It was added to trunk yesterday and packages are ready in our Launchpad PPA for Ubuntu.

A quick guide:

1. Select photo(s) and press ctrl-alt-e (or find Enfuse in Photