{"id":657,"date":"2007-11-06T05:24:13","date_gmt":"2007-11-06T10:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2007\/11\/06\/raw-management-and-conversion-in-linux"},"modified":"2007-11-06T05:24:21","modified_gmt":"2007-11-06T10:24:21","slug":"raw-management-and-conversion-in-linux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2007\/11\/06\/raw-management-and-conversion-in-linux","title":{"rendered":"RAW Management and Conversion in Linux"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, I was playing around with Linux, and RAW management. Not wanting to carry a laptop just for photo editing (i.e. I plan on travel without<\/i> my MacBook Pro, and beautiful Lightroom, Aperture, iView Media Pro [okay, Microsoft Expression Media now], and Photoshop CS2), I figured I should make Linux up to scratch.<\/p>\n

My favourite photo browser, is GQview<\/a>. Its not standard software any longer, but its pretty old, and it works fairly well. It however, doesn’t support RAW. Today I discovered f-spot (ok, I discovered it ages ago, but I didn’t like its iPhoto-ness, where it wants to import stuff for you). Never fear, that’s what<\/p>\n

    f-spot --view <path><\/tt><\/p>\n

is for. Shortcut wise, its a little different, so I just use the up\/down arrow keys to browse.<\/p>\n

Now to convert the RAW files to JPGs, with preservation of EXIF data. I played around with the commands manually after reading the man page for dcraw<\/tt>, and figured there must be a better way. So I hopped on over to Yahoo!, did a little search, and came up with Jamie Zawinski’s mvpix<\/a>. After changing the script a tad bit to suit my environment, I have images! RAW, JPEG, and copies of the JPEGs in an EDIT folder. mvpix<\/tt> also works on OS X.<\/p>\n

The options being passed to dcraw<\/tt> seem to be simple: -w<\/tt> for using camera supplied white balance, -t 0<\/tt> for no tilting, and -c<\/tt> for writing decoded images to stdout. Its passed to cjpeg<\/tt>, and run at 95% quality. However, the images seem to be a tad different, and I have no idea why.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
On left, is when the camera was shooting in RAW+JPEG, and on right is the JPEG generated from the RAW file (click for larger image<\/a>). These are 100% zooms.<\/i><\/div>\n

The colour differences befuddles me. Why does the camera come out with “brighter” RAW, and dcraw<\/tt> come up with paler tones?<\/p>\n

<\/a>
On left, is what the in-camera JPEG gives, when you’re shooting in RAW+JPEG, in the middle is what UFRaw sees from the RAW file, and on the right is what the converted JPEG looks like, after being parsed through dcraw+cjpeg (click for larger image<\/a>).<\/i><\/div>\n

What gives? Are there better options in dcraw<\/tt> to give me an as-close-to-in-camera JPEG experience? Are the converted images better\/more true coloured? I’m not sure which to pick, and I’m not sure what’s the correct<\/i> setting, to be honest. <\/p>\n

Now about the photos. Apologies to the girl pictured here, all I know is that she’s probably a student at the Caulfield Campus of Monash University (so no, I don’t know her name). She was randomly picked for some quick studio photos, which was really just a bunch of us playing with a few studio strobes, and having the power of wireless triggers. These photos all rolled off an EOS 350D digital back, with a 50mm\/1.4 lens attached to it, shot at f\/1.6, at 1\/25s. Sure, this should have really been made at f8, but there was no time to coax the girl.<\/p>\n

Technorati Tags: linux<\/a>, raw<\/a>, cr2<\/a>, gqview<\/a>, f-spot<\/a>, jpg<\/a>, dcraw<\/a>, mvpix<\/a>, cjpeg<\/a>, colour correction<\/a><\/p>\n

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