HOWTO_read_raw_camera_images

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This page does not cover how to read your images from your camera. This page assumes you have the raw images already on your disk somewhere but explains how to convert the raw images so you can read them into Gimp or other programs.

1 Converting RAW files
2 Installing dcraw
- 2.1 Basic GIMP plugin
- 2.2 UFRaw: A powerful tool including a GUI and GIMP plugin

Converting RAW files

There are many different types of raw images. There are lots of different and protected raw formats from different camera manufacturers. Even cameras from one company can have different raw formats

Dave Coffin has done a lot of hard work on decoding and reverse engineering these raw files. His program is called dcraw.

Installing dcraw

The good news is that dcraw is in portage so you can simply type

emerge media-gfx/dcraw

For the usage of dcraw simply type dcraw with no arguments. Dave Coffin site has other examples of converting to jpegs etc.

Basic GIMP plugin

The gimp plugin is not in portage. You need to download the file and install it yourself.

wget -O ~/rawphoto.c http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/rawphoto.c
gimptool-2.0 --install ~/rawphoto.c

UFRaw: A powerful tool including a GUI and GIMP plugin

UFRaw is a tool that provides a GUI to dcraw allowing curves adjustments, ICC profiles for input and output, and live preview of the image. A GIMP plugin is included as well. A great benefit of UFRaw is that the curves tool in it, exposure control, and colorspace conversion all happen in 16-bit color precision, so it's much, much better than doing an 8-bit RAW conversion and then using the GIMP's curves tool to work on the image.

Just type