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Comment by strogonoff | Hacker News Reader

While file format (RAF, DNG) often is an acronym, “raw” by itself simply references raw image data; it is not an acronym, not a trademark, and does not need all caps.

The mistake of “shouting” raw is perpetuated in the wild even by serious companies, but let’s not let Apple degrade our literacy[0]. I’ll point to Adobe which does, in fact, use the correct spelling[1].

[0] It is fine when used as part of idiomatic spelling of their product or trademark (“ProRes RAW HQ”, etc.), but IIRC their promotional materials and even developer docs do shout it when simply referencing raw image data, which is a little ridiculous.

[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/digital-negative.html

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This is one of those "well actuallys" battles that has been lost a long, long time ago my photographic friend.

Yes, "RAW" itself isn't a format like TXT or an acronym like JPEG, but in practice RAW appears alongside other all-caps names like JPG, DNG, TIFF, etc. in menus and documentation and so the industry has mostly converged on writing it RAW for consistency.

Fujifilm writes "RAW": https://fujifilm-dsc.com/en/manual/x100vi/connections/raw/

Nikon writes "RAW": https://onlinemanual.nikonimglib.com/zf/en/raw_processing_59...

Canon writes "RAW": https://www.usa.canon.com/learning/training-articles/trainin...

Leica writes "RAW": https://leica-camera.com/sites/default/files/pm-73002-Leica-...

Even Adobe writes "RAW": https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/file-types/image/raw.htm...

Descriptively yours,

In practice raw means raw (scene-referred) image data; the days when it meant filename extension are long gone.

However many examples you point out, there is no limit on poor editorial standards and lack of literacy, and I have no issue with that. That doesn’t mean we should stop calling out misspellings in official documentation.

Never thought about that. Always wrote it all uppercase because that’s what camera maker Canon consistently does from what I’ve seen.

If I search for Canon raw on Google the Canon owned websites that I see writes it all uppercase; RAW.

One of their pages that I find even makes note of that:

> The letters RAW do not stand for anything – it's just a convention that RAW is usually written in capital letters – and the names of RAW files from Canon cameras do not end in .RAW.

https://www.canon-europe.com/pro/infobank/image-file-types/

I'd expect a cause is that most camera makers are Japanese, and it's not uncommon in Japan to uppercase words written in Latin alphabet for aesthetic reasons

Very plausible, I haven’t considered it.

Perhaps the combination of that and the old .raw filename extensions on old filesystem implementations where everything appears uppercase (since camera firmware is slower to catch up, this persisted for years even though contemporary OS already had no such limitation) made it stick.

I can only recommend to consult more trustworthy sources.

Funny, I've been shooting digitally since 2007 and I've never seen RAW spelled other than RAW. I guess we've been doing it all wrong :shrug:

I’ve been in the film industry since 2010 and yes I see RAW but any camera department will tell you it’s just “raw” unless you’re talking about a specific raw codec that has “RAW” in the name. The reason no one corrects anyone is that it’s such a common thing and it doesn’t have any major consequences. “We are shooting raw” vs. “REDCODE RAW” (most people just say “red raw” but just giving full name for clarity).

There’s no need to be lowkey rude about it either way.

To be fair, it's essentially de facto convention at this point in the ecosystem, regardless of what's "right" or "correct". No one is gonna bat an eye regardless if you write RAW or raw either.

I saw it used both ways. My question about which one is right was answered as soon as I bothered to look up what it is, which I did when I got interested in raw photography.

RAW gets all caps the same way TXT, JPG, CMD, SH, BAT, and etc. get all caps. That is, you are also perfectly free to say raw files, text files, JPEG files, command files, shell scripts, and batch scripts, or .txt files, .jpg files, .cmd files, .sh scripts, and .bat scripts, and not everyone uses the same convention (or even consistently a single one).

I don't really see "SH" being used instead of "sh". JPG and JPEG get the uppercase treatment because it is actually an initialism (Joint Photographic Experts Group) unlike "raw".

Some are more used than others, and indeed, JPEG is an initialism. My point is the uppercase treatment doesn't depend on initialism, i.e. RAW doesn't have to stand for something to be capitalized because uppercasing file extensions is just a thing that happens.

The way I interpreted what they were saying is that they were focused more on the fact that for raw files, the extension is not ".raw", it's ".nef" (for Nikon for example) so that's why it's questionable to capitalize it.

“RAW file” makes sense when it’s an actual RAW file. However, raws come in a wide variety of other formats, too. DNG, NEF, X3F, RAF, just to name a few—all of these contain raw image data of some shape or form[0].

This project happens to be dealing not with RAW files, but with RAF files. (Even if it was indeed dealing with RAW files, there would still be a distinction between RAW as a file format and raw photos as a general concept, but we can safely sidestep that can of worms for now.)

[0] In fact, there isn’t even a precise definition or shared spec as to what constitutes a raw photo—it could be literally anything from debayered/denoised/prettified image to straight up sensor number dump in whatever way firmware feels like—which makes capitalising raw, as if it’s a specific thing, doubly silly when you’re not talking about a specific format.

This is one of those things as a pedantic technologist I've had to accept, like DJs referring to USB thumb drives they store their music on as "USBs".

Casual use is one thing, but this is documentation so I hold it to a higher standard…

Its hard to get anyone not to capitalise three letter words and best to just have a longer product name.

The use of “raw” being objected to is not in a product name.

I appreciate the breakdown.

But practically speaking, does it really matter? The goal of language is to communicate, and in this case we all understand what the author is referring to when they reference "RAW".

It's like chastisting someone for saying "Band-Aid" instead of "bandage". One refers to a specific company that makes small adhesive bandages and the other is the thing itself. But we all understand what you mean when you say "band-aid".

And isn't that the point?

I would not chastise anyone for saying anything, especially in a casual setting, but I will point out a misspelling in written documentatation.

“Band-aid” or even “bondage” is fine, as long as you’re understood, but would you be happy to see that written in some medical guidelines? Would you feel confident that whoever wrote it even knows what they are talking about?

Sure, except this is just photography. Not exactly life and death.

1. Photography is critical in many life or death activities like murder investigations.

2. I take it you would be fine if software official documentation for spelled JSON as “jeyson” or something equally random.

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