Spaced-OoooO-Out ::

I’ve blogged before about processing RAW digital imagery, however that was in relation to extracting raw values that can be calibrated to give radiance. More recently there has been an increased interested in workflow processing of digital photography. Whilst I am a big fan, and use, Adobe’s Photoshop Elements, parimarily because it includes their photo organiser, it is still a little weak a pulling photos off the camera in a professional manner. Currently it will pick up RAW or JPGs images and import them into my collection (automatically storing them in a date named directory). From there I can “tag” them so that the collection is easy to navigate. It also allows one click lossless rotation, red eye removal etc for quick image processing based around a versioning system so that you always keep previous versions of the image. All good stuff, although note that unless you take care setting the system up, it is quite difficult to backup without doing a full system backup. In particular all tagging and photo attributes are stored in an Access database within your profile. Keep it safe! And woe betide you should you wish to move all your photos to another directory as absolute pathnames are hard-coded into the database. And whilst it is possible to change them it requires getting your hands dirty.

Anyway, digression. Several companies had noticed a gap in the market here, particularly for professional/amateur photographers. In order to get the best out of your imagery you need to shoot in RAW mode; this note only stores the raw image data, but allows subsequent manipulation at a very low level. And your image processing software is far better at doing this than your camera which is severly time limited when taking a shot. Pixmantec are of note in this area and produced a free and “pro” version of their workflow software. This allows you to bring in imagery to a directory of your choice, tagging the “quality” of the shot and then applying standard pre-processing techniques during import. In particular automated white balance, contrast stretching and sharpening. Whilst the free version didn’t include some of these features (ntably contrast stretching), these features are available in most image processing packages so it allowed access to the other features. I’m currently playing with this as it offers a wealth of flexibility. Notice I said “produced”. Adobe has now bought the company and the developers are proting much of the RAW processing capabilities to Adobe’s Lightroom product which is currently in beta. So Lightroom is the product to watch (and you can download a Mac or Windows beta), but for the time being you can still get the free version of Pixmantec. Grab it whilst your can!