[CREATE] Re: raw processing

Thu Mar 16 09:32:19 PST 2006

I'm the lead developer of Album Shaper. Album Shaper is currently
going through a massive transformation, so while a new release is not
imminant, we are certainly looking forward to adding support for RAW
formats in the future.

For now, our efforts are in many ways focused on support for EXIF,
IPTC, and other metadata formats. We provide a separate standalone
meta data viewier editor called Reveal. You can get an idea of what
Reveal does here:
http://albumshaper.sourceforge.net/images/teasers/reveal1.1.jpg

Reveal 1.1 will support the CRW RAW file format, as Exiv2 0.9.1 now
does. When used as a stand alone program Reveal saves meta data
changes to a file directly. When encorporated into Album Shaper in the
future we hope to provide full undo-redo support for meta data and
image changes. If a user makes changes to metadata it makes no sense
to make a duplicate of the image just to store it! In addition, meta
data can be stored in JPEG or TIFF images, not just RAW images. We
havn't decided on how to solve these problems yet, but if you had to
ask me to guess I'd say I'd like to save RAW image changes using
Adobe's "open" (documented) DNG format, while saving changes to meta
data using another undecided file format. Perhaps we'll use a diff
format based on the XML format Reveal 1.1 will support exporting meta
data in.

The work Digikam developers are doing creating and maintaining a C++
dcraw parse class that supports getting image data out of raw files
using the latest updates from Dave's Dcraw program is a big help. I'd
like to see such a C++ class become a defacto standard for all open
source RAW supporting software, Reveal and Album Shaper included.
Unless somthing unexpected occurs we'll rely on libexiv2 to read/write
metadata to image files.

Another topic entirely is interpreting meta data from files. For this
we've developed our own MetadataInterface class that provides easy to
use getter and setting functions for common data like ISO, F-stop,
flash status and mode, etc. This makes the life of a developer far
easier because all logic invovled in dealing witht eh various EXIF and
Makernote tags is taken care of by this class.

-Will

--------------------------------------------------------
Will Stokes         wstokes (at) gmail.com
Album Shaper   http://albumshaper.sf.net
--------------------------------------------------------

On 3/16/06, Gilles Caulier <caulier.gilles at kdemail.net> wrote:
> Le Mercredi 15 Mars 2006 15:09, Alexandre Prokoudine a écrit :
> > Greetings,
> >
> > I usually try to avoid crossposting kind of stuff, but since some of
> > concerned people are not subscribed to the list, let it be so this
> > time.
> >
> > For those of you who doesn't know what CREATE is: this is an
> > umbrella-project where developers of graphics (and hopefully
> > audio/midi too) applications meet and talk about uniform solutions and
> > standards.
> >
> > Details: http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/index.php/About
> > Activities:
> > http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page#Specifications
> >
>
> Fine for me...
>
> > Those who have experience of work with Windows software for processing
> > RAW know that each and every application has its own way to store
> > changes introduced to originals.
>
> If you want mean image data or image metadata ? It's not the same...
>
> >
> > Adobe Camera Raw saves them to .xmp files for every changed file, e.g.
> > if IMG_0001.CR2 file was changed, IMG_0001.xmp appears. Canon's native
> > RAW processing software saves all changes to a database file
> > ZbThumbnail.info on per-directory basis. Picasa saves Picasa.ini on
> > per-directory basis. And there are many more 3rd-party and camera
> > manufacturer's applications.
> >
> > Thus, once you applied changes in one application, you cannot load
> > them in some other one.
>
> sure...
>
> >
> > Currently we have UFRaw as standalone application and as GIMP plug-in,
> > a couple of (obsolete) RAW loaders for GIMP, initial RAW loader
> > plug-in for Krita, initial support for RAW processing in Digikam
>
> not initial : it's complete and support 16 bits color depth ! Forget digiKam
> 0.8.1 that only support 8 bits/color/pixels. The next 0.9.0 release will be
> available like beta1 during May will support all RAW files in 16 bits to edit
> in Image editor and Showfoto. The image data after decoding need to be saved
> in TIFF or PNG file format to preserve 16 bits color depth.
>
> In the future, DNG file format will be supported in read/write. I have planed
> later than 0.9.0 release to provide a RAW file converter in the fly dirrectly
> in camera interface with metadata support !
>
> In the same way, a new tool will be created to batch convert RAW files from
> HDD in other file formats : TIFF/PNG/DNG.
>
> Actually, digikam 0.9.0 use Exiv2 library to manage metadata + an internal
> class named DMetadata, for example to manage Exif/Iptc raw file profiles
> generated by Imagemagick during file conversion.
>
> About Raw file conversion, I have started a new C++ class based on last dcraw
> implementation to extract image data from RAW file without suing an external
> dcraw instance. The implementation still uncomplete
>
> > and
> > plans to introduce RAW processing in F-Spot soon.
> >
> > UFRaw can save its own ID files on per-file basis for further batch
> > processing. F-Spot tends to keep everything in its own sqlite database
> > kept in depths of ~/.gnome/. I don't know the way Digikam works,
> > haven't tried latest version.
>
> Well take a on the fresh screenshots here :
>
> http://www.digikam.org/?q=image/tid/10
> http://www.digikam.org/?q=image/tid/24
> http://www.digikam.org/?q=image/tid/25
>
> and developers blogs :
>
> http://www.digikam.org/?q=blog
>
> >
> > Does anybody else perceive it as a problem? If so, is there some way
> > we could avoid situation we have on Windows/Mac OS X since workflows
> > in these applications/plug-ins are different to some extent?
> >
> > P.S. Some (most) of you are attending Libre Graphics Meeting this
> > weekend, probably you could have a talk together ;)
>
> no, i'm in French Alps this week end. Sorry (:=)))...
>
> Gilles Caulier
>
> PS : I CC this message to the lead developer of Album Shaper. I'm sure that it
> will be interressed
>