Michael Tapes for President!
Sep. 26
9:25 am
I gotta tell ya, people are lovin’ that free “Instant JPEG from Raw” utility Michael Tapes and Imagenomic created! Look at some of these comments posted by readers on Wednesday:
- “Works fantastic, Now I can shoot just in RAW instead of RAW+JPEG and get more pictures on the cards. It makes life alot easier and I can hand out the smaller sized JPEG´s much faster. Thanks for a great tool!”
- “Great program and it works so fast that I thought it was NOT working. You made my day.”
- “THANK YOU!!! you’ve literally saved me! “
- “Wonderful! Literally dropped my jaw after the first extract. I’ve already processed about 20 directories. THANK YOU!”
- “It works just fantastic!. The clearest jpegs I have seen after first shooting in raw, and then converting them.”
- “Wow, this is really useful! Big thanks Michael and Scott. I was exporting 600 RAW files the other night after a rugby tournament I shot and it was painful waiting 2 hours for them to turn to jpgs.”
- “This utility is a boone. Thank you very much indeed for it! “
- “It’s amazing. No more RAW+JPG!”
- “Michael-thanks for giving back to the photo community. As an aside, the program works with DNGs. Nice work!”
- “…thank you for a great little utility!! Very quick and effective!!”
- “Adobe’s PS development group have done a great job for CS4 and Michael Tapes has done a great, great, great …….great job for photographers, that too at free of cost and he deserves all credit and best wishes for making our lives so enjoyable in this profession.â€
- “Thank You so much, it’s awesome!!!!”
- “I think this utility should be licensed by the camera manufacturers and adobe, implemented in the software that comes with the camera and/or Lightroom and Photoshop, and the RAW+jpg setting should simply disappear from cameras forever. Thanks so much for posting this. This is truly fantastic!”
Michael, if you were running, I’d vote for you! My thanks once again for doing something so cool and useful for our community! 
Anybody got a link to this program that works for MAC? The site says “available Apr 15.”
I’ve just got to give it a try after hearing all this praise!
Scott:
Can you add a link to the post please?
Nik:
http://rawworkflow.squarespace.com/instant-jpeg-from-raw-utility/
Jim Poor:
Follow that link - a link to the Windows and Mac download will be emailed to you there.
Scott,
Now I have to go attend the debate. I wonder if McCain will show now that I am on board. Seriously, many thanks for your more than kind acknowledgment of my post.
Nik….here is the original post…
http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/2008/archives/2027
Michael
This is a fantastic utility! There is one thing to consider when using this over the Raw + JPEG on your camera. This utility is pulling the embedded JPEG from your RAW file but it is an unprocessed RAW so it won’t necessarily look as good as the JPEG produced by the camera. When the camera makes a JPEG image, it applies a certain amount of in-camera post-processing to the image (which is why most people love the way their images look on the camera LCD preview screen which shows the JPEG). So while the utility is extremely fast, just be cognizant of the fact that the extracted JPEG file will look just like your unprocessed RAW image.
Thanks again Michael for adding some zip to our workflow.
Correction to my last statement. What I meant to say is that it DOES look like the LCD version of your camera but it will NOT look like your processed RAW files. This is because the corrections to the RAW file live in a sidecar file and the conversion program only reads the embedded JPEG from the RAW only. So if you spend some time processing your RAW files in Camera Raw or Lightroom, don’t use this utility to create JPEGs, thinking they will look like your post-processed RAW files. Sorry about my confusion…too much cough syrup
Hi Jeff,
Yes, your second post is correct. But the real purpose of IJFR is to use it before you have imported in LR saving lots of time, so there is no real issue. Also, if you output from LR to DNG, then you can use IJFR on the DNG to get a high quality JPEG that *does* reflect your ACR/LR adjustments perfectly.
