Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
The Incredible Dave
Dozens of RAW processors from around the world owe their existence to the efforts of
Dave Coffin, a Boston-based programmer who has cracked all the proprietary RAW file
formats and made them available to the Open Source world. The result of his work is an
ANSI C program called dcraw (pronounced “dee-see-raw”) that can decode RAW images
“from any digital camera on any computer running any operating system.” It also extracts
thumbnails and displays metadata, as its author explains—in both English and
Esperanto—on his Website. An entire industry has grown up on the foundation of Dave’s
work, securing him a place in the annals of digital photography. You can find dcraw code
in nearly 50 different brands of software (see a full list at cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw),
including the following:
■ ACDSee
■ Adobe Photoshop
■ BreezeBrowser
■ IrfanView
■ LightZone
■ SilverFast DCPro
A photographer needs only one RAW conversion tool, but which one? That rather
depends on what other software you use, or intend to use. Some packages, like ACDSee,
are extremely feature-rich, having become “workflow tools” to address all the software
needs of the photographer, from RAW input through to archiving and printing. Other
packages, like LightZone, are more focused on the processing tasks that need to be done
in the early part of the workflow. The following descriptions can help you decide which
software to try, with the aim of moving the workflow through its first vital stages.
BibblePro
Vendor: Bibble Labs
Purpose: Well established and widely used RAW workflow package with plug-in architecture
Description
With platform-specific optimizations, BibblePro offers very fast RAW conversion
together with many other tools, including noise reduction, healing, cloning, and image
correction. It has a younger brother called Bibble Lite, which has all the core features of
the professional version, but without pro-style support for tethered shooting and the like.
To convert a RAW image you simply drop it on a “batch queue,” a feature that can
greatly speed up your workflow by making copies of the original and creating Web galleries.
The program also enables fast printing using a similar “print queue” feature.