[Digikam-users] How do you generate good quality jpegs from raws quickly, automatically ?

[Linuxguy123]

This is a follow up to my "How does digiKam do raw conversions for the
slide shows ?" post from earlier today.

So... I shot 600 raws at a wedding last weekend.  In digiKam the
previews of these files look awesome.  Apparently they come from a jpg
embedded in the raw file. 

I need to convert the raws to jpegs.   I also have another 2,000 or so
raws to convert.

The problem with converting raws to jpegs automatically is that they
almost never look as good as the preview images.  Please don't tell me
to shoot jpgs alone because when I spend a lot of time on an image I can
get it looking a lot better than than the preview image, especially if
the white balance is out and I happened to shoot a grey card image from
which to adjust the white balance.  This happens frequently when I shoot
in mixed lighting situations, which happens from time to time.

If I were a lazy man I would just extract the jpgs from the raw files.
But that seems like a waste given that we have all these fancy raw
converters and all the glorious raw pixel data sitting in the raw file.

I've used a number of tools (ufraw, Raw Studio and the digiKam tools)
and they usually come out looking pretty horid.  I can't figure out why.
The white balance is usually way out, the saturation usually needs
adjustment and sometimes even the exposure is off.  I can fix all this
stuff, but it takes a lot of TIME.  I'm looking for something that
doesn't take a lot of hand tweaking. 

This raw conversion issue is a big problem for me.  Its the main
bottleneck in my whole photography workflow, now that I have digiKam
anyway.  Before everything was a bottleneck.  Now only raw conversion
is.  digiKam rocks !

FWIW, I have raw images from a D50, 40D and 450D.

So how do you convert your raws to jpgs automatically and get a good
result, ie something close to the preview jpg ?  I would prefer to use
the tools in digiKam but will consider using outside tools and
eventually write a plugin to use them in digiKam.


Thanks