[Digikam-users] questions about the raw importer

[Gandalf Lechner]

Hi all,

today I spent some time with digikam's new raw importer in 0.9.5svn and can 
confirm once again that it has improved a lot over the previous versions. 
Nontheless, I would like to ask some unrelated questions about it.


1) white balance.
Do the settings "default D65", "camera", "automatic" just correspond to fixing 
some value of the temperature? Or are there some more internal settings 
involved? If it's only the temperature (and green tint, maybe), it would be 
helpful if the chosen temperature would be indicated on the slider, with 
dragging the slider changing whitebalance to manual mode. 
Moreover, there is a funny error in the German translation. While "Handbuch" 
is the correct translation of "manual" in the sense of the manual which the 
user is supposed to read, the "manual" mode meant here is "manuell" or 
"benutzerdefiniert" in German, not "Handbuch".

2) black and white.
I don't understand these settings very well, but that's probably due to my 
limited photography knowledge ;-) My guess is that with these sliders, you can 
cut off the spectrum at the left or right hand side. Is that correct? If yes, 
it would be great if this cut off could be visualized in the spectrum depicted 
in the importer. Or how can I see what value is appropriate?

3) luminosity curve.
For consistency with the rest of digikam, maybe for "reset to linear" the same 
button as for all the other reset buttons could be used. The micro button 
which is used right now can actually easily be overlooked.

4) workflow for imported images.
After the raw image is imported, usually some more adjustments like crop, 
sharpen, etc are made. What is the intended workflow here?
I started out with importing the raw image, save it to something non-raw, and 
then do further adjustments. Or can the tools in the image editor work 
directly on the raw data? Well, when I save the imported X.raw to, say, X.jpg 
and then do some more changes, I have the problem that saving after these 
changes does not work - digikam refuses to overwrite X.jpg with the changed 
X.jpg, and I am forced to pick a new file name. So I usually import, save to 
jpg, close the image editor, open the jpg again and then do the other 
adjustments.


Best regards,
Gandalf