Rawzor is a proprietary

Proprietary software

Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...

 lossless image compression

Image compression

The objective of image compression is to reduce irrelevance and redundancy of the image data in order to be able to store or transmit data in an efficient form.- Lossy and lossless compression :...

 software which compresses camera raw images

RAW image format

A camera raw image file contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, image scanner, or motion picture film scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed and therefore are not ready to be printed or edited with a bitmap graphics editor...

 without any loss in image quality or meta-information. It is available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

Features

• Supports all major raw formats. Complete list of supported formats and cameras is on the website.
• Typically provides between 20% and 60% space savings depending upon the raw format. This is significantly better than compression obtained by zip or rar on image files.
• It is completely lossless, there is absolutely no loss in image quality or meta-information. Decompression gives back exactly the same original file.

Working with Rawzor compressed images

Rawzor has released a free SDK using which many image processing software provide support to open and edit Rawzor compressed images. SDK is available for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Some of the software supporting Rawzor compressed .rwz images:

• Konvertor supports Rawzor compressed images.
• XnView
  XnView
  XnView is a cross-platform image viewer used for viewing, converting, organising and editing graphical & video files. It is free of charge for private, educational and non-profit organisations...
  
   provides plugin to support Rawzor compressed images.
• Raw Therapee
  Raw Therapee
  RawTherapee is a cross-platform raw image processing application, recently released under the GPLv3. It is written in C++ using a GTK+ front-end and dcraw by Gábor Horváth of Budapest, Hungary. It is notable in that it was one of the first raw converters available for Linux with a reasonably usable...
  
   added Rawzor support starting version 2.4 on both Windows and Linux.
• ExifTool
  ExifTool
  ExifTool is a free software program for reading, writing, and manipulating image, audio, and video metadata. It is platform independent, available as both a Perl library and command-line application...
  
   added Rawzor support in September 2008.
• Zoner Photo Studio
  Zoner Photo Studio
  Zoner Photo Studio is a software application for viewing, editing, organizing, archiving, publishing and sharing digital images. It also supports GPS-assisted geotagging and creation of 3D pictures.- Versions :...
  
   supports Rawzor's compressed images starting with version 12.
• Manuel Llorens' fast precompiled dcraw binaries include Rawzor support.
• FastPictureViewer
  Fast Picture Viewer
  FastPictureViewer is a commercial 32 and 64-bit image viewer for Windows 7, Vista and XP. Its aim is to facilitate quick review, rating and annotation of large quantities of digital images in the early steps of the digital workflow, with an emphasis on simplicity and speed.As of v1.6, a basic...
  
  supports Rawzor compressed images since March 2010.
• FPV Codecs add support for showing preview and meta-data of Rawzor compressed images in Windows explorer.

Rawzor compressed photos have .rwz extension. For example, birthday.cr2 will after compression become birthday.cr2.rwz The naming convention also indicates that the original .cr2 file is preserved within the compressed .rwz file.

Rawzor compressed images can be decompressed to get back the image file in its original format.

External links

• Rawzor website
• Review by Golem.de (in German)