Hi all, I am having trouble getting RAW files from several cameras to display correctly in Preview, Finder and Photos. The colours are totally off, they appear very warm in tone and much fine detail is lost, nothing like scene that I originally saw. If I take a JPG and Raw the JPG shows the correct colours whilst the RAW file is totally wrong. This seems to hold true for Nikon, Canon Panasonic and Olympus RAW files, has anyone else had this issue? I'm on a M1 Macbook air with all the latest updates to Big Sur applied.
The is no "right" or "wrong" here. RAW files don't have "color" or "sharpness" or anything else until that are processed by software to generate a traditional color image. Cameras will simply record the raw data from the sensor and add a set of processing parameters to the RAW file's metadata. Those parameters tell the camera's dedicated software/firmware what the desired processing should be. These parameters are, for the most part, specific to a camera's proprietary conversion engine. RAW files in DNG format, instead of other proprietary RAW formats, are more universal.
What appears to be happening is that Apple's software, all of which rely on a RAW conversion engine of Apple's own design and embedded into the OS, are failing to deal with the parameters in the file's metadata and are instead simply using their own default settings. Adobe goes to extremely great lengths to read as much of the metadata as they can and to mimic the proprietary conversion engines of various camera. That way, there software defaults to producing results much more similar to the results created by the in-camera RAW to JPEG or RAW to TIFF conversions.
BTW, when you "take a JPG" you are ALWAYS actually taking a RAW image. Digital cameras can't do otherwise. What you are doing is asking the camera to convert the RAW image to JPEG when saving the file rather than having it save the RAW data. Many cameras offer the open to save both. The in-camera conversion to RAW uses any adjustment settings (color balance, contrast, saturation, ...) that you may have chosen (simple cameras use factory defaults for these). When you save as RAW, these settings are simply written into the metadata and don't have any impact on the RAW data itself. It is up to the conversion software to deal with them.
Also, even simply displaying a RAW file on screen require processing of the RAW data and conversion to the display bitmap format the OS uses. Most RAW files will contain a low resolution preview image in JPEG format. Some apps will use this when displaying RAW files.
