Editing photos- software advice?

[Sassy Rabbit]

I want to make some minor edits to photos (RAW files) - a little sharpening, color corrections and converting to black and white. Picasa seems to produce decent results, but it dosen't seem to produce high quality jpeg files. Anything I open in GIMP appears to be a little off in color - the reds seem a little to pink or blue maybe?

I want something that will produce some nice results quickly - any advice?

 

[xanis]

Photoshop might be a bit overkill for what you want to do, but I would take a look at Photoshop Elements. Not sure if it has RAW editing though.

 

[dblevitan]

If you're shooting RAW it'll be worth it to get Lightroom and Photoshop. If you don't want to bother with the problems associated with RAW (specifically the time required to deal with the photographs), I'd suggest switching to JPEG. If you don't want to and want to use free software, you'll have to spend time fiddling with the color controls and curves in ufraw (the software GIMP uses). With my D70 I never had any color issues, though I do remember ufraw's auto white balance was nowhere near as good as the camera's.

 

[QuixoticOne]

GIMP has a plug-in that supports UFRAW (a free RAW converter) imports.
I'm not sure if you're using GIMP without that plug-in and the default is worse than the plug-in would be, or if you have the UFRAW based RAW conversion.

IIRC UFRAW itself isn't great in getting the white balance / color profile right by default for some cameras, and it may not intrinsically offer a sharpening setting. If you play with it a little you can probably come up with a profile manually that adjusts pretty well for your particular camera, and you can use that same setting for multiple subsequent photos. Sharpening you can certainly do in GIMP even if it isn't presented in the first RAW import / conversion screen menu.

Alternatively, this guy has a free (afaik) converter which I have NOT tried, though was considering doing so (I assume you use MS Windows; other builds are available for other platforms):
http://www.rawworkflow.com/downloads.html
http://www.whibalhost.com/_pf_...antJpegFromRaw_V10.zip

This is UFRAW it may be similar to what you are using with GIMP if you have that plugin, though maybe there is a newer / better version here (get the latest plug-in or version and see how it is).
Lack of sharpening is a bit annoying, but that's what GIMP is for.
http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/
http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/Install.html#MS

Here is bluemarine, it is still preliminary in its version but for simple conversions maybe it will be quite fine as long as you don't expect to use it as a full alternative to LightRoom for cataloging and searching many albums:
http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/
http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/download.html

Here is RAWDROP based on DCRAW which is a bit more sophisticated in some ways than UFRAW, though unfortunately DCRAW is command line driven (great for batch files, poor for using interactively). This GUI program for it doesn't show you a preview, so it is very basic, but if you get lucky and the "use auto WB" or "use camera WB" does a perfect conversion for you, it is very simple / efficient.
http://www.wizards.de/rawdrop/

Otherwise look at bibble labs software, Adobe Photoshop ELEMENTS (if it does RAW), maybe Adobe Aperture, Adobe lightroom, Adobe CameraRAW/DNG converter, lightzone, et. al.

Oh here's another idea... Qimage Pro for $50.. not free but not horrible... I know it will convert and PRINT the images.. I don't know if you can convert and SAVE the images to JPG/DNG/PPM/TIFF/whatever.... The price is about the same as PhotoShop Elements though so if you mainly want an image editor / converter for computer use as opposed to a mainly convert for printing tool, I'd go with PS elements or whatever.
http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/

Also check out
http://www.irfanview.com/
http://www.acdsee.com/
http://www.lightcrafts.com/products/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...rison_of_image_viewers

You might want to get a neutral gray card and just make a habit of shooting that in one photo when you're doing a series of shots in the same location / lighting / exposure settings (assuming you often use manual / fixed settings). Then a single click on the gray target will fix your white balance in virtually any raw converter program since it'll then have a known color / white balance reference to work with. Some programs even do it fully automatically. You can use the same settings then for that whole batch of photos taken in the same general lighting / exposure conditions at that scene. The IJFR / Whibal software and site I linked above does this and they also sell a reference card to work with their converter software; I have no personal experience with their products though. There are many others, of course. Google for a "white balance reference" and you can even find TIFF files you can print on your own printer to generate a pattern of black/white texture that averages out to gray and then you can just take a piece of that and hold it in front of the camera for a gray reference that'll work pretty well, or there are other commercially sold ones.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Here's the bit about the whibal/rawworkflow card and system; it is a similar site / link to the free software file converter above, but instead here I direct your attention to the reference card and shooting tips:
http://www.whibalhost.com/whibal
http://www.rawworkflow.com/
http://www.whibalhost.com/_Tut...s/WhiBal/08/index.html

 

[QuixoticOne]

Here's bibble's site, commercially sold raw conversion software:
http://www.bibblelabs.com/

Another thing you could consider doing is trying to use something like the free ArgyllCMS color management tools to generate a rough device input color profile for your camera.

That'd go something like take a commercially available IT8 color patch reference target or use a color patch test target you can generate with ArgyllCMS and print on a decent photo printer so you end up with a photo of various color / grey patches.

