Kind of OT, but does anyone know of decent resources for learning more about and eventually correcting RAW images?<p>I have a collection of RAW photos that have, due to bad transfers or old disks, become corrupted in ways where you can still see the original image, but color casts are off for half the image (strong purple or orange casts) or the image will suddenly jump and skip a few hundred pixels at random places. It seems like I am just missing a portion in the middle or something is misaligned, and I'd love to get these photos back. (I know that a JPG preview is hidden inside the file, which I could extract, but it would be nice to have the full image back as well.)
We wrote a tool like this in my last job to guess the width of raw images like these. First, we were dealing with iOS, and there are certain constraints on the platform which help with guessing width (bitmaps are generally 32-bit BGRA, and the rows in iOS bitmap images are aligned to 32 bytes). Because of the alignment constraint you only have to guess the width in 8-pixel increments. Then pick the width that minimizes the average pixel difference between adjacent rows in the image. This usually guessed the width of the original image (or an integer multiple of the actual width), at least when the original image was a UI element (as UI elements generally have large rectangular blocks of color in them).
In the end of the eighties I needed to replace the fancy patterns available in spreadsheet graphics on PC1512 (gem) by more serious patterns (the client was a bank). I have done a small visualisation program in turbo pascal to find them and I have patched the binary.