Re: RAW/Versioning improvement ideas

["Peter Finley" <pezskwerl gmail com>]

Alexadre,

I am also a photographer and I shoot only RAW, so I am speaking from my own experience.  Currently, I am in the process of developing a workflow.  I would love to use F-Spot to organize my photos, but currently support is just not quite there for RAW files, which is why I am attempting to get a discussion going on how to remedy this situation.  I would love to hear what other photographers who shoot RAW think.

Here is my take:

It makes perfect sense to me to keep around both a RAW file and a converted JPEG version simply because of the fact that RAW files are proprietary formats which will eventually be unsupported by software.  JPEG (or TIFF) on the other hand will likely be around for a longer time.  For more information on this, I would recommend checking out: 
http://www.openraw.org/.  This is why I process every image that I shoot as a RAW.

Now as far as processing a RAW file in concerned, a RAW file is just that, unprocessed.  It usually takes some user-intervention to convert a RAW (for example to tweak the White Balance or change the exposure).  Currently when viewing a RAW file in F-Spot, it is actually displaying a thumbnail image that is embedded inside the RAW file.  This thumbnail is a actually a scaled down processed version of the RAW and is poor quality compared to the actual image.

I am open to other ideas.  It is a good idea to look at how others will be or would like to be using the software in their workflow.

Peter

On 11/1/06, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com> wrote:

On 11/1/06, Peter Finley wrote:

> Add some code to automatically detect converted RAW files during the import
> process. For instance, say there is a RAW file called 'img_0001.cr2'. Most
> often a file converted from this will retain the same base filename, such as
> 'img_0001.jpeg'. During the import process, this could be detected and the
> JPEG file could be automatically added as a version of the RAW file. Again,
> this suffers from the same limitation of #2.

I have a very bad feeling about this approach.

Let's have a look at workflow. At what stage do you want JPEG?

1. When you want to send files to photolab?
2. When you want to export photos to Flickr/PicasaWeb/etc.?
3. At some other stage?

If [1] and/or [2], how much sense does it have to keep JPEG around
_all the time_? If photos could be processed non-destructively and
shown in processed form in F-Spot, would you still want having JPEG
around or would you be happy with possibility to easily export
processed originals with required settings (print/web) on demand?

Maybe it's about time to hear from all F-Spot users who shoot to RAW
what workflow is ideal for them?

Alexandre
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