Canon EOS 400D (Digital Rebel XTi) RAW Images in RawShooter

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If you do any RAW photo processing at all then you know what Rawshooter and LightRoom are.

Basically the quick and dirty low-down is that Adobe bought this company called Pixmantec. Pixmantec made this totally sweet RAW image processor called Rawshooter. So anyway, Adobe shut the project down. And if you’ve been reading various forums and websites you’d also know that this is NOT cool. Everyone is in an up-roar and we will all miss Rawshooter greatly. Now for some people they will be able to use Rawhooter for a long time. As long as they NEVER upgrade to a newer camera.

Here’s what the app looks like.

It’s clean and runs really fast. Unlike Adobe’s current LightRoom, which admittedly is still in beta. We can only hope that they will speed it up by the time it comes out of beta.

Ok, so some really nice things about Rawshooter that go unsaid by almost everyone.

1. Rawshooter is portable – Meaning you can just grab the folder and put it on your thumb drive and take it anywhere. No freaking installed required…how cool is that?
2. It saves all of your settings for each edited RAW file in a sub folder where your images are. Sooo good because it keeps things all nice and organized. Also this makes it really easy to have a centrally located collection and have any adjustments work on which ever computer is doing the editing.
3. You can view files over your LAN. Adobe LightRoom has NO capability to browse to a network share and load in raw images from a file server. LAME!
4. Did I mention how fast it loads the images, builds thumbnails, applies changes, and does conversions?

The camera situation:
Ok, so we went on a vacation and debated heavily if we wanted to pick up a digital SLR for the trip. It was a debate because the bodies of some of these cameras can be quite heavy and large and ultimately a pain in the ass to lug around. A large bodied camera is ok if you’re going on a short 3 day trip and want to have a brick strung around your neck. But our vacation was for 104 days. Ya. Smaller would be better.

So we were at Costco a few days before we left and saw this camera (Canon XT 350D) there. The body was so much smaller than other SLR’s. Great. we bought it and were off to our great vacation.

We used Rawshooter 1.0.3. build 77 or 1.0.3 b77 and added new photos to our online gallery daily. The workflow was great and the output was fantastic.

When we returned home from the long vacation I had some time to do more in-depth tweaks with Rawshooter and also continued to shoot with the Rebel XT (350D). Much to our dismay we noticed there was a missing pixel on the back LCD of the XT. CRUEL WORLD!

A week or so later we happened to be back at Costco and I thought I’d see what the replacement warranty or whatever would be. Costco said they’d just take the camera back as a return and then we could pick up a replacement over at the camera section. NICE!

One problem. The Rebel XT had disappeared from their inventory and the XTi (400D) had arrived. EVEN BETTER! We promptly did an exchange and were completely excited with the swap! SCORE!

We opened the box at the Costco food court and checked the LCD to make sure it wasn’t missing any pixels, which it wasn’t, and we were on our way!

A few days went by and we had finally filled up our 2GB compact flash memory card. It was time to start processing the RAW images.

We quick found out that Rawshooter didn’t support the new RAW files from the XTi. I could go on for quite some time about this issue but won’t as it has been talked about across the world I’m sure.

So, I started to search and found that some people had found a ‘work around’ for getting their Canon Digital Rebel XTi (400D) to working in Rawshooter.

Here is the work around that you can find easily with a Google search.

1. Download the free Adobe DNG Converter 3.6, available for Windows and Mac OS X.
2. Install Adobe DNG Converter 3.6.
3. Convert the RAW image files from Canon XTi or 400D in .CR2 format to .DNG (Adobe Digital Negative Specification)
4. Download any Hex editor.
5. Navigate to RawShooter installation folder, usually inside Program Files folder.
6. Make a backup copy of RawShooter.exe.
7. Open the RawShooter.exe in any Hex editor.
8. Search, find and replace each and every instance of ‘350D’ with ‘400D’ (there should be 6 of them).
9. Save the file. Check that the cracked RawShooter.exe has exactly the same number of bytes as the original RawShooter.exe (or its backup).
10. Run the RawShooter.exe and open the .DNG files converted from Canon EOS 400D Digital Rebel XTi.

That’s it. You’re supposed to be set. Now you just use either your original un-modified .exe for your older camera or you use the new one for your XTi.

Here’s the punch line. 

This is all a lie. It doesn’t work. Not even if you try 10 different times 10 different ways.

Basically the directions listed above are impossible to achieve because there are no occurrences of 350D in the rawshooter.exe. Therefore there is no hack to be done.

HOWEVER, if you are using a cracked version of the rawshooter.exe, which is easily available from the web, then you will be able to perform the above 10 steps and you still won’t be able to open your newly created .DNG files.

You can see in the image below that in the original rawshooter.exe that there were 0 occurrences of 350D in the binary code. However in the cracked version of the rawshooter.exe there are in fact 6 occurrences of 350D.

In conclusion

I’ll keep using my last version of Rawshooter that I got from Pixmantec for my RAW files that were taken with the older Digital Rebel XT. Until then I’ll keep searching for features in a product that are like the ones in Rawshooter.

I’d like to petition Adobe to please release an updated version of Rawshooter. I think they would sell the crap out of it. Or maybe that is what they don’t want to happen as it would hamper the sales of LightRoom.

I fully expect LightRoom to be a viable product once it’s out of beta but for now it’s just a pile of garbage that is as useful as a supermodel at a grocery store.

I would also encourage any of you to comment and let me know what kind of success you have had in getting close to using your RAW files from your XTi in Rawshooter.