As quality is our top priority, Rawsie provides only optimization tested for a number of settings for certain tested cameras. That's why it features a number of technological limitations. After compression, a file subject to such a limitation will get copied to the export folder completely intact, so you couldn't accidentally delete them along with the source folder.

To see the exact reason behind certain files being copied without compression, please click See Report next to Files copied counter after compression ends.

Yes, DNG files can be compressed in Rawsie, except for these cases:

1. Files coming from unsupported cameras (please see camera support list).
2. DNG files that were lossy compressed in-camera or in other software (e.g. in Adobe DNG Converter).
3. Files falling under brand or camera specific limitations outlined in sections of this FAQ below.

Not supporting files with ISO higher or equal to the values listed below:

• Canon EOS 5D Mark III. <25600
• Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. <32000
• Canon EOS 5DS. <6400
• Canon EOS 5DS R. <6400

• Not supporting files with sRAW / MRAW setting switched on (lossy compression).
• Not compressing files that were already compressed in Rawsie
• Not supporting DNG with lossy compression applied before, for example if "Use lossy compression" setting in Adobe DNG Converter was switched on (Linear Raw)
• Not supporting ISO bigger than 65000

Please see actual camera support list on our Pricing page

Unfortunately, no new cameras will be added to support due to sunsetting Rawsie in its current form. Please follow us on instagram.com/rawsieapp and twitter.com/dotphoton to get updates on our new products for photographers.

There are basically two options:
1. You are trying to compress images that can't be compressed due to our limitations or from an unsupported cameras (see Limitations section above).
2. If the number of imported images and compressed images are the same, but Rawsie still says some of them were not supported, there might have been a hidden macOS system file among the files you've imported that we can't define since they are protected by your system.

Rawsie follows a non-destructive pattern, meaning it will not overwrite your source files, they will remain intact. After compression a new copy of each file is created which will be up to 5 times lighter preserving full quality.

It's for you to decide: choose or create a folder from 'Save to' bottom menu or chose one of the previously used folders by clicking 'More'. There's also an option to export images into their original folders, in which case a new "_Optimized" subfolder will be created in your source folder.

Rawsie allows exporting to original subfolders. Click "More" next to Export button and check "Export to original folders". The files will go to their original folder in a "_Optimized" subfolder.

1:3–1:8 depending on the information stored in your image.

The only metadata tag that we've found not getting transferred to the output files so far is the Noise Profile. All the other information is carried through, but we would strongly encourage you to double-check all the tags crucial to you.

Rawsie creates a local backup copy of every LR catalog/session before compressing it. This feature is built in to make sure you still have your original .lrcat file in case of a machine failure. You may delete the backup copies after a successful session.

As Rawsie raw compression is designed to keep in as much raw data as possible, the resulting file size of JPEGs exported from Rawsie-compressed files will be about the same as of JPEGs exported from your original raw files.

.P extension was originally introduced to make sure you would never mix up optimized images and your original files. Current versions of Rawsie will not add .p extension anymore, please update your copy.

For bunch renaming files please use http://osxdaily.com/2015/05/28/batch-rename-files-mac-os-x-finder/ and also a number of alternatives here https://alternativeto.net/software/namechanger/

Please make sure that you have the read and write access on your local or external hard drive you want to use with Rawsie. To confirm this, try to copy a file from your machine and paste it on the hard drive in question.

Please make sure your external hard drive is formatted using ExFAT file system, instead of NTFS for example.

If you compressed some files that were linked to your Lightroom catalog via "Optimize individual raw files" mode instead of "Optimize Lightroom catalog folders" mode and your Lightroom shows "Missing files" alert, please perform these 2 steps to fix it:

1. Move the compressed files out of "_Rawsie-optimized" folders to their original folders. E.g. if the files were originally located in "Weddings 2021-05" folder and then were moved by Rawsie to the "_Rawsie-optimized" subfolder inside this original folder, you would need to move optimized dng files back to the "Weddings 2021-05" folder.
2. Then you'd need to rename those optimized files back to their original file extensions (on Mac there's a native tool to help you do this). E.g. if your files were .arw/.nef/etc and were turned into .dng after Rawsie's compression, you would need to batch rename them back to .arw/.nef/etc.

After these two steps, please relaunch your Lightroom, it should locate the files for you and resolve the issue. This is because Lightroom would match the file names and their locations and understand that those are the same files it has listed in its catalog.

Files compressed by Rawsie will work in DxO PureRAW, providing PureRAW supports the camera model. On the other hand, files that went through enhancement in PureRAW first, are not compressible in Rawsie.

Quantum physics is taken like a modern buzz-word, but it is more than a century old. It started off with Max Planck explaining the colour of sunlight (blackbody radiation), and got Einstein his Nobel prize (in 1905) for the photoelectric effect, which is what is used in camera sensors till today.

There are two main differences between classical and quantum theory: the first is that quantum theory, unlike classical physics, is probabilistic, i.e. noise is well understood, comes from fundamental principles (no-cloning) and can be accurately modeled. The amount of information and of noise in a signal can be accurately described from first principles, especially when quantum theory is combined with Communications theory as developed by Claude Shannon (around 1948).

Unlike classical theory, where noise is dominated by your measurement apparatus, in the quantum regime, noise is a property of the signal itself. For maybe 5 or 10 years now, image sensors have been firmly working in this quantum regime, and Rawsie has been developed to work in just that regime. JPEG and the other compression algorithms, had been developed when sensors were still fairly inefficient and limited by their electronics rather than by the quantum nature of light.

Rawsie uses three things that we learned from quantum theory: the way we model noise, the way we characterize the sensors, and the way we estimate and limit the information loss due to compression.

