Why Can't I Open a Mr. Sid Image in Photoshop?

[kbellis]

What are the reasons that prevent these two companies from working together? Both Adobe and Lizardtech make great products that I use everyday, but it seems that their customers get the short end when they consider actually using them together on the same image.

What - if any - alternatives are there for editing: color balance, hue, saturation, brightness, curves, etc. of images that have been compressed with Lizardtech software?

Thank you very much for any reply.

Kind regards,

Kelly

[kbellis]

Hi Aulick,

What I have learned (at least up through this moment) is:

This from Mike:
The ability to edit a SID in its native format would have to be done using LizardTech’s GeoExpress 8.5.
GDAL is really an amazing suite of open-source tools, if you’re not scared of command-line interfaces. You can rescale raster values, reproject, clip, rotate, change formats, compress imagery, generate world files, generate hillshades from DEMs, convert raster to vector and vice-versa, and more. All of that for free and completely scriptable.

This from Susan:
I have used IRFANview in the past. h_t_t_p://w_w_w.irfanview.com/ It is a freeware program that does lots of things.

This from Sam:
As an aside, there is actually a partner company of ours called Avenza Systems that makes Geographic Imager (h_t_t_p://w_w_w.avenza.com/geographic-imager), which is a plugin for Photoshop. That allows you to do all the operations you describe plus cropping, mosaicking, and tiling, while maintaining the geographic referencing information. I believe it adds support for MrSID read to Photoshop as well. You can see more information on this at their website: h_t_t_p://w_w_w.avenza.com/

From me:
If I want to spend $700 for another application-plugin (Geographic Imager single license) I'll need way more paying work coming in... and even then it seems unjustified since older versions of Photoshop used to have FREE Mr SID Viewer plugin to deal with SID images - do a search and you'll find stuff like this "The MrSID Viewer for Photoshop® is currently available for Windows 95 and NT only. The Viewer is fully compatible with Photoshop® version 5.0."

Good luck.

Kelly