Dotphoton, a deep-tech startup, has built a program called Rawsie that enables quantum-based RAW image compression. What that means, practically speaking, is that its technology can compress RAW file data sizes by up to 80% without quality loss, dramatically reducing storage requirements.

Rawsie was created in partnership between professional photographer Eugenia Balysheva from Geneva and quantum physicist Dr. Bruno Sanguinetti of the University of Geneva.
Contrary to the common belief, storage is not getting dirt cheap for pro professional photographers. Current prices are not expected to drop lower than a certain value and are already getting near to their plato. On the other hand, pro photographers prefer to create multiple backups, so it’s not about the price of just one drive. Moreover, the average image file size is constantly growing year-to-year.
But Rawsie is not just about saving space, but it’s a lot about saving time, and making life easier. For example, Rawsie makes cloud backups 5x faster (and cheaper).

The overarching technology is based on patented proprietary quantum information field research and, in its industrial application, achieves up to 10:1 compression ratio. The desktop application for photographers is nearly as powerful, and Dotphoton claims that Rawsie is able to compress any RAW file by 80% without losing any image quality.

“The output is in DNG which, unlike other formats, allows to keep the full dynamic range. Rawsie applies its unique compression algorithm reducing the images by up to 80%,” the company writes.

Dotphoton algorithms create no artifacts and retain image information, so they are as suitable for post-processing and archival as regular raw files.

Technically, Dotphoton introduces a small scientifically controlled loss of 0.3 bits of information per pixel at most. Bits are a logarithmic scale, and 0.3 is a very small amount. In fact, this value is so small that the difference between the original pixel value and the compressed value is always strictly smaller than the noise.
Unlike most compression algorithms, Rawsie guarantees not the fixed compression ratio, but the highest compression ratio for a particular image from a particular sensor at the highest quality of that image.

“In our first year the biggest challenge was the unimaginable skepticism among photographers,” says Boris Verks, the head of product for Rawsie. “Pro photography is generally a geeky field, but the technology behind Rawsie out-geeked it all. When you tell people their 1GB of data could turn into just 200MB without quality compromise, it challenges everything they know about their gear.”

Dotphoton says that the photographers who have embraced what Rawsie can do use the software in a couple of different ways. For those using Adobe software to edit and cull, Rawsie compresses folders linked to Lightroom catalogs, which reduces file sizes while preserving edits and metadata. It can also be applied to individual raw images.

“The software mostly addresses workflows common for high-volume photographers where storage costs and file handling speed are annoying,” the company says. “Both pre and post-editing is vital.”

Rawsie has a free version of its software that allows anyone to compress up to 30 images a day with the option to unlock an unlimited version both as perpetual software or as a subscription. The company says Rawsie can be purchased for $79 annually as a subscription or $199 outright.

More info on Rawsie’s website.