Raw photo software

In article , Mayayana
wrote:

| lab is a different colour model. non-pros are highly unlikely to need
| it (or even understand it). even pros rarely use it, but for those who
| do, photoshop elements won't cut it.
|
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_color_space
|

Thanks. I wonder how that applies to monitors. Do
you use a special monitor?

no. any monitor works.

It seems that when a photo
goes from camera to PC to printer the color can be
translated very accurately if the printer is good.

it depends on a *lot* of things. ideally you have a fully colour
managed workflow but not everyone does. if your monitor is profiled and
your printer is profiled, you should be able to match screen to print,
as close as possible (it's never going to be perfect).

Yet
in between, when it's displayed on the monitor during
work, it can be very inaccurate, affected by operating
system, settings, limitations of 24-bit RGB display (and
only 18-bit on Macs!), the garish over-saturation of LCD
display, etc.

there is *no* such limit on macs. in fact, macs work in 48 bit colour
internally and had 16 bit printing several years ago.

macs use the same display panels everyone else uses, often better.
steve jobs once said that competitors use the panels that apple
rejected.

what you may be thinking is that laptops tend to not have the best
panels since there isn't an unlimited amount of power, as there would
be on a desktop lcd display. that's not unique to apple. battery
powered devices come with compromises. you can always plug in an
external desktop display to any laptop.

then there are the pro displays that can display adobe rgb space, such
as eizo. they don't tend to be cheap and are overkill for the average
user. they typically use a 10 bit lut, so they're 30 bit colour.

The page you linked notes that Lab is more
close to human vision that RGB, but if adjustments have
to be made using an RGB monitor, anyway, how does
one take advantage of Lab accuracy?

if you work in lab space you can do things you can't do in rgb or cmyk.
it all depends what you want to do.

most people think in rgb. they add cyan to remove some red, etc.

working in lab is different, since luminance and chrominance are split
and you can work on either one, separately. one technique is sharpen
the luminance only (l channel) and leave the colour (ab channels)
untouched, which will avoid colour artifacts.

again, most people don't need it. pros might, so that's why it's in the
full photoshop and not the consumer version.

| system, settings, limitations of 24-bit RGB display (and
| only 18-bit on Macs!), the garish over-saturation of LCD
| display, etc.
|
| there is *no* such limit on macs. in fact, macs work in 48 bit colour
| internally and had 16 bit printing several years ago.
|

They settled a lawsuit sometime ago about low-grade
LCD monitors:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2007/05/apple_lcd_lawsu/

The gist of it is that their monitors are only capable of
18-bit display. Apparently that's also true of many PC
monitors. I don't know how to find out which. The difference
with Apple is that they provide the monitor and they call
the setting "millions of colors", knowing that their own
hardware is not capable of that.

In article , Mayayana
wrote:

| system, settings, limitations of 24-bit RGB display (and
| only 18-bit on Macs!), the garish over-saturation of LCD
| display, etc.
|
| there is *no* such limit on macs. in fact, macs work in 48 bit colour
| internally and had 16 bit printing several years ago.

They settled a lawsuit sometime ago about low-grade
LCD monitors:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2007/05/apple_lcd_lawsu/

The gist of it is that their monitors are only capable of
18-bit display. Apparently that's also true of many PC
monitors. I don't know how to find out which. The difference
with Apple is that they provide the monitor and they call
the setting "millions of colors", knowing that their own
hardware is not capable of that.

that's common to just about all laptop displays.

not that many people do colour critical editing on a laptop display so
it is really a non-issue. if you need to do colour critical work, plug
a better display into the laptop.

the new macbook pro with retina display is an ips panel, just in
desktop lcd displays, and not only has insanely high resolution
(2880x1800) but it's a very high quality panel.

in other words, apple is the only maker (so far) to have the highest
quality laptop display, not the lowest, as is suggested.

In article , tony cooper
wrote:

I'm not going to try to make you like Elements, but it's not "junk"
and it does much more than Gimp. Less than CSX, but E 10.0 has the
RAW capability you want, and it's available for less than $100. If
you buy a copy of E 9.0 on eBay, it's much less and has the RAW
capability. There's very little I can do in CS4 that I can't do in
Elements 9.0.

that's funny. a couple of weeks ago you insisted elements was $99 after
i said it was available for less than $100. i guess you learned
something.

It's listed at $99 at the Adobe site. I have no idea what re-sellers
are offering. There are some programs that I would buy only from the
originator's site.

in other words, you don't know what price it is. maybe you didn't learn
anything.

Lightroom, of course, also has RAW capability but you'd have to learn
a new series of steps in general editing to take advantage of LR.

nonsense. the raw processing is identical to photoshop. we went over
this already. it's the *same* camera raw engine as in photoshop,
including elements.

I knew you'd chime in with something stupid. General editing includes
the other tools. The other tools in LR are not the same as the tools
in Gimp.

the comparison wasn't with gimp, nor is it about general editing.

you were discussing photoshop, which as i said, has the same camera raw
engine as lightroom. if he's going to learn one, he is in effect,
learning the other.

In article , tony cooper
wrote:

| Is there any reason you don't want to run Photoshop Elements 10?

I don't know. I'm looking for recommendations from
people who work with raw photos. My only experience
with PS Elements was a few years ago. It was junk.
$100 for what was actually just a repackaging of the
shareware PS3. But it may be very different now.

photoshop elements is the same as standard photoshop but without the
stuff pros need, such as cmyk, lab, etc. non-pros more than likely
won't ever miss any of that.

