The company announced yesterday partnerships with Adobe and camera makers Canon, Fujifilm and Nikon to develop native support for their RAW formats. A certification program for other RAW formats will also be launched.
While many camera users download images from their cameras in common formats such as JPEG, RAW refers to the raw image data captured by the camera before it is converted, and is said to have much greater quality.
The RAW formats are non-standard, and change with new camera releases, however. Microsoft said it is working with its partners to figure out ways around this problem.
While there are some major players not named as current partners in this initiative, Microsoft also said it will offer a certification scheme, so imaging firms can submit their RAW formats for implementation in Windows.
Application programming interfaces will be made available for Windows developers to build RAW support into their own applications. Also, Microsoft will shortly release a RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP.
