re-processed again if it has been modified in post processing.) It achieves this simplistically by merging nearby shades to 1 so a maximum of 16,000 shades per RGB colour is reduced to a maximum of 256. The more shades there were originally, the more combining is done. So the compression is 'lossy' and the data is lost forever.

Does this matter? Probably not if you were happy with the original image, and display on a screen or print (very few monitors support even full JPEG colour space and no printing that I know of.)

It does matter if you are unhappy with the image though. With a RAW image you can almost invariably recover burn out highlights or blocked in shadows but you can't if the detail has already been removed by the inbuilt camera processing.

So back to your priginal request: you can easily convert 8 bit JPEG to 16 bit TIFF using any convenient method (ie open jpeg in FastStone image viewer then immediately save in TIFF.) Then any RAW processor should be able to import the TIFF as a RAW (ie Adobe Camera RAW 'open as'

What you will never be able to do is recover the original RAW 16 bit content as that was removed in-camera as the great quote above 'you can't take that and create the original ingredients (RAW) to prepare the meal differently'.

Topaz have recently announced AI JPG to RAW converter. https://topazlabs.com/getting-started-with-topaz-jpeg-to-raw-ai/ which may help - download the 30 day trial and see what it does. Here is a review
(review: http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/topaz-jpeg-to-raw-ai-review/)

Hope that helps

adedeluca Loc: holbrook ny

Shoot a Raw of it and send that

rmcgarry331

Adobe applications (Lightroom, Camera Raw, Photoshop & Photoshop Elements) can convert it to a DNG file. However, the basis is still a 8 bit jpeg, probably with an SRGB color space, so the editing information is still limited.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

Like entropy and time, you can only go in one direction.

Camera RAW > TIF or PSD > JPG;

14-bit > 16-bit > 8-bit.

For archiving or safety you can go JPG to DNG and use the PP generated DNG as a RAW file but it will contain no more information or data then the original JPG or JPEG.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

We know, don't complicate it for the fellow. He is confused enough already.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

(I was willing to bet many do not...)

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

If quality is the issue and you want to spend the time and cost. Have a high quality large, say 8x12, 10x15 or 16x24 inch print made and then photograph it with your Nikon camera on full resolution RAW. Now you will have a RAW file of your image. You may need advice for the copy work as well. What equipment do you have? Macro or other prime lenses, tripod, etc.