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

[Martin (KDE)]

Am Mittwoch, 23. Dezember 2009 schrieb Martin (KDE):
> Am Mittwoch, 23. Dezember 2009 schrieb 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.
> 
> I usually use UFRaw to set exposure, white balance etc. and safe it
>  as ID file only (ID file contains settings only and is much faster
>  to save than a jpeg or png). After that is done, I run ufraw-batch
>  with the ID files (which can take very long).
> 
> I have created a curve which matches (almost) the EOS30D one. I use
> the EOS standard icc profile with gamma set to 0.45 and linearity
>  to 0.1. Additionally I set saturation to 1.1 and enabled auto
>  black-point adjustment.

I have done (once again) a test to get almost the same result from raw 
as I had as jpeg. With the standard ICC canon file as input I have to 
change saturation in ufraw to 1.5 and I get almost the same result 
(besides raw file is much crisper).

> 
> Most raw files looks pretty good with this settings. If many
>  pictures can be developed the same way, you can use one ID file
>  for many raw pictures. But I take the extra time to set some
>  values for every picture.
> 
> My results mostly looks better than the embedded jpegs. Color is a
> little less intensive but I think more accurate.
> 
> Martin
> 
> > Thanks
> 
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