DCRAW Variables

[Starry Dave]

Merry xmas folks,

Andrew asked me to look into the best settings to use for DCRAW which he uses to convert raw camera files into TIFF format that SkippyStak can read. DCRAW can be used from the command line but I found a neat little app called RawDrop that lets you tweak some settings (link below).

However, regardless of whether I used the command line or RawDrop, I found that the DCRAW TIFFs were much noisier than those produced by Canon's Digital Photo Professional. For me, I think I will stick with batch converting my CR2s into TIFFs in DPP unless someone can work out better DCRAW settings.

Also, I couldn't get SkippyStak to load CR2 files directly, even with dcraw64.exe in the SkippyStak folder.

Dave

http://www.wizards.de/rawdrop/

[Andrew Cool]

(25-12-2015, 12:28 AM)Starry Dave Wrote:

Hi Dave,
The dcraw executable is a command line tool. There's no way of directly ingesting the CR2 image into your own program. That can be done by building dcraw.c into a callable DLL, but that's beyond my meagre abilities as a
programmer.

You point out that in any case, Canon's own Digital Photo Professional produces less noisey images. The annoying thing here is that DPP does not offer either a command line function or the ability to directly ingest the image into you own code. DPP is a stand alone program. Which sux.

There is however some hope in the offing. SkippyStak is written in Interactive Data Language (IDL), and the IDL folks in the USA have been trying to email me code to do with reading raw images, but are having trouble getting it out through their server. Now when this code eventually gets to me, it may just turn out to be an interface to  DCRAW,
or a shell to the LibRaw, which supposedly offers easier, improved raw reading, but is still based around DCRAW.

In which case, it doesn't particularly help if you prefer DPP's output.

There are some older posts on the 'Net that suggest that DPP's batch executable can be invoked from the command line, thus avoiding the GUI. Feel free to try to get Dpp4batch.exe to do something useful... ;-)

>Also, I couldn't get SkippyStak to load CR2 files directly, even with dcraw64.exe in the SkippyStak folder.

it should create TIFF files as output, which are then read back in.

Andrew

Merry xmas folks,

Andrew asked me to look into the best settings to use for DCRAW which he uses to convert raw camera files into TIFF format that SkippyStak can read. DCRAW can be used from the command line but I found a neat little app called RawDrop that lets you tweak some settings (link below).

However, regardless of whether I used the command line or RawDrop, I found that the DCRAW TIFFs were much noisier than those produced by Canon's Digital Photo Professional. For me, I think I will stick with batch converting my CR2s into TIFFs in DPP unless someone can work out better DCRAW settings.

Also, I couldn't get SkippyStak to load CR2 files directly, even with dcraw64.exe in the SkippyStak folder.

Dave

http://www.wizards.de/rawdrop/