Thanks…
An alternative solution, which also works for linux and mac os X, is to install Phil Harvey’s software exiftool (link: http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/) and run in a terminal “exiftool -b -JpgFromRaw -w _JFR.JPG -ext nef -r .” to extract jpg from all nef files in the current directory (of course, replace nef in the command by crw or whatever the extension of your raw format is). It works great, and it’s even free software (as in free beer AND as in free speech).
Alexandre,
Yes, as I mentioned in the comments of the original post, there are many options for extracting the embedded JPEG, With Exiftool, and Photo Mechanic and Breeze Browser being some of them. Also DCRAW. The point of IJFR, is free, lean and mean, no learning curve (not many photographers could deal with exiftool), and Win and Mac. So for 99% of the folks, I think that IJFR will serve the purpose better than any other. For specialized purposes, or command line geeks (not that there is anything wrong with that), there was Yarc (10 years ago), and many other still available. I hope that IJFR serves the masses well. BTW, we use segments of DCRaw as part of our code base, as do most raw applications and utilities. That is why I mentioned David Coffin in my piece. And Phil Harvey has done a masterful job with ExifTools. I use it on a regular basis for specialized tasks.
Thanks for your post…
Michael
@Michael: sorry if my post came out wrong, I am of course not complaining about IJFR or anything, I was just reacting to the first comment asking about Mac OS X support, and thought that maybe linux geeks would like to know how to do more or less the same. But I do agree that it’s much less user-friendly if you’re not used to the command line, and I thank you for making your tool easy and accessible. One DSLR at a time, we’ll be eradicating RAW+JPG from history
Alexandre…..we’re cool. Thanks..
Michael
Great utility. It will be a Godsend in the field when I download RAW files to my laptop and want to review them in the evening. My question is whether you plan to update the program for new cameras. I ran it on some Canon 50D RAW files that I downloaded, and it did not find the JPEGs in those.
Brilliant little program thank you!
I am a teacher and the “unofficial” photographer for the school I work at. This tool will save me heaps of time and many nags from staff and students.
I did have the import settings on Lightroom to have a medium JPEG preview on DNG creation and wondered why I was getting images of only 1024×685 from the full image size of 3872×2592. But when I changed this to full JPEG preview on DNG creation the extracted JPEGs were full size. You might want to include this in your notes/manual/FAQ.
P. Knight
It could be that the current 50D files are from a pre-production camera, or that you are correct in that IJFR will have to be updated (no promises).
Please send me a raw file or a link to one soI can take a look. Thanks..
for file please send to here:
htpp://dropbox.yousendit.com/raw
email is ijrf @ rawworkflow dot com
Brad
We have posted this info here at Scotts blog but we will add it to our documentation. Thanks.
Michael
Michael
Michael,
I sent a 50D raw to your dropbox. However, some might be interested to know that when I converted the 50D RAW files to DNG, using the Adobe DNG Converter 4.6 Beta, IJRF was able to extract the embedded JPEG from the DNG file.
P. Knight
P. Kinght,
The 50D not working is an error on our part. But a DNG is a DNG so that will always work. We do not care what camera the DNG was created from.
Likewise the Sony files that we do not yet read, can also be read via DNG. But that is a bit roundabout…
Thanks…Michael
Does not seem to work with Leica M8 raw files. Using the Mac version jpeg files are not extracted.
This will be really useful! Could I suggest a few improvements? Is it possible for the utility to read the orientation from the RAW file and get the portrait-orientation images standing up right? Also - it would be really good if I could set the destination for the folders created to a different location, so that I could use this to view RAW files I have archived to DVDs and CDROMS.
Chris,
1. We pass along the JPEG as is (as written by the camera). So any errors are caused by the camera. Also check my comments about the “viewer app” needing to honor the orientation flag.
2. We have had a lot of requests for a user selected destination. It is on a wish list but no promises….
Carl
A very quick look at the Leica M8…seems like there is a 320×240 JPEG lurking in there. Not very useful as a separate JPEG. I do not see any other image files other than the raw data. Maybe the camera has a setting to store a large preview into the DNG? Do you know? If not I can find out.
Thanks again to all..
Michael