The second difference between quantum and classical is that quantum particles do not obbey “local realism”, i.e. they may be “entangled” meaning that although the properties of two particles are fundamentally random individually, they still share a global property (such as energy, momentum or other). Quantum computers use these aspects to scale performance of some algorithms better than classical ones, quantum computers are still a few years off, and Rawsie does not use that aspect of quantum mechanics.

Rawsie is a lossy algorithm, i.e. the output of rawsie is not bit-for-bit identical to the input. However, Rawsie aims at introducing the loss only within the noise. If you take two images of the same static subject, they will not be identical, as each one has a different “realization” of the noise.

Rawsie takes this difference as the “leeway” for modifications to compress the image. There is potential for a small amount of information loss, and maximum information loss per pixel is 0.3 bits. This is equivalent to having a slight amount of increased noise, so, an image taken at ISO 100, after passing through rawsie will look as if it were taken at ISO 115. So, there is a small amount of loss, but it is ~10x less than JPEG / Lossy DNG, which also concentrates the loss in areas of high detail and makes images look less sharp.

No, Rawsie is very different to JPEG / Lossy DNG. Rawsie maintains your dynamic range and your sharpness, whereas JPEG does not. This is because JPEG / Lossy DNG has no means to distinguish signal from noise, whereas Rawsie can compute the exact noise level for each pixel value in most settings combinations.

Also, the errors in JPEG / Lossy DNG are mostly in areas of high detail, so that although JPEG is good on average over the image, in interesting areas, it performs much worse. Another issue is that JPEG / Lossy DNG are deterministic algorithms, so that they introduce the same artefacts for similar looking things, by eye, this is still OK, but it limits the amount of processing before artefacts add up and become visible. This is becoming more true as advanced processing such as AI are introduced, these will work just right with Rawsie images, but not as well with JPEG / Lossy DNG.

Another aspect is that although a single pass of JPEG is OK, if you re-compress a JPEG, there may be some interactions between the first and second compressions, so when you export your Lossy DNG to JPEG some issues could come up, whereas Rawsie compressed images can safely be exported as JPEGs in high quality.

Lossy DNG compression is based on JPEG, so, it will have all of the issues of JPEG mentioned above. Rawsie, on the other hand, although lossy, loses much less information. Lossy DNG loses up to 10x more information than Rawsie.

The key is knowing the exact amount of natural noise, as well as its structure for each pixel. To do this took quite some development time, as we have calibrated each camera in each setting combination under metrology lab conditions, i.e. the precision was down to the single-photon level.

However, that is not enough, as you need to build a noise model for each camera and build tolerances within the algorithm to account for the small variations that you can have pixel-to-pixel and device-to-device. In practice, each pixel is de-noised, but just below the noise level so that the noise maintains its structure.

Once this is done, Rawsie applies a lossless compression to the image. It is still a lossy codec, as the output is not identical to the input, but in a much more controlled way than JPEG. The loss that Rawsie introduces is equivalent to having taken your image with a 15% higher ISO, e.g. ISO115 vs ISO100. No other losses are introduced.

Whenever you change a pixel value, whatever you do, you will introduce a loss even if it is tiny. Rawsie works at the optimal threshold where the image can be most compressed with the least effect on the signal. However, this optimal level still adds a tiny bit of noise, exactly like having taken the image at a 15% higher ISO, as explained above. There are no other hidden losses.

This is because some manufacturers have already implemented lossy compression in-camera, and this lossy compression has already modified the image beyond what we consider the maximum acceptable modification, so that there is not much we can do. Also, Rawsie is really a hybrid of pre-processing + lossless compression, so that if an image is naturally rich in information, that information still needs to be preserved in the file.

In order to provide the best possible compression some of the files will require a free copy of Adobe DNG Converter on your system to encode your images to the open format DNG. If you uninstall Adobe DNG Converter, Rawsie will not work until you install it back.

Simply delete Rawsie.app file on your system. If you don't remember where it is, you can open Spotlight and enter Rawsie.app in the search field to locate and delete the file. If you'd also like to uninstall Adobe DNG Converter which goes with Rawsie, you can also delete it from Applications folder.

Updates come automatically, so there's no need to manually update your Rawsie. You will see an update notification as soon as it will get updated. Alternatively, select Rawsie from the macOS top navigation bar and click Check for Updates

Unfortunately, trial version of Rawsie is not currently available to download due to sunsetting Rawsie in its current form. Please follow us on instagram.com/rawsieapp and twitter.com/dotphoton to get updates on our new products for photographers.

It's a number you use to activate your copy of Rawsie. You can find it in the e-mail that we've sent you when you purchased the license, upon logging in to my.rawsie.co or in the app's Check license window.

As of June 15 2023, all subscriptions will be cancelled at the end of your billing period due to sunsetting Rawsie in its current form. Unfortunately, subscription can not be cancelled before it expires.

Absolutely nothing will happen. Your images will be stored wherever you store them and they will be editable at any time as DNG is an open raw format. The only change for you would be that you will not be able to compress more images with Rawsie.

Yes, your license key will work on two Macs. Any additional computers will require purchasing another license.

Basically there are three options.

• Your order was canceled or refunded, which rendered the activation code invalid.
• We've noticed some potential fraud activity connected to your license and blocked it.
• You've used your license key on more than two Macs, so one of the first two got automatically deactivated.

In any case, please reach out to us at boris at rawsie dot co

As for now we can only do it manually for you by switching off one of your already used licenses. Please contact us at boris at rawsie dot co

Unfortunately, lifetime/perpetual Rawsie plan will not be available for new users since June 2022. All current lifetime users can still enjoy their plans as purchased. 

Please contact us at team@rawsie.co