[Digikam-users] LightZone

[Arnd Baecker]

On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Gerhard Kulzer wrote:

> On Tuesday 05 February 2008 Markus Spring wrote:
> > Gerhard Kulzer wrote:
> > | if you're tagging your whole collection you might be interested in reading this:
> > | http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=DigikamDAM
> > Gerhard, this is an excellent article! Thank you for this compilation.
> >
> > One question regarding dng: As far as I know there is no linux software to
> > create dng's out of raw files, is this correct?
> >
> > As I have already exchanged my camery and have a pile of raw files from my old
> > camera, I can do nothing but rely on dcraw's strategy to digest new formats
> > without dropping old ones - or convert all my files to tiff in order to play
> > safe. But then I have to create sidecar files for all the metadata...
> >
> > Regards - Markus
>
> You are right, there's no DNG software (AFAIK) on Linux yet, unless you want to try this:
> http://mat.users.geeky.net/serendipity/index.php?/archives/244-A-dcraw-patch-to-enable-DNG-output-finally!.html
>
> It is of course one of our near future goals to support DNG. It needs tiff writing support be exiv2 and libtiff to start with.
> I took DNG up in my article because, whilst it is focussed on digiKam, it take a bit of a general stance on DAM, and DNG seems to be the way to go for RAW. Right noe the best digiKam way to go about RAW is to keep RAW files and to convert into PNG, although there is no full metadata PNG support either.

Isn't there also the additional aspect, that the original RAW
data directly correspond to the sensor data,
which usually are separated into R G B data, in a Bayer array.
Thus some people argue, that it is better to keep the original
RAW, because better Bayer interpolators might be created in the
future. DNG would already contain an interpolated image, right?

Actually, I am not sure how relevant this is in practical
terms, but together with noise reduction etc. it might be important
in some cases?

Best, Arnd