Does parsing of a RAW camera image yield all the necessary informations to create a viewable picture from it?
More specifically, is it possible to obtain informations like sensor layout, crop position and size, ... just from the RAW file?
I'm asking because in the case of crop, there is ActiveArea TIFF tag but it seems it is not always available. Also, I see that RAW conversion software seem to always include a hand-crafted database of attributes like black-point, sensor pattern so I was wondering whether that is some kind of optimisation or that all the required information is simply not there in the RAW?