>
> The software looks horrid, Ken. That's my main gripe.
>
What do "looks" have to do with it? If it's fast and functional... How
about Irvanview? That's not exactly good looking either, but it sure is
popular.
I did encounter a major flaw with Raw Therapee (RT). When you crank the
snot out of the highlight/shadow recovery and the Local Contrast Adjustment,
you get really strange banding (comb shape) in the image. I thought it was
a flaw with the E-3 file I was working with, but using the same type of
extreme adjustments in both C1 and Lightroom we were unable to recreate it.
Then I tried it with an E-1 file and it showed up.
But we're talking about EXTREME adjustment, and backing off to the 90% of
maximum point seemed to take care of it.
What is really sweet about RT is that the raw conversion part is just a
minor thing--just like it is in Lightroom, so you can mangle RAW, JPEG and
TIFF files in one program. I am getting unusual artifacts which look like
hot-pixels in the RT converted files, so there are a few bugs to work out
yet.
Back to workflow with Viewer. As a general rule, my workflow (this week)
when processing hundreds of images is to find my selects with Viewer and if
I shot RAW, I do a batch process en-mass using in-camera settings. If I
have to corral a particular picture, I individually reconvert that one
individually. Then I use other programs, such as RT or Photoshop Elements
to crop, edit, etc. RT, like Lightroom, let's you crop, adjust
colors/contrast, sharpen, resize, de-destort, free-rotate, etc., and it
dynamically updates the thumbnails as well as allows you to copy/paste/save
processing settings.
For converting my old Minolta A1 files, Raw Shooter Essentials still rules
the day.
A side-note about resizing images in Irfanview for web-display: DO NOT
resize in one-step, but use three steps instead. Otherwise, you will end up
with nasty jaggies.
AG
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