[KimDaBa] KimDaBa 2.0 is released.

[Shawn Willden]

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On Saturday 30 October 2004 10:58 pm, jedd wrote:
>  There's a bunch of exiftools out there that aren't OSS / free ...
>
>  http://www.hugsan.com/

Thanks, I'll look into that.  I don't mind non-Free, or non-free software that 
runs on Linux.

However, I've run into a couple more obstacles with using RAW images.  Maybe 
someone has some suggestions?

The first, and biggest, problem is image quality.  I cannot seem to make 
pictures taken in RAW mode look good!  By that I mean I can't produce JPEGs 
from them that look as good as the JPEGs I get from the camera.  Obviously 
it's possible, because whatever post-processing the camera is doing can 
certainly be done by my PC, but I haven't found the trick.

Just using dcraw without any options results in an image that is very dim and 
quite low in contrast.  That's okay, because I can fix it either by adjusting 
the gamma setting on dcraw, or by post-processing with the GIMP's levels 
tool.  I need to experiment to see if there's a process that does a decent 
job (similar to what the camera does when producing JPEGs) that I can run 
automatically.  I don't want to have to adjust every image manually.

Beyond brightness and contrast, the colors I get out of a RAW image are subtly 
wrong.  All of my test images come out with a little too much red.  Whereas 
the JPEG from the camera usually produces something that is a reasonably 
close match to what my eye perceives directly, the converted RAW images are 
too red.  I have not been able to find a good way to fix this at all... even 
with careful manual adjustment of the colors (and I'm reasonably skilled at 
that).  I think the camera is applying a tuned color adjustment curve, like 
an ICC profile, and gross whole-range color adjustments do a poor job.  I 
suspect that to get proper colors from my RAW images, I need an appropriate 
ICC profile, and some software to apply it (I think I saw a GIMP plugin a 
while back...).

Okay, so I've got lousy brightness, contrast and colors, what's left?  Oh, 
yeah, sharpness.  The converted RAW images are fuzzy.  That's not such a 
problem, though, an unsharp mask fixes that right up.

So, for any others that routinely work with RAW images, how do you deal with 
all of this?

Thanks,

 Shawn.
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