Originally posted by mohb Given that the Holy Grail of some seems to be the elimination of noise without altering anything else in the Raw file is this possible without contravening the laws of physics?
Originally posted by photoptimist What if the some pixels are corrupted in ways known to the camera manufacturer but not readily known to the photographer or their software?
What if "pure" is impure?
I think for many of us, we have somehow assumed that RAW files were like unscanned film and upon discovering that even RAW files are processed (albeit minimally) that weʻve been duped and that a more pure state would be "the holy grail".
But even film had to be processed and prints were always a second generation with a great need for some post-processing. I can imagine how an astronomer or bio researcher would want unaltered pixel data, but engineers with human manufacturing and economic realities are dealing with millions of pixels that need software tweaks to correct anomalies. (e.g. Is that a newly found pulsar or a glitch in my sensor?)
My perspective is that RAW files are minimally processed and jpegs are out of the camera processed. No post processing on a RAW file and even in a scientific use, is too RAW for consumption. Post-process a jpeg and you are most likely over cooking it.
I agree with the concerns @photoptimist poses; even if we could extract a purely unprocessed RAW file, the only benefit I could imagine would be seeing the actual flaws of the sensor which could be compared to how effective the camera processing is when creating a traditional DNG or PEF/NEF/CR2, etc.
I apologize in advance if Iʻm missing your point.