- Developer / Product Page: Denis Artyomov / DNG for PowerShot
- Price: Free (open source)
The problem, however, is that RAW formats are camera-specific, and OS X (and its various image-aware applications) don't know what to do with these RAW formats they've never seen before. So I couldn't use iPhoto (or Aperture) to import my RAW photos, because those programs know nothing about the PowerShot's RAW format. iPhoto would import the JPEG copy that's created alongside the RAW image, but not the RAW image itself.
So I went looking for a solution, and didn't have much luck at first -- most programs that handled PowerShot RAW format images seemed to be for Windows or Linux. After much digging, however, I found DNG for PowerShot. This program converts PowerShot RAW images to Adobe's DNG format. Once converted to DNG (which is based on the TIFF file format, but adds in metadata), I was able to use Photoshop to open and edit the files. (Aperture also supports DNG, but iPhoto does not.) Note that I first tried Adobe's own DNG Converter, but it would not read the RAW images from my PowerShot.
So if you've CHDK'd your Canon, and you're looking for a way to handle the RAW images it creates, give DNG for PowerShot a try -- it worked well for me!

