UFRaw 0.12 could make new converts to open source RAW photo conversion (Linux.com)

Posted Aug 30, 2007 16:13 UTC (Thu) by peace (guest, #10016) [Link]

This is very interesting software, kudos to the developers. I have a Nikon D80 and took a shot yesterday that had blown out highlights all over the image (the hazy sky and sheen off of a lot of metal objects) as indicated by the cameras "show blown highlights" screen. I loaded that image into UFRaw and used it's indicate overexposed and underexposed options. This highlights areas that are either blown out or under exposed. I then used the exposer slider and pulled back by -1 stops which brought all the blown out sections into exposure without dropping any of the shadow detail. I shoot all my images using RAW + basic jpeg because I knew that at some point I would return to the images and want to post process. The extra dynamic range recorded in the RAW file gives a nice degree of latitude in correcting for improperly exposed shots. It's interesting to see the actual details come back into the image, which is not the case with simple brightness/contrast settings possible with other image formats. You can literaly go back in time and retake the shot with a different exposure (about +-3 stops).

I'm still figure out the controls but for basic adjustments such as white balance, exposure compensation and color tweaks it looks great.

It claims to allow for "spot white" balancing but I have not been able to get that to work. I'll have to spend more time with it. This could be useful for shots that contain several different types of lighting (e.g. city at night background, incandescent foreground).

For batch processing, you can adjust white balance, tone and color curves, save them to a file and then feed those settings into the ufraw-batch command line processor.

I know almost nothing about color profiling but as it is in this application, I will be learning about it shortly.

Couple notes on getting it compiled. I am using Ubuntu Feisty.

Install all the -dev packages:

sudo aptitude install libcinepaint-dev
sudo aptitude install libgimp2.0-dev
sudo aptitude install liblcms-dev
sudo aptitude install libjpeg-dev
sudo aptitude install libtiff-dev
sudo aptitude install libpng-dev
sudo aptitude install zlib1g-dev
sudo aptitude install libbz2-dev

install gtkimageview-1.3.0 from source:

http://trac.bjourne.webfactional.com/

I was not able to get gtkimageview-1.4.0 to work, YMMV.

On Ubuntu anyway, add /usr/local/lib to your /etc/ld.so.conf file and sudo ldconfig

install UFRaw using:

./configure --enable-extras
make
make install

the configure script enabled everything but cinepaint as Feisty has version .21 and >=.22 is required.

Kind Regards