[Digikam-users] 16bit editiing and auto-whitebalance

[Arnd Baecker]

On Tue, 15 Apr 2008, Gilles Caulier wrote:

> 2008/4/15, Benjamin Schindler <bschindler at student.ethz.ch>:
> > Hi
> >
> >  I just bought a Nikon D60 and started to experiment with Raw photos, so
> >  I have two questions/suggestions (I'm on a gentoo box using latest beta):
> >
> >  - Why is 16bit dcraw decoding not enabled by default? 16bit is one of
> >  the major reasons to use raw, so I would expect to have 16bit unless
> >  instructed otherwise
>
> 8 bits by default because there is no auto-gamma with 16 bits color
> depth with digiKam <= 0.9.3

Should we now switch to 16 Bit as default ?

> >  - I've created just very few raw photos, but one thing struck me: Take
> >  the following raw: http://n.ethz.ch/~bschindl/fotos/DSC_0033.NEF. The
> >  embedded jpeg (which I assume is the one visible in the album view)
> >  looks nicely vivid. But when opening the image, it looks _very_ bad. I
> >  know cameras apply their set of improvements, but I have left the camera
> >  with the default settings, so it shouldn't be this bad. Why is this so?
> >  I know I can just do some color corrections to get this, but it would be
> >  great if this would be the starting point for editing!
>
> Done in 0.9.4. auto-gamma is implemented with 16 bits color depth

Well, even with current svn it just does not look good
enough to me.
Most likely this is not digikams fault (i.e., ufraw's output
looks similary dull to me) as no one (in open source) knows
the secret methods of raw to jpg conversion used by Nikon
(same with Canon of course, but there the results
looked much better, in the cases we looked at together, Gilles).

I am not sure if much can be done, though ....

Best, Arnd