Re: [Gimp-developer] Adobe software issues

[Elle Stone <l elle stone gmail com>]

On 5/8/13, Clayton Walker <blender3dartist gmail com> wrote:
> Considering the fact that Adobe even has a separate program called Adobe
> Camera Raw, I don't see why gimp should necessarily include a raw loader.
> Perhaps maintainers could bundle gimp with ufraw, but to combine the two
> projects makes little sense.

The thing is, ACR is packaged as an integral part of Photoshop (or
was, haven't seen any recent versions of Photoshop), and it's
extremely convenient to use from within Photoshop. If you hang around
the Luminous Landscape forums, you'll often find people mentioning
that this or that raw processor is "much better than ACR", but they
only use the "good" raw processor for really important images because
ACR is quick and convenient.

It might be the case that the stand-alone raw processors with Gimp
plugins and/or the automatic "send to Gimp" feature would go a long
way towards offsetting the "ACR is so convenient" factor. Also
batch-processing is an option. But not being familiar with the OP's
workflow and time constraints, it's hard to say what might work. Most
of us can be very resistant to changing how we do things!

It seems to me that dcraw and UFRaw are considerably faster and/or
simpler to use than some of the other alternatives. I didn't mention
Rawstudio, but it also seems suited for a very fast-paced workflow.
Also, which raw processor would work the best depends on whether the
OP wants to use DCP (RawTherapee, RawStudio) or ICC (they all support
ICC) camera input profiles.

I agree that adding raw processing to Gimp itself (as opposed to
plugins/export options) seems superfluous given the excellent quality
and diversity of the existing open source raw processors.

> On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 8:36 AM, Guillermo Espertino (Gez) <
> gespertino gmail com> wrote:
> > I'd add Darktable (www.dartable.org) to the list. It's awesome although
> > it's not available for windows, just Linux and OSX.

As an aside, Darktable allows for exporting 32-bit floating point
openexr images, which Gimp 2.9 can open, so with Darktable + Gimp you
can stay at 32-bit floating point without the need to output to a
lower bit depth before importing to Gimp.