LibRaw

LibRaw was designed to be a library for reading RAW files obtained from digital photo cameras (CRW/CR2, NEF, RAF, DNG, and others).

LibRaw is based on the source codes of the dcraw utility, where part of drawbacks have already been eliminated and part will be fixed in future. The users of the library are provided with API to be built into their software programs.

Photographers using digital cameras know that shooting using the RAW format, where "raw" data from the camera matrix are saved to file, provides the highest flexibility for further processing. At the same time, photographers and pre-press specialists still can't enjoy the full potential of the RAW format, since most popular converters significantly and irreparably impair the quality of the initial material.

Developers willing to get rid of this sad discrepancy run into a vast diversity of formats and either have to waste time and effort on studying them, or confine themselves to a limited set of formats, or use ready solutions for extracting RAW data for furher manipulations and rendering into an image.

Most software products for RAW file processing extract the input data using code that is based on the source of the dcraw utility by Dave Coffin. For all its evident advantages, however, dcraw is a command-line utility rather than a software library. As a result, one should either make his or her library from it (and many developers, including Adobe, have followed this way) or use the dcraw command line (which is far from convenient, too).

In addition, dcraw tampers the data at the extraction stage and does not extract some of important parameters from the RAW file, thus impairing the quality of the result.