[KimDaBa] KimDaBa 2.0 is released.

[Robert L Krawitz]

   From: Shawn Willden <shawn-kimdaba at willden.org>
   Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 15:36:26 -0700

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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.

There's plenty of other exif software for Linux.  There's a nifty
little KDE program called exif.py that extracts exif info, and if you
do a sourceforge or google search you'll find more.

   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.

I've been doing a lot of work on dcraw and have come up with a lot of
improvements.  You still won't get a perfect match with the jpegs the
camera produces (since the conversion algorithms the camera uses are
secret), but it's possible to do much better.

I've put a snapshot on ftp://66.92.65.9/pub/dcraw.c.  Try using the
following command line:

dcraw -u -w -1 crw_6666.crw

-u means automatic exposure compensation; -1 means to create the 8-bit
PPM file with the same algorithms used in the 16-bit conversions.  -u
also causes the transfer curves to handle highlights better.

There's a lot of other options I've added: saturation and contrast
adjustment (-C and -W), -t to flip/rotate the image (by default, this
version rotates the image to correct the orientation), -x to perform
manual exposure compensation (if you use -x and -u together, you'll
first get auto compensation, then you'll get additional compensation),
-W to do centerweighted exposure metering rather than full-frame, -T
to produce more contrast in highlights.  There's quite a bit more.
One of these days I'm going to release it somehow, since the upstream
maintainer doesn't particularly want to accept these changes.

   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.

The camera probably performs the unsharp mask internally.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gimp Print   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton