While skateboarding with my son this weekend I watched several people struggle with their digital cameras trying to capture the near ballistic acrobatic moves of the boarders as they careened around the skate park. Unfortunately the fodder for that post will have to wait; as I was rudely reminded a short while later of a very important tool that I believe everyone who shoots digital images should have on their hard drive.

After my skateboarding misadventure and about three hours in the emergency room, I retuned home with my arm in a sling and a PC formatted CD holding my X-rays. I popped the CD in to my Mac laptop and fumbled through the numerous folders until I found what I hoped were the radiographs of my left arm. The first file I found was labeled 1426 with no file extension, which I tried to open in Photoshop without success.

Digital file formats come in a hodgepodge on acronyms: CRW, NEF, CVG, ECW, EPSF, IMQ, JFIF, MAG, MRC, PICT, SCX, TIFF, WPG, XFIG, YUV, just to name a few. My X-rays, as I later discovered were DlCOM, a medical imaging format produced by a Philips DigitalDiagnost digital radiography system.

Faced with a file format I did not recognize and could not open in Photoshop, I turned to the Swiss army knife of digital file formats for the Mac, Graphic Converter. Thorsten Lemke developed this shareware program in 1992, which now boasts it will open nearly 200 different graphic formats. Not only did Graphic Converter open the DlCOM file, it also allowed me to read the patient medical data embedded in the file header. Using Graphic Converter I exported the DlCOM file (right) to JPEG so I could include it with this post. I have also used Graphic Converter to open and recover corrupted JPEG images.

If you are a PC user you may want to take a look at Graphics Converter Pro by Newera, it has a five star rating on Versiontracker. Apple recently started pre-loading Graphic Converter, check your utilities folder; you may already have a copy.

— Ken Geiger

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