Corrupted G9 Files

[jlipkin]

I just tried to open a few images I shot with my G9, and it appears they are corrupted. The previews rendered fine.

I converted them to DNG at import using LR. When I try to develop the files in LR, I get the message: LR has encountered problems reading the photo. You will not be abloe to make adjustments. When I try to open in Photoshop, I get the message that PS couldn't open because the file format module cannot parse the file. This is an entire shoot lost.

Any advice on how to recover the files? Image Rescue didn't work.

[MikeA]

Ouch!

I guess the first thing to do would be to see if it's an ongoing problem. Take another shot and import it.

Something I always do, is grab a backup of the rawfile before anything has a chance to munge it. To that end, I use Image ingestor to manage the card import and backup the RAW files before any other software (including DNG) even touches the files. Won't help you here, but it can save your bacon and worth doing:

ImageIngester - One-click (or zero-click) image ingestion

Mike.

[jlipkin]

The odd thing is that it was only this one import (everything since has been fine), and I would think that LR would have notified me if the files had been corrupted during import. Also, not all the files are corrupted - maybe only about 75%


Maybe I need to rethink my workflow if LR is going to mangle files like this.

[George Hardy]

Hey Jonathan,
sounds similar to what happened to me using Microsoft's` Digital Pro. Got locked out of an entire file and not knowing what happened had to hunt for a solution. Best I came up with was to open the corrupted files in a previous version; this meant going into the registry, digging though the switches and hopeing for the best. I decided it was not worth the aggravation. In analyzing what happened it was discovered that I was running System Mechanic as the download was in progress from the camera ,and Mechanic did what it does best, stop things from happening and clean the computer. Man, I will never do that again.
Now when I download I make sure the computer is not doing anything else and back up immediately or not format the cards until the files are verified.
George

[jlipkin]

What I thought was that LR was verifying files as it imported them. Either it borked the files, or they got corrupted after import. I'll have a look at my Retrospect backups and see if I have an earlier version of the file.

[AndrewCassino]

It's been said around here before and maybe at long last the point will sink in, which would be a real benefit for those people that are getting burned by these problems.

This very first thing you should do with a memory card is COPY and VERIFY the files off it using your computer's operating system. COPYING a file from a CF card to a hard drive is a non-destructive process WHICH CAN BE VERIFIED, and even Windows Vista can accomplish this competently!

Whereas "image ingestion" (and all the other confabulated terms for simultaneously importing an image file into an application, tagging it, renaming it, etc, etc) is NOT necessarily non-destructive and does NOT necessarily verify its operations (it depends on the capabilities of the application being used and the settings selected by the user).

Before you do any form of "ingestion" you should COPY and VERIFY the files off the CF card. At the very least if you do that you will know immediately if there is something wrong with the files from the camera or the memory card, and if something goes wrong during ingestion you will have a backup!!!

[jlipkin]

Andrew -

My assumption was always that when I imported as DNG, that the process of converting and building a preview in LR was verifying the integrity of the images. This has always been implied by DNG proponents. But seems not to be the case. I'm going to have to modify my workflow now. But, Andrew, I'm not sure about your assertion that copying verifies the image. It verifies the file, but the actual integrity of the image is something else, no? In other words, if the image is corrupted in camera, one would need to build previews in bridge to verify the image itself. This is the process I thought I was accomplishing in LR.

What I've been trying to figure out is whether the image was corrupted in camera, or whether the DNG process is what did it in.

Postscript: because I was able to view the image in iView, I managed to use the convert image file option to save it as a full-size tiff. So, some image data was saved. When I opened it in Graphic Converter, the bottom half of the image was black, so I'm guessing that the DNG processing is what did the damage.



(see Schewe's response pasted below).
from PhotoshopNews: Photoshop News and Information » Archive » DNG Workflow / Part I

Ken Tanaka Says:
May 24th, 2005 at 1:07 am
I wholeheartedly support the DNG initiative
But before I can completely incorporate the DNG conversion into my normal workflow the converter must become much more reliable. At present approximately 1% of my conversions produce a corrupted DNG image. This corruption appears as blocks of color, sometimes covering nearly the entire image. Reconversion always seems to remedy the image, although it sometimes trashes another image in the batch.

I continue to experiment with the DNG converter but, at least at this writing, it presents just one more darn nit requiring close supervision in a chain of such nits.

-K.Tanaka-

Jeff Schewe Says:
May 24th, 2005 at 2:46 am
I’ve never had the DNG Converter barf an image that didn’t already have some sort of issue already. It would be useful to post the DNG Converter version, your OS and CPU platform and the exact steps to reproduce a corrupted DNG file.

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