[Digikam-users] Using camera RAW settings by external RAW converter (was: Preview is "better" than RAW conversion?)

[Remco Viëtor]

On Sunday 31 August 2014 14:34:57 Niels Ott wrote:
> Am 31.08.2014 um 13:29 schrieb Michael Gerdau:
> > Now my question:
> > Does anyone of you know of a way to (fairly accurately) use the 
camera's
> > RAW parameter as a default to start from with an external (aka running
> > on Linux) RAW converter ?
> 
> I think this is what DigiKam already does. However, as far as I
> understand it, the point is in what happens afterwards. Brightness,
> contrast, colors etc. can all be tweaked in the DigiKam editor in a
> convenient way.
> 
> The trick most likely is to automatically find values that give you the
> best result. As said above, the camera manufacturers have good reason
> not to tell you about these (and hide them in their Windows software and
> in the camera).
> 
> These values are probably based on heuristics (e.g. how many pixels are
> over/underexposed and other statistics) and not stored into any RAW file.
> 
> Most of this post is educational guesses. Feel free to correct me.
> 
>    Niels
> 
> 
It's usually a mixture of both:
part is heuristics (indeed, the black point and white point settings can 
work like this), part is in-camera settings (like white balance contrast, 
sharpening, saturation, and all the 'scene' settings, all of wh,ich can be 
tweaked on my camera). And part of these settings are in the documented 
part of the metadata (white balance!), part are in the (officially) 
undocumented maker-notes.

And for things like scene modes, the mode and tweaks selected are in the 
EXIF, the exact details in the camera and (closed-source) raw developer 
provided by the camera maker, and as such unavailable for Digikam.

Remco.

P.S. One of the nice things about using raw is that there are no 'best' 
settings for the development.