PreView and RAW or ORF image files

I don't think Preview is intended to be a full-featured package.

According to [Wikipedia, Preview can open RAW files|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Preview]. However, if you click on the link in the RAW reference you will also read there are lots of different RAM formats, including some proprietary ones where manufacturers want to restrict the programs that can open a file.

One thing to try is to open Preview, then use the file open menu to see if it will open the file.

I have found on some rare occasions that changing the file extension will trick a program into opening a file it thinks it can't but it really can. You could try changing the extension from ORF to RAW and see if that works, but I'm not optimistic.

Preview should be able to open it if Aperture can. Aperture, iPhoto, and Preview share the same raw converters. What happens when you try?

I don't think Preview supports RAW formats. iPhoto 08 can, but this article likes Aperture much better for RAW formatting. http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2007/08/iphoto08_is_good_butaperture.html

iPhoto can Export to JPG, TIFF, and PNG.

And here's an overview of iPhoto 08: http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/#overview

Aperture Forums: http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=184

Carolyn 🙂

It looks like ORF is Olympus raw image file format. While I can't say for sure Preview can't open this, there are a lot of formats out there and it wouldn't surprise me if a format specific to one camera brand wasn't part of Preview's capabilities.

You mentioned updaters for Aperture from Olympus. I wonder if these are plugin converters specifically for Aperture that Preview can't access. Just guessing.