Canon EOS 5D Mark IV: Opening The RAW Files In Capture One

This post is also available in: Dutch

Last Thursday the long-awaited Canon EOS 5D Mark IV camera came out. Unfortunately one of the best RAW converters, Phase One Capture One, doesn’t import the RAW files from the camera yet. Last Friday I found an unofficial solution, a “hack”, being able to import those files in Capture One and process them, until the official release of Capture One. I’ll explain you how, but there are some things you have to remember.

• The EXIF data will be changed to the Canon EOS 5DS, we will trick Capture One
• Capture One doesn’t provide an ICC profile for the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV yet so it will use the Canon EOS 5DS profile
• There can be some white balance inconsistencies, especially with the new “pure white balance” camera mode, it seems to revert to “ambient white balance”
• Tethering won’t work yet, because we will be “hacking” the RAW files before importing them
• Please make a backup of your RAW files first
• Did I say it already? Please backup your original RAW files first…

We will use the free open source exiftool program to modify the EXIF data of the RAW files. I use it on the Mac, but exiftool also works on Linux and it should also work on Windows, although I cannot test that. I wil explain the steps for the Mac.

1. Install exiftool from their website, Mac users can choose the Mac OS X package or install it through Homebrew with brew install exiftool
2. Place the RAW images from the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV in a folder. I made a folder on my desktop named “RAW-Files”, please make a backup of your original RAW files first as mentioned above
3. Open the Terminal app. By default it’s installed in Applications -> Utilities, but you can also open it by pressing CMD + Space and then typing Terminal
4. Enter the following command, without pressing enter/return yet:

   exiftool -model="Canon EOS 5DS" -preserve -overwrite_original

5. Insert a blank space (directly after -overwrite_original)
6. Drag and drop the “RAW-Files” folder from your desktop onto your Terminal window, so Terminal inserts automatically the full path to the folder onto the command line
7. Remove the extra space and insert a slash and an asterisk at the end: /*
8. In my case, the whole command looks like this:

   exiftool -model="Canon EOS 5DS" -preserve -overwrite_original /Users/hans/Desktop/RAW-Files/*

9. Press enter/return and wait
10. Finished! You can close Terminal now and open the files with Capture One 😃

Thanks to AronQZ for the reminder about the EOS 5DS camera model name, because last Friday I experimented with the name of the Canon EOS 1DX Mark II and others and because of my busy schedule I didn’t remember exactly which was which anymore.

Now you can evaluate the great sharpness and dynamic range of your brand new RAW shots in Capture One. You can use this “hack” until Capture One officially supports the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV. I will update this post as soon as the new Capture One with official support will be released.

Update: now there’s a thread on DPReview with background information.