tech question about sharing raw files

[voidsource]

Something I recently remember ( which happened years ago ), was that I was working with a photographer and they sent me the raw images. But when they did that, I got these very tiny thumbnails with file sizes being no where near the raw files. I thought it was a mistake and i remember I contacted the photographer and he said those are the real files and to open them up in my editor ( don't remember if it was LR or PS ) but either way when i opened them up they were the full raw image. Till this day I don't understand how that was possible. Literally sent me a zip file with 100's of tiny thumbnails who files size were maybe a 1/10th of t he original size and were fully editable.

I tried going on google and researching but I was not able to find anything. I found mostly how to scale down but not how to get it to go back to full raw editable file once opened in the desired OS. Anyone know how this is done? i'd like to know.

[Doug Nelson]

Sounds like a miscommunication about "raw" files (ie: unedited) and .raw files (the RAW file format). RAW files (or NEF or whatever extension) are uneditable. I remember having circular conversations about this back in the day.

There were also a couple of early editors that used a proxy pyramid as their editing format, but this was never a RAW format.

[voidsource]

Sounds like a miscommunication about "raw" files (ie: unedited) and .raw files (the RAW file format). RAW files (or NEF or whatever extension) are uneditable. I remember having circular conversations about this back in the day.

There were also a couple of early editors that used a proxy pyramid as their editing format, but this was never a RAW format.

no these were somehow the actual dng or raw files just in byte size that allowed you to send them over via email and i'm trying to remember but maybe i had to uncompress them to get it back to the normal size ( speaking in mbs ) which would allow me to then edit them. Once I edited them, he just wanted the xmp file. Yes i know xmp contains the info for the edits. So I'm thinking i ended up working on them in LR as i dont recall PS giving me xmp files, though its probably possible. The closest i found after more searching was this

https://petapixel.com/2013/08/26/create-a-smaller-emailable-copy-of-your-raw-photos-using-lightrooms-export/

but again, the file open up in full high res and editable. I am thinking maybe i have the photographers email saved up somewhere but i would have to look through it to find them to know for sure.

[Doug Nelson]

From that article "The tradeoff to all this is that you’re sending a lower-res, lossy version of the original RAW file. It’s not the original, but it’s a RAW file that you can easily share and get feedback on." So they were literal thumbnails, only in a DNG wrapper. Not the original raw sensor data files. (Sorry for my pedantry)

I have heard of workflows where edits are made to lowrez versions, then the edit history is replayed over the actual full-rez files.

[voidsource]

From that article "The tradeoff to all this is that you’re sending a lower-res, lossy version of the original RAW file. It’s not the original, but it’s a RAW file that you can easily share and get feedback on." So they were literal thumbnails, only in a DNG wrapper. Not the original raw sensor data files. (Sorry for my pedantry)

I have heard of workflows where edits are made to lowrez versions, then the edit history is replayed over the actual full-rez files.

Yup, i have made edits on low res versions before and then later applied them to the high res. Specially in photoshop with the liquify tool. But yea that video was an example of how they lowered the file size, but the photographer i had received it made me uncompressed it and it had gone back to a full res version bc i remember the file size was way bigger than what the actual dl was. Not sure how he was able to pull that off. So thats why i was wondering if anyone had done anything like that before. I guess no one has done it before.