RAW on your Canon Compact.

[phild]

I've often been impressed with the quality of images that comes from HRH's A710 and wised I could have more flexibility in processing.

There has been a Canon RAW hack for many model compacts for quite some time but I hadn't bothered to download.

Recently I've been frustrated with colour balance issues from HRH's A710 so I'm going to install the CHKD hack.

The CHKD hack works for most of canons compact range.

For anyone who's interested here is a link (http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK)with information and download, The hack is quite powerful and is basically an add on (loaded from the SD card at boot up) that doesn't modify the original firmware.

There's a lot of additional information on that site, including focus stacking and scripting, as well as a number of user written scripts for download including intervalomoeter and bracketing.

There is also a link to some Open source focus stacking software Combine ZP

[ZedEx]

i've had hit and miss success with CHDK. I did it to a higher end IXUS compact about a year ago which enabled RAW. All well and good, however no program would open these RAW files (none of my dSLR Canon software, nor Adobe Camera RAW) and a lot of the other ones were pretty gimmicky, and most didn't work.
Really though, thumbs up to the guys that find these hacks, they're doing some great stuff (especially on the earlier 300D I think where I think they unlocked most of the extra stuff found on the higher end 10D cameras, just through firmware).

[phild]

That's interesting because there are lots of success stories, even a mention of opening the RAW files is CS2, the hack is quite model specific presumably you have downloaded the correct one for your model, there is constant revision and bug fix happening so your problem could well have been resolved.

I'll report back once I get it loaded.

[ZedEx]

Yeah, like I said it's hit and miss. A lot of the functionality is pretty useless though. Like the increased ISO is really no different to brightening in photoshop by 1 stop. The older SLR hacks were better, and I wouldn't mind having a model that supported the motion trigger/ultra fast shutter speeds etc but unfortunately mine didn't :(