Camera RAW thumbnail generator

[Steffen Hansen]

On Tuesday 21 June 2005 20:15, Renchi Raju wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Jun 2005, Steffen Hansen wrote:
> > Last time I looked at the digikam raw plugin it was just a frontend
> > to dcraw and actually running the dcraw binary to do the
> > conversion. This doesn't allow interactive adjustments of the
> > conversion parameters.
>
> the kipi-plugins raw converter plugin allows interactive adjustments
> of all conversion parameters that dcraw allows:
>
> http://www.digikam.org/images/plugins/sshot-rawconverter1.jpeg

Please don't take this as negative critisism or whatever, but what the 
KIPI RAW converter plugin does it not interactive adjustment. It is 
just a gui frontend to dcraw. Have you tried any commercial RAW 
converters lately?

If you have a windows box available you can try the free (as in beer) 
RSE from http://www.pixmantec.com/products/rawshooter_essentials.html . 
That is what I mean with interactive adjustments...

> > Have a look at http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/ -- it's not perfect
> > either, but I think it's a small step in the right direction.
>
> ufraw is a very nice plugin and it allows adjustments to the
> extracted image (from the raw image) in 16 bits, thus overcoming the
> inability of gimp to work in 16 bit colorspace. imho, the correct
> solution (tm) is to extract the image from raw image in 16 bit format
> and allow the host app to do the adjustments to the image. we are
> working on adding 16 bit support to digikam

Right. If the host application supports 16bit editing and provides tools 
for the typical RAW adjustments (whitebalance, gamma, highlight/shadow 
detail, contrast etc) then it's perfect, esp. if the host app allows 
batch processing of some sort (for example like BibblePro that allows 
you to selectively copy/paste image settings to collections of images).

What is the current vision for digikam btw? Is it evolving more in the 
direction of photo album management or image manipulation?

BTW: I only noticed yesterday that the digikam thumbnail kio slave can 
also extract preview images from RAW images. The code is almost the 
same as mine, but I didn't know that when I made it. As far as I can 
see the only difference is that I replaced one or two of the functions 
in parse.c with the more complete equivalent from dcraw.c and that I 
read out the rotation property of the image.

I would _love_ a powerful free RAW converter with good interactive 
performance and batch capabilities for KDE/Qt, but it is not a trivial 
task to implement it and I know I can't put serious amounts of time in 
it. 

regards
-- 
Steffen Hansen          |       Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB
Senior Software Engineer|       http://www.klaralvdalens-datakonsult.se
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