Woohoo! Congratulations to the RawStudio guys for getting 0.7 out today!
RawStudio is the application I use to convert my RAW photos (.CR2 files from my Canon Rebel XT) into jpegs. I love this application because of the way it streamlines the raw conversion workflow for me. It’s interface is logical and well thought out and perhaps most surprisingly, different from anything else I’ve tried. I love it.
The single hitch with using RawStudio up until this point was the fact that when it converted one of my CR2 raw files, it generated a smaller than full size jpg. Plenty big for most print uses and definitely plenty large for web use, but not full size. It came down to a process referred to as demosaic’ing. Something so far above my head that I resigned myself to using UFRaw in those rare instances I wanted a single full size jpg conversion (UFRaw is good for single conversions but painful when you’ve got directories full of raw files).
But all that ends with version 0.7. They’ve got the demosaic thing sorted out. They’ve streamlined the interface even further with a quick exposure mask toggle and better zooming control. The exposure mask dynamically shows you which areas are over or underexposed as you make adjustments to your photo. What I noticed first is that it really highlights the lack of dynamic range in today’s digital cameras. I’m not going to get into a film vs digital comparison, but rest assured you will be amazed at how little dynamic range you can actually capture in a photo. Clearly using multiple raw conversions or multiple exposures to compose high dynamic range (HDR) images is something that could be used a lot more than it is.
So if you’re interested in a free-software RAW conversion utility to help your image workflow on Linux you should really give it a try. A lot of the major distros likely have Rawstudio in their repositories, but if you want version 0.7 right now, you’ll likely have to download the source files and compile it yourself. I’ve built it here on Gutsy so if you need help, let me know, it’s not that hard at all (heck, if I can do it, then surely you can!). Hubert Figuiere on the mailing list also posted a link to a pre-built 1 click installer for Rawstudio 0.7 for use on OpenSuse 10.3 which is:
http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/home:hfiguiere/openSUSE_10.3/rawstudio.ymp
Good job guys!!
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One thing I like about UFRaw is that I right-click on a cr2 file, and open with GIMP, and the GIMP UFRaw plugin pops up, converts it, and opens it directly in GIMP for me.
Does Rawstudio have a GIMP plugin?
I like that feature of UFRaw too. But that’s for cases where I’ve got an image I know I’m going to want to edit with the GIMP.
Most of the time, I’ve got 20+ CR2 files in a folder and I want them all converted. With Rawstudio I can do a reasonable amount of exposure, contrast, color balance and warmth adjustments to get it to within 99% of what I want very quickly on all those images (even if each one is adjusted differently it doesn’t take long). I can even crop them if I need to. Then I can batch convert them to jpg.
I don’t think Rawstudio has a Gimp plugin. Normally, for almost all of my RAW photos, I make adjustments as noted above in Rawstudio and then use the jpg to do anything more detailed in GIMP. Or for something very special, I’ll use the UFRaw plugin for GIMP and do it your way.
The process of editing in GIMP is too much and too slow for what I’m looking for most of the time. But it’s definitely something I do sometimes.
I simply don’t make enough ‘special’ images I guess.
Actually I say that only half-joking. It seems lately that all I take are snapshots lately. I’ve got to change that.
Thanks for staying subscribed Simon!