Take a picture of that target with your camera in known conditions of lighting / exposure.
Convert the RAW image of that into a TIFF to feed into ArgyllCMS for analysis. It'll analyze the color differences between what is supposed to be on the color patch card versus the camera's IMAGE of that card and generate a correction profile that'll correct all the (incorrect) colors from your camera's RAW image into relatively correct values in an output image. When you use this standardized ICC/ICM color profile you've generated it'll automatically fix any future image via the calculated correction that only has to be done once.

In practice you might need a range of color profiles to accomodate different ISO or over/under exposure settings, flash settings, et. al. relevant to the camera's use in different conditions.

GENERALLY people use a white balance reference at each shoot / set of shots instead of a camera ICC color profile, and I assume this is for a reason (the card method works better and may be more convenient in a way). That said, you may find the results are acceptably convenient and good if you did try the color profile method.

Ideally you'd use a white balance card AND a camera color profile OR start shooting something more advanced like a gretag macbeth color checker chart once per photo set which would give enough information to correct not only the white balance and black level but also help correct non-neutral colors as well.

Or you could just shoot JPEG / AUTO-WB and let the camera figure it out...

 

[soydios]

Lightroom works for 99% of my shots. It can do everything from Photoshop that doesn't use layers. For layers stuff, I have Photoshop CS2, but I only open that up if I really need it.

 

[Sassy Rabbit]

WOW - thanks for all the wonderful information. I guess my next question is - why do two programs see the raw images differently? (Well, 3 I've tried ifranview also - it's just slower... and it dosen't seem to be great for corrections...

 

[QuixoticOne]

AFAICT the problem is threefold:

a) Even though the software claims to be able to be able to use the camera's determined white balance and information on the white balance that should be stored in the RAW file, it doesn't do so correctly for various models of camera. I'm unsure why this seems to be so; I've read news reports about even various kinds of encrypted / hidden white balance data being able to be decoded by free raw utilities like DCRAW. Yet the problem persists, so I may only conclude that it isn't doing it correctly / fully in some cases.

b) If you tell the s/w to use "auto" white balance it will try calculating the correct WB automatically based on averaged data in the image and areas found to be similar to black / white / grey. This apparently isn't always satisfactory.

c) Even after the white balance is adjusted manually to the best looking settings, there is still a pronounced difference (in my experience with my camera(s)) between the non-neutral (gray/white/black) colors in the image and those colors in the JPEG of the same exact photo produced by a camera that can save both to JPEG and RAW at the same time. It seems clear that the only explanation for this is that there's a substantial error between the camera's actual "color profile" response curves and the implicitly assumed color profile used by the RAW -> JPEG converter which probably assumes the RAW data is roughly in a color space of being linear or roughly sRGB or roughly Adobe 1998 or whatever. The only correct "ab initio" way to fix this is to have a more accurate ICC/ICM device input color profile for the camera's non-linear response to various colors / intensities given the exposure parameters and use that profile to correctly map the RAW data to the desired standard output color space (sRGB, Adobe 1998, whatever). As before an empirical way to help correct for this is to shoot a calibration shot containing a "color checker" chart with several patches of known colors in it some time during a given photo shoot and then use software either automatically or semi-manually to map the "camera" versions of those colors to the "true" versions of those colors and by doing so estimate a rough color profile that will interpolate all other colors in the image to close to their correct values.

If black / grey / white colors look right after a conversion, the white balance must've been handled OK. Other non-neutral colors may still be off in hue, saturation, or intensity if the color profile isn't correct.

If the whole image has some kind of color tint uniformly applied to it making for instance greys or near-whites look bluish or reddish or whatever then the problem may just be the white balance. If you correct the white balance and the whole picture no matter what other colors are present looks good then the problem is purely WB. It is like the difference in a scene when viewed in sunlight under the sky (bluish) vs. incandescent light (reddish/yellowish) vs fluorescent light.

I'm thinking of writing a little RAW converter that will try to 'cheat' and better correct some of these problems using the free RAW converters as a basis and then adjusting the WB / color profile to better match what is presumably more correct. I'll post more in the thread if I do so and have something to share.

However AFAIK some of the other free programs (IJFR?) may do a much better / adequate job already using fully automatic settings at the conversion, so maybe having another alternative isn't that necessary for MS Windows users. For LINUX, though, at least something better seems needed.

http://www.normankoren.com/digital_tonality.html
http://www.normankoren.com/color_management.html

 

[Sassy Rabbit]

Hmmm - OK, I'm not certain it's a white balance problem per say - the whites look white. (I was photographing an aikido demonstration so there were white gi's involved...). However, the other colors in the photo appear to be off - flesh tones etc.

 

[rudder]

It may also help if you calibrate your monitor. There are several products like spyder and Eyeone that do a great job.

 

[ivan2]

Originally posted by: Sassy Rabbit
I want to make some minor edits to photos (RAW files) - a little sharpening, color corrections and converting to black and white. Picasa seems to produce decent results, but it dosen't seem to produce high quality jpeg files. Anything I open in GIMP appears to be a little off in color - the reds seem a little to pink or blue maybe?

I want something that will produce some nice results quickly - any advice?

are u using Adobe RGB?

