Digital Light & Color

For some reason, I am under the impression that raw color conversion in PWP is done with DCRaw. Is that true? If not, how is raw image file interpretation performed? Whatever the raw converter, it must be updated regularly as new cameras to be supported come out or changes in raw formats come out and must accommodated. Now that PWP is no longer an ongoing supported product, how is raw conversion updated? Come to think of it, how was it done in the past? PWP updates did not come out all that frequently compared to the continual changes in the marketplace. Thanks.

Cheers, Peter

The PWP 7 raw converter is derived from dcraw which gets updated by its author, Dave Coffin, on a very irregular basis. When we were maintaining PWP7, we had to take each dcraw update and modify it to fit within PWP which we are no longer doing.

Personally, I recommend using a separate raw converter program. There are some very good commercial ones such as DxO PhotoLab and Capture One which also correct for lens distortion, vignetting, and chromatic aberration and provide very good noise reduction. There is also the free Raw Therapee and several others. Most of these can be configured to output their converted files as TIFFs and to open PWP with the converted file automatically.

Thank you for describing how PWP performed its raw conversion.

Is there any reason you didn't mention LibRaw in your listed recommendations? (Or, horrors, Lightroom / PS for that matter?) Thanks.

Cheers, Peter

Lightroom/PS work fine if you have them. See the section in the help file on integrating with other applications.

LibRaw, as far as I know, is a library that other applications can incorporate to add raw support and not a stand-alone application. I am tracking this for possible future use by PWP.

Another perspective...

As a former product design engineer of products unrelated to digital cameras/software, there may be proprietary aspects known to your camera/lens manufacturer that are NOT fully taken into consideration by third party -- all comers -- conversion software.

Just suggesting that the manufacturer's suggested/provided conversion software should also be considered to take advantage of any proprietary aspects as it is in their interest to provide the best conversion possible for their product(s)... ...even though the User-Interface may be unfamiliar and not always in colloquial English.

...den...