CR2 viewer Download
CR2 viewer is a convenient, minimalistic CR2 file viewer. CR2 is one of the RAW formats used by Canon's digital SLR cameras. Examples of models that use this standard include the EOS300d, EOS350d, EOS400d, and Digital Rebel XT.
Earlier Canon cameras used .CRW file format, which is based on the Camera Image File Format (CIFF). CR2 is the RAW format that replaced CRW format files. RAW files are different to jpg and other image files as the data is written to memory directly from the CCD or CMOS chip, without any modification, processing or compression. This means that the file is unchanged and perfect for editing.
These files contain much information about the original scene and the image, information that is lost when using JPEG or other image file formats. Because CR2 file formats contain huge quantities of information, the size of the CR2 file will be about four times larger than the equivalent highest quality JPEG file format.
The extra information contained in CR2, make these Canon Raw images popular and favoured in astrophotography because in post-processing can be bought very fine details of planets, nebulae and galaxies. Also, CR2 (or RAW files generally) offer great flexibility if you are dealing with exposure times. To underexposed images can easily be increased in brightness - contrast without introducing noise or affecting the dynamic range, as can an overexposed image.