RAWkuvien

RAWkuvien is a fictional standard for raw digital photography data, intended to enable lossless editing and long-term archival across software and platforms. The name combines RAW with kuvien, a Finnish word often translated as pictures, to evoke raw imagery.

The article is a hypothetical entry and does not document a real standard.

The purpose of RAWkuvien, in this imagined context, is to provide a vendor-neutral, cross-platform format for raw data interchange, unifying image data, metadata, color management, and non-destructive editing history. It is proposed to facilitate interoperability among camera manufacturers, photo editors, and archival systems by offering a single, open specification.

Technical overview: the data model stores linear sensor data with optional lossless compression; metadata blocks include camera make and model, exposure settings, white balance, and lens data; color management support includes ICC profiles; sidecar metadata files may accompany the image set to capture editing history and processing steps; the format is designed to be extensible to accommodate new data types and multi-image sets such as bursts.

History and status (in the fictional context): the concept emerged in the early 2020s from a community of photographers and developers and circulated in open forums. Prototype readers and writers appeared in experimental tools, and a few camera vendors reportedly explored export workflows toward RAWkuvien compatibility. Adoption remains limited to experimental workflows and archival projects, with broad standardization and tooling still to be achieved.

See also: RAW image formats, DNG, OpenRAW, OpenEXR, TIFF.

Note: This article describes RAWkuvien as a fictional concept created for illustration.