Re: RAW/Versioning improvement ideas

["Aigars Mahinovs" <aigarius gmail com>]

On 11/1/06, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com> wrote:
> Maybe it's about time to hear from all F-Spot users who shoot to RAW
> what workflow is ideal for them?

I used to shoot in RAW, but working with RAWs in Linux is too cumbersome.

GIMP does not support working with RAWs directly (it does support
reading a RAW via a plugin and saving it to a JPEG afterwards), so any
significant editing would require a JPEG.

Even our displays (for most of us) do not support displaying of the
whole RAW gamut, so the image will have to be converted to something
JPEG-like for display and extraction of the thumbnail. Currently no
conversion is taking place at all - RAWs get thumbnails generated from
JPEG data of teir EXIFs, if such data is there (and frequently it is
not included to reduce size).

Ultimately I would love to be able to do all photo editing in F-Spot
in 16 bits per channel (see Apple's Aperture) with full control over
the colors (replacing the controls of the RAW->JPEG converters) and
automatic conversion whenever that is needed (editing in GIMP, export,
...). But, until there is a full RAW support, such conversion via
external RAW->JPEG converters would be very useful.

I did describe a photographic workflow of my dream some while back:
http://www.aigarius.com/blog/2006/07/31/spot-focus/

Since then I have had more exposure to Aperture and I strongly
recommend all people here to get a closer look at it. There are minor
details that make a lot of difference. For example, a simple slider of
noise removal. And another simple slider of sharpening. And each
application of the slider creates a new version that somehow is not a
separate file - it stores the difference somehow. Also the cropping
tool there is much more intuitive - instead of drawing a selection
rectangle, you drag the borders of the photo and the part that will be
cropped is shown darker allowing to fully see the result all the way
trough the cropping process.

However more to the point - in Aperture you only guess that the photo
is in RAW format because there is more range in the adjustment sliders
- everything is stored in 16 bits per channel internally and only
converted to JPEG on export.

--
Best regards,
   Aigars Mahinovs        mailto:aigarius debian org
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