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Suggestions for RAW workflows

This discussion is connected to the gimp-user-list.gnome.org mailing list which is provided by the GIMP developers and not related to gimpusers.com.

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Suggestions for RAW workflows Shawn Willden 25 May 21:56
  Suggestions for RAW workflows Stephen Norris 26 May 05:37
  Suggestions for RAW workflows Tim Jedlicka 26 May 07:52
  Suggestions for RAW workflows Alexander Rabtchevich 26 May 08:40
Shawn Willden
2006-05-25 21:56:33 UTC (almost 18 years ago)

Suggestions for RAW workflows

Hi,

This isn't strictly a GIMP question (although the GIMP may well be a component of the solution), but it seems likely that some of the people here will have some good ideas.

I'm experimenting with various approaches to turning my RAW images into high-quality TIFF or JPEG files for printing and/or on-screen viewing, and I'm looking for suggestions from others who are doing the same thing on Linux.

So far, I've found that using GIMP and the ufraw plugin, I can get conversions that are fairly nice in most respects. Manipulating the exposure and the curves in the ufraw dialog even allows me to take advantage of the greater contrast that the RAW format captures, compressing or stretching the dynamic range prior to converting to 8-bit color depths so that highlights aren't blown out and details aren't lost.

There are a couple of problems, though.

First, the ufraw plugin, and the dcraw program, seem to fall down in one respect: my converted images are often much noisier than the JPEGs produced by the in-camera processing. I shoot in RAW+JPEG so I have both, and in some cases I've been able to get a better final image out of the JPEG than the RAW, simply because of the noise issue.

I have found that the GIMP 'selective gaussian blur' can be used to get rid of much of the noise, but it has to be used very carefully to avoid losing too much detail or distorting portions of the image. I'd like to find a less 'fiddly' solutuion.

The second problem is that I'd like to print some of my images in relatively large sizes (11x14 or so), and it seems to me that if I want the best quality possible, it's not a good idea to convert to 8-bit color. Of course, that rules out using the GIMP to clean up noisy areas, since it doesn't yet support higher bit depths. Cinepaint doesn't have the selective gaussian blur filter, nor does ImageMagick.

So, are there any other RAW photographers who use Linux or *BSD and want to share their photo processing workflow?

Thanks,

Shawn.

Stephen Norris
2006-05-26 05:37:44 UTC (almost 18 years ago)

Suggestions for RAW workflows

On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 13:56 -0600, Shawn Willden wrote:

So, are there any other RAW photographers who use Linux or *BSD and want to share their photo processing workflow?

Thanks,

Shawn.

Here's mine.

1) Copy images using a python script into datestamped (from the shooting date) directories.
2) Back-up images to DVD or CD.
3) Open BibblePro and use it to do almost all post-processing. This includes Noise Ninja for noise reduction as well as sharpening and lots of other things. See http://bibblelabs.com/ My first step is to cull out obviously bad shots, then go from there. 4) For a few things (mostly perspective correction) I then load the images into The Gimp.
5) Finally I file the images (originals and any JPEG/TIFF versions) in f-spot.

Hope that helps. I spent a long time mucking around with various plug-ins in the Gimp for reducing noise without ever achieving anything half as good as Noise Ninja in Bibble does.

Stephen

Tim Jedlicka
2006-05-26 07:52:56 UTC (almost 18 years ago)

Suggestions for RAW workflows

On 5/25/06, Shawn Willden wrote:

First, the ufraw plugin, and the dcraw program, seem to fall down in one respect: my converted images are often much noisier than the JPEGs produced

I've been happy with dcraw and ufraw, however I haven't noticed or had

noise problems. I have been running the latest version (ufraw 0.8.1). So my only suggestion is to make sure you are running the latest and greatest.

Thanks to Stephen's suggestion I did take a look at Bibble. Nice to see a Linux app. It also appears to encourage GPL plugins.

Alexander Rabtchevich
2006-05-26 08:40:46 UTC (almost 18 years ago)

Suggestions for RAW workflows

The jpeg image you get from your camera depends on in-camera sharpening and noise reduction algorithms. If you look through camera comparisons, f.i. at dpreview.com , you'll see that different manufactures have different visions of this balance. Some of them prefer less aggressive noise reduction (Panasonic), some more (Kodak). So an jpeg image from Kodak camera looks smoothly with less noise, but with less details.

When you convert image from RAW with UFRaw, you get it closely to "as is" from camera matrix. Afterwards you can apply sharpening or/and noise reduction. Noise reduction plug-ins can be found at http://www.haypocalc.com/wiki/Plugin_Gimp_GREYCstoration or any other from the page
http://registry.gimp.org/list?category=10

I'd recommend you selecting some "critical" parts (like faces) before applying noise reduction with greycstoration, overwise it would take a lot of time and memory.