 

[dblevitan]

Are you comparing the RAW files output from ufraw/picasa to JPEG files from the camera? If you are, that might be your problem. No third party RAW converter will equal the camera manufacturer's converter (whether in-camera or software). For example, I know for Nikon cameras that only Nikon's software uses all the information provided by the camera - even Adobe Camera Raw (the converter in photoshop and lightroom) doesn't use everything. ufraw will use even less.You can adjust colors in ufraw to simulate what you want or try to find a color profile for your camera that will help ufraw.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Use the GIMP color picker tool (pick it from the tool box, then mouse over a white spot, SHIFT+LEFT-CLICK to see the color value at that spot) to look at the R,G,B values of a couple of white areas.
The R, G, B (red, green, blue) pixel values should be very nearly equal to each other, and all should
be large numbers, e.g.
R=255, G=255, B=255 = perfect fully saturated white,
R=255, G=220, B=220 = a reddish shifted white since R > G,B, it isn't a neutral gray.
R=200, G=200, B=200 = a bright gray that's closer to white than black.
R=100, G=100, B=100 = a gray that's mid level
R=0, G=0, B=0 = perfect black.

A white balance shift will shift those away from equality somewhat significantly.

Also if you use the white balance adjustment in GIMP, the result shouldn't look much better,
COLORS -> AUTO -> WHITE BALANCE.

Here's some more info on GIMPing white balance semi-manually FWIW:
http://www.gimpfaq.org/tutorials/whitebal/

If that's definitely not the main problem then you're looking at a color profile style adjustment of the color curves in general to get they to have the right shapes to reproduce the non-gray/white/black colors accurately.

Originally posted by: Sassy Rabbit
Hmmm - OK, I'm not certain it's a white balance problem per say - the whites look white. (I was photographing an aikido demonstration so there were white gi's involved...). However, the other colors in the photo appear to be off - flesh tones etc.

 

[Gooberlx2]

I still like the old (and free) Pixmantec Rawshooter Essentials.

It can still be found.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Yes, that's exactly what I was comparing, specifically the cases where the camera generates
RAW + JPEG thumbnail or
RAW + JPEG full image
simultaneously. The JPEG is often WAY off relative to the converted RAW file even when "camera WB" et. al. are supposedly used by the converter software.

I certainly understand your point that the PC software may not exactly match the camera's or camera maker's own conversion parameters, though I had expected the higher quality / more mature converters to get much closer under ordinary conditions than I've observer them to do.
Certainly sometimes the camera's own processing is "incorrect" and needs manual adjustment, though most of the time it gets it decently close to perceptually accurate IMHO, and it is the 3rd party software that fails to accomplish anything similar.

I've played around in rawstudio / UFRAW et. al. but it seems hard to find the right parameters to even roughly match the "perceuptually correct" camera made JPEG. I don't expect perfection, but I was surprised to see it was nowhere close in most cases. I don't understand why it isn't better profiled for popular cameras, or even more naively that it doesn't take "hints" from any available correlating JPG / thumbnail image. Usually I would just look at the neutral colors, adjust the WB, then look at the sky color and try to change the saturation or color channel / curve parameters or whatever to match it, but usually it is off by more than one control "dimension" of adjustment making it hard to manually fix in their user interface.

As you say, perhaps I need to make an color profile for the camera itself. Thanks for the feedback.

Are you comparing the RAW files output from ufraw/picasa to JPEG files from the camera? If you are, that might be your problem. No third party RAW converter will equal the camera manufacturer's converter (whether in-camera or software). For example, I know for Nikon cameras that only Nikon's software uses all the information provided by the camera - even Adobe Camera Raw (the converter in photoshop and lightroom) doesn't use everything. ufraw will use even less.You can adjust colors in ufraw to simulate what you want or try to find a color profile for your camera that will help ufraw.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Thanks for the tip, I hadn't heard of it. Googling......

I still like the old (and free) Pixmantec Rawshooter Essentials.

It can still be found.

 

[Sassy Rabbit]

Originally posted by: dblevitan
Are you comparing the RAW files output from ufraw/picasa to JPEG files from the camera? If you are, that might be your problem. No third party RAW converter will equal the camera manufacturer's converter (whether in-camera or software). For example, I know for Nikon cameras that only Nikon's software uses all the information provided by the camera - even Adobe Camera Raw (the converter in photoshop and lightroom) doesn't use everything. ufraw will use even less.You can adjust colors in ufraw to simulate what you want or try to find a color profile for your camera that will help ufraw.

I'm comparing RAW files in Picasa and Ifranview to the same RAW files in GIMP. They look the same in Picasa and Ifranview...

 

[Sassy Rabbit]

Originally posted by: ivan2

Originally posted by: Sassy Rabbit
I want to make some minor edits to photos (RAW files) - a little sharpening, color corrections and converting to black and white. Picasa seems to produce decent results, but it dosen't seem to produce high quality jpeg files. Anything I open in GIMP appears to be a little off in color - the reds seem a little to pink or blue maybe?

I want something that will produce some nice results quickly - any advice?

are u using Adobe RGB?

sRGB i think ....