Will PBM still be an editable camera RAW?+
Panasonic RW2 needs camera- and file-aware development to produce a rendered PBM image. White balance, exposure, camera colour interpretation and, where applicable, demosaicing determine that rendering. The destination does not retain the original RAW development latitude. No development settings or camera support are implemented yet.
Can PBM retain gray shading?+
PBM represents each pixel as black or white. Colour and intermediate gray levels cannot survive as sample values. Thresholding or dithering decides how tones become marks; the future engine has no such policy yet. PBM is not an ordinary grayscale photograph format.
Does lossless output mean an unchanged source?+
Netpbm stores these samples without compression. Reducing colour, thresholding or changing maxval can still lose information before storage; text and binary representations change the layout, not its image meaning. PBM can store its supported image samples without lossy compression. This applies after rendering and sample conversion: it does not guarantee preservation of source precision, colour space or document structure, and cannot undo earlier losses.
Are bit depth and colour values guaranteed to match?+
Source and target sample models can differ in precision, channel layout, colour space and transfer function. Lossless compression only preserves the samples actually encoded; a precision reduction or colour conversion can already change them. The future engine defines numeric mapping, orientation and colour conversion; canonical depth facts are listed below where available.
Will metadata and colour profiles be retained?+
Panasonic RW2: Capture metadata → PBM: Header, Comments. Which fields are copied, rewritten or omitted will depend on the future engine; retention is not implemented yet.