‘The first raw image compression algorithm designed for human eye and machine vision equally. Rawsie optimizes the noise encoding at the raw pixel level without compromising the signal’

Yay! ~ I finally have the Rawsie application! I have been waiting for this for two years and I can now sit down and compress all my Sony α7 III raw files. I will see how grateful my NAS and my secondary external backup units will be after I have finished the work. I have always been an advocate of compression to save space as long as there is no loss in quality. For a while now, I have been watching the space on my NAS slowly being eaten away by images from shows and studio work.

Rawsie can take a RAW file, from supported cameras, and compress them down to a Digital Negative (DNG) file without loss in quality or editing ability. You can simply drag and drop a folder of images to the application window or you can select a Lightroom catalog and choose which folders you want to compress. Rawsie will then relink the files in the catalog for you. I am using Capture One so I have just been dragging multiple folders and watching the magic work.

For comparison, the Sony α7 III .ARW files are circa 24 meg in size. When I come home from shooting a cabaret show, the SD Card can be holding 16 Gig of data or more. That is a lot to store when I have a regular show each week. Rawsie will take a look at these files and crunch them down to circa 8-10 meg per image depending on the content. This is a massive saving in file size! This also means the ingestion of the files to Capture One or Lightroom as well as backing up the files to my Nas is faster and doesn’t take up as much room either.

The downside, depending on your point of view, is the files are converted to Adobes DNG format. Some will care about that, I do not. The DNG format is open source and can be read by many applications.

File size comparisons ~ I dug out the test shots from when I first purchased the Sony 24-105 f4.0 lens and took a few quick shots along the North bank of the Thames. Simple shots, nothing fancy, a few buildings, and a couple of tourist boats on the Thames. You can immediately see from the graphs below, how much was saved by Rawsie.

The file sizes come down to below half in most cases… I could hear my NAS cheering, although that could be the fans speeding up!

Image Quality - The DNG files are fully editable and retain all the raw sensor data… although I have seen a slight colour shift when compared to the original in Capture One. This is nothing major and a quick edit sorts out the issue, but I feel that is nothing to worry about. I also noticed that Capture One does not recognize the camera type for the DNG file where the ARW file does. This again is not a great loss and is easily fixable in Capture One. I know which lens was used, so I select it for one image, then cut and past the changes to the others. The histograms do show a slight variance, any differences are barely perceptible in the main images. For the work I produce, it really doesn’t matter that much.

I threw in a few edits on the ARW file and then copied them to the DNG version. Again there was no perceptible change. I then zoomed in on both to see if there were any differences in detail, none of which I could see. So a few clicks later and everything is fine. You can click on the images below to take a closer look.

Issues ~ As I have not been using Lightroom exclusively for some time now, all my editing has been in Capture One. So there is no linkage available in the current version. So once the shots are converted and synced back into the catalog there are a number of issues:

• They are not the original files so any edits I have done are lost.

• Any colour tagging I have added, to show which of my studio shows not to use, is also lost.

• All preview files need to be rendered again.

All of the above are not too much of an issue, edits can be done again as I have a standard edit style and keep to a set way of cropping, etc… The colour tagging can be done again by checking messages from the models/performers from the day. The preview files can be rendered again without issue.

In Conclusion ~ This has already been inserted into my workflow and I have been busy converting all my ARW files to DNG format over the past few days. So how much space did I save? In total, Rawsie saved me a colossal 480 gigs of data…. nearly half a Terrabyte! It did take me a while to delete the old files and copy and back up the new DNG files to the NAS and secondary external devices. Capture One needed to delete the ARW files from the catalog and read the new DNG files, this took some time too.

There is definitely a speed increase when using the files in Capture One and Lightroom, previews are generated quickly, and cutting and pasting settings between large ranges of images is much faster too. Exporting speeds are still the same though.

This is a fantastic piece of software and has massively reduced the storage needs of my work. It does not support all cameras though, you can find a list here as well as pricing. Rawsie Supported Cameras. If you are a wedding photographer who takes thousands of photos a year or just a casual shooter, then this will save you a lot of time and money. Although it is quite expensive for a perpetual license it will start paying for itself immediately.