On Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:21:23 -0400 Olin Lathrop wrote:
>
>
>> While "rolling your own" offers endless fascination, the black magic
>> of RAW image processing is so arcane and the experience base from
>> competent players is so vast that it is almost certainly better to use
>> somebody else's converter or perhaps a GNU or similar offering. Life
>> is too short and too full ... :-).
>
>I find it hard to believe it's really all that magical.  My main reason for
>probably wanting to write my own app would be to get the user interface I
>really wanted.  That could be a wrapper around someone else's low level code
>that converts raw files to arrays of RGB pixels with a large set of control
>parameters, if such a thing exists and has the control parameters I want.

There has been such a thing for a long time called dcRAW, it is open source
and is a commandline driven conversion engine. There are quite a few
independant GUI's built arround it already, for many different PC platforms.

Even several of the 'commercial' offerings from camera 
manufacturers use this as a basis.

That said, for large volume work I still prefer dedicated tools by Adobe,
more specifically their 'LightRoom' application that has a rather easy
to use work-flow from importing raw images upto batch-printing,
exporting to CD-rom or creating web-galleries ...

I also prefer to use cameras that create DNG based RAW images, 
like the latest Pentax and Leica cameras do ...

Regards, JvW


Jan van Wijk, author of DFSee; http://www.dfsee.com
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