manage photos

[Cefiar]

On Thursday 23 November 2006 00:04, Nikolai wrote:
> Nagy Gábor wrote:
> > Can you download the images from the camera in RAW format?
>
> Yes, of course. I plug in a CF card to my computer and download RAW
> files to my hard disk.

That isn't exactly a download, but I know I can copy RAW (.CR2 files from my 
Canon 30D in my case) files using gphoto2 from the command line using the USB 
interface. Of course, it'd be nice if there was a GUI that actually supported 
pulling those files off, but then again, I'm still running Dapper at the 
moment and for all I know, Edgy may do this now. I'd upgrade, but I need to 
make sure Edgy will do what I want first. Fortunately I have holidays coming 
up... *grin*

> > Do you want to store images in RAW or JPEG format?
>
> I store in RAW. Those images that are edited in a significant way, I
> keep them in 16-bit PSD or TIFF formats. JPEG format is a final output
> format for the finished image to go to print. Once it's printed, JPEG is
> deleted. You probably can gather from the above that this sort of
> workflow can't be achieved in Linux, not yet anyway, people like me need
> colour management, 16-bit image support of the image editing app (Gimp
> lacks that) and so on. This is why, as much as I hate this fact, I have
> to keep a working copy of WinXP on my box, to work with images in a
> proper way.

So, breaking it down into points, basically the process you're using here is:
 Camera takes RAW
 RAW moved to PC
 RAW converted to PSD/TIFF
 Image edited in PSD/TIFF
 Image exported to JPG
 JPG printed/distributed (eg: web)
 JPG deleted (easy done manually)

I think the big issue is converting from RAW to PSD/TIFF, and it'd be really 
nice if whatever program you are using can actually do this as an integrated 
part of the application, and allow you to tweak with the import settings 
(which of course affect how the picture renders into the new format). As 
such, I don't think anyone expects the ability to save to RAW formats 
(especially as there are so many), and I'm not sure if anything out there 
actually does this anyway.

Something that I've noticed that a lot of coverters/editors don't do (or don't 
allow you to manage properly), is the creation/preservation/management of 
EXIF data, either when converting (going from RAW to JPG or another format) 
or after manipulation (such as resizing of JPG's which have EXIF data 
attached).

An example here is that if I shoot directly to JPG, my camera includes EXIF 
information in the JPG about a huge amount of things. Some of this includes 
what I may consider to be useful information (such as the 
ISO/shutter/apeture/focal length details) that I don't mind including in the 
final image. Some of this information is stuff I wouldn't want to include 
(eg: the serial number of the camera). Especially when doing bulk conversions 
(eg: scaling stuff for the web), I'd appreciate the ability to see a list of 
all the fields across the photos I'm about to convert, and allow turning on 
or off this information in the resultant output images.

Most of the apps I've played with so far either preserve everything, or remove 
it all. Some preserve the info when doing images one by one, but don't when 
you do them in bulk. If an app got this sort of thing right, it could very 
well end up my usual work-horse app.

> If you're thinking of supporting RAW, perhaps you should get to know
> David Coffin's dcraw thingy:
>
> http://cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
>
> dcraw is the engine that drives ufraw and rawstudio and perhaps some
> other projects. Both ufraw and rawstudio are very capable RAW converters
> but still lacking some very important features from a professional
> photographer's point of view.

I'm wondering what specifically you're missing here? Last I tried (which was 
almost a year ago), there were a few things that seemed to be lacking, but I 
wasn't that aware of the professional options at the time either. Of course, 
a year can be a long time in the open source community, so they've probably 
improved somewhat since my last look.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not a coder, but if we can identify ways in which 
software can be improved, at least we can hopefully help the people writing 
it to improve it.

-- 
 Stuart Young - aka Cefiar - cef at optus.net