Some of us "non-pros" use lab in color adjustments, sharpening, and
conversion to black and white. It's not essential to the non-pro, and
there are (as always in PS) other ways to do it, but some would miss
it.

you do understand what 'more than likely' means, right?

It's hard to compare these different programs, so I
was looking to narrow down the list of possibilities to
programs that experienced photographers recommend.
I have Paint Shop Pro 5 and the GIMP, which covers
general graphic editing. The need is specifically for
raw editing.

there are trial versions, making it very easy to compare.

In general I'd prefer to avoid Adobe. Their software
is *very* bloated and *very* expensive.

some of their stuff is expensive while other product are not. photoshop
elements is very cheap and often bundled for free with hardware.

I don't recall an instance where the *current* version of Elements is
bundled. Wacom supplies Elements 8.0 as their current bundle offer.
Why you mention bundling at is a mystery to me. What hardware with a
bundle offer is the OP in the market for?

i don't track which version is bundled with which product. if an older
version is bundled and he wants the newer version then he can buy it.
maybe an older version will suffice. you're a couple of versions back
on photoshop so you're not one to talk about being up to date.

he also has xp which means he might not be able to use a newer version.

But at this
point I'm not ruling out anything. It sounds like everyone
here is using Adobe products.

that's because adobe products are generally very, very good.

No one has commented
on UFRaw, RawTherapee, or anything else open-source.

most of those are crap.

nospam=nohelp. Statements like "it's junk", or "are crap" are
meaningless without supporting reasons.

i've explained why before. try to keep up.

nospam wrote:
In article , ray
wrote:

Have you tried reinstalling ufraw - it is excellent -

not compared to adobe camera raw, it isn't

It's better.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

In article , Floyd L. Davidson
wrote:

Have you tried reinstalling ufraw - it is excellent -

not compared to adobe camera raw, it isn't

It's better.

no it is definitely not. it's much, much slower and it's demosaicing is
not as good. it's noise reduction is also amazing, and it offers a
*lot* more control over the process than dcraw/ufraw does.

"Mayayana" wrote in message ...

XP 32-bit. Can anyone shed some light on stable options
for processing raw photos?

Photos from Nikon and Panasonic cameras.

No Photoshop.

RawTherapee sometimes crashes with a VC++ runtime error.

UFRaw crashes generally. (GIMP 2.8 is installed with UFRaw
installed to the GIMP folder. I haven't yet tried installing an
earlier GIMP version.)

Found Delaboratory but haven't yet tried it.

Another option seems to be Photiva. But Delaboratory
and Photiva both seem to be lacking even the most
basic documentation.

Panasonic software is pretty good, but only for the
Panasonic camera. Nikon's ViewNX is limited and their
more involved software is expensive.

+++++++
Try this ... http://www.breezesys.com/BreezeBrowser/index.htm

I have been using some version of it for years to convert raw Canon files to
TIFF and do some adjusting (exposure, contrast, etc.) during the conversion.
It is compatible with XP and you can download and try it free.

Ron
+++++++

"Mayayana" wrote:
here is using Adobe products. No one has commented
on UFRaw, RawTherapee, or anything else open-source.

I've used UFRAW, and GIMP, for years. But I also run them
on Linux systems, so they are in their native environment.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

"Mayayana" wrote:
Those two programs, at least, suffer from common drawbacks
of open-source software. The interface of RawTherapee is very
awkward. It doesn't even have a menu or right-click functionality.
On the other hand, I was looking into them because I had come
across conversations among what seemed to be professional
photographers who repeatedly recommended Raw Therapee in
particular. (Though from what I can tell, all such open source
products are actually just wrappers around a base library known
as dcraw.)

I've looked at RawTherapee a couple of times, and just
can't see how to use it efficiently in a complex
workflow.

UFRAW on the other hand is fabulous. The big problem
for many, and I'm assuming for you too, is that it
originats under an X windowing environment on inherently
multi-user unix based systems. That is very different
than what people have learned to work with on Windows
systems. For example all of your problems with the
libraries for UFRAW and GIMP are quite different under
Linux. Not that Library Hell doesn't exist, just that
it has a different basis.

But if you are able to use shell scripting, there is just
no end of the functionality that can be derived from UFRAW.
For example my typical work flow is to go through at batch
of RAW files by invoking UFRAW from a command line like this:

ufraw *.nef

Each NEF file is interactively processed in turn, but only a
configuration file is generated and the time consuming generation
of an image file comes later.

Normally the settings used for the last file are carried
over to the next, and all that is written for each image
is a configuration file. That is almost instantaneous
and then the next image is loaded. When the
configuration files have all been created, the entire
list is done as a batch process. Typically that would
be done by invoking "ufraw-batch *ufraw", but that isn't
what I do. I invoke a shell script that determines how
many CPU's are available on the machine that I'm using
and runs ufraw-batch that many times at once as
asynchronous processes. That gets a very significant
speed increase. The script also does a number of other
default actions, such as check what ISO each image was
shot at and select a wavelet noise reduction parameter
appropriately.

In the end, I can do something else while all the real
grunt work is done in the background

While it doesn't process RAW files, the tools from
ImageMagick are another delight to have available for
shell scripts. As an example I use a relatively complex
shell script to resize images.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)