(For once, I just couldn’t resist.)

I’ve had my S3 IS for a few weeks now (it arrived while I was in the hospital; my father was kind enough to bring it by), and have been overwhelmingly happy with it. Not all photos have turned out well, but as I become more familiar with the functions and train myself to take a closer look (particularly on how good or bad the lighting is), the percentage of good results will probably increase.

Some readers may recall that, while I originally had expected to buy the S3 IS (or any successor thereof), I was not so sure once I looked at Panasonic’s FZ8, leading to much pondering on my birthday, and Adobe moving to support its RAW support made things even harder to decide. That I did eventually go for the S3 was more of a decision of the kind where you just stop thinking and flip a mental coin. The toss worked out great, though.

While I was aware that the camera theoretically supports firmware updates, Canon tends not to provide them (aside from the occasional urgent bug fixes, but hardly ever feature enhancements), so I didn’t expect anything notable in that direction… until today.

Seriously, why didn’t anyone tell me? I occasionally look into HDRI (I still need a primer on how to actually shoot such images without feeling like a complete moron ), and somehow that made me stumble over Wikipedia’s article for my camera, and as my eyes wandered around, they spotted the word “RAW” on the page.

RAW, on the S3? Surely that’s a mistake?

As it turns out, virtually all PowerShot cameras with Canon’s DIGIC II processor can load a third-party firmware “CHDK“ which, among several other enhancements (more interface options, a file browser, etc.), adds RAW support. You can customize white balance without quality loss, fine-tune the sharpening, and so on.

(I should clarify that it’s not strictly speaking a firmware, but rather a software on top of Canon’s firmware. This not only means that you can always go back to Canon’s firmware, but also that there’s no flashing, and thus virtually no risk at all.)

Now, with some rather cumbersome trickery involving running DNGForPowerShot inside Windows XP in Parallels Desktop, then adjusting OS X’s ImageIO framework’s Raw.plist file (which contains information for supported cameras and how to interpret their data), as described over here, I even managed to get Preview to display the RAW images, and Aperture to import it, including having RAW fine-tuning options in the Adjustments panel/HUD!

That’s right: I can shoot RAW and losslessly edit it in Aperture, with a PowerShot S3 IS! This despite Canon not advertising the S3 as being RAW-capable at all (or even capable of any lossless format), and Apple generally being slow/downright ’sucky’ with adding more camera support for RAW.

For those interested, the key to add in the plist should look like this:

	<key>Canon-PowerShotS3IS</key>
	<string>Canon-PowerShot G6</string>

(You might be inclined to add a space between “PowerShot” and “S3IS”, or even one before “IS”. Don’t. The spelling must exactly match that in the EXIF data.)

This will make it behave the same as the PowerShot G6; that is, you’re essentially ‘aliasing’ the properties of one camera to that of another. Perhaps someone will find a different Canon camera that more closely mimics the S3’s behavior; do let me know, but the settings worked okay with me thus far.

So, it’s looking like I’ll be able to tap into virtually all of Aperture’s abilities. The shooting is a lot slower, so it’s not always advisable to keep the setting on, but for the occasional well-prepared shot where high quality matters more to you than it normally already does, this is a nice surprise.