Problems with Canon CR2 raw decode in ufraw/gimp

[Walter Dnes]

On Sat, Dec 08, 2012 at 12:51:16PM -0500, Giles Orr wrote

> My take on this is that you should think long and hard about why you'd
> want to shoot RAW.  I know it has advantages and maybe you need some
> of those, but if you end up converting your images to TIFF and are
> happy with that, you've lost about 95% of the advantages of RAW.  I've
> shot digital for about eight years now, and have chosen to stick with
> the highest quality JPG files that my cameras could produce rather
> than worry about RAW.

  The disadvantage of direct JPEG shooting is that you hope and pray
that you got everything right with the shot, because there is no
undo/redo.  Maybe a pro can do that, but I'm a novice at the Toronto
Digital Photo club http://torontodigitalphotoclub.com/  Among the
advantages of feeding a raw file through the UFRAW plugin into GIMP are

* Even something as simple as cropping or re-sizing causes quality loss
  if you have to do it in lossy JPEG format

* You can correct for over/under-exposure or wrong colour balance after
  the fact.  This is often difficult or impossible on JPEGs.  And even
  where you can correct, the modified image will lose detail, thanks to
  JPEG lossiness

* Speaking of over/under-exposure, you can take *ONE* raw image, create
  versions with diferent exposures, and create HDR images.  See
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJFqZvmB8IE  Try doing that with a JPEG
  photo.

* rawtherapee (or UFRAW) passes output (via pipe? IPC? whatever?) as
  8-bit to GIMP... *AFTER* tweaking in rawtherapee (or UFRAW).  So I get
  to choose which 8 bits of the 10/12/14/16 gets passed to GIMP.  And if
  I don't get it right, I can always go back to the original raw file,
  and try again

* I save my "working files" in PNG format.  They're a lot smaller than
  uncompressed TIFF, but still lossless, unlike JPEG.

> I'll add that I've voluntarily stuck with high end point-and-shoot
> cameras rather than moving to larger sensors and DSLRs - mainly
> because I'm not willing to carry the extra weight and bulk of the DSLR
> and a couple lenses.

  That's why I got the S100... near-DSLR performance in a point-n-shoot
sized package.  Also, some sporting events, etc allow point-n-shoot
cameras, but not "professional" cameras.  When they see a
"point-n-click" camera hanging on a wrist strap, they'll suppress a
giggle, and let you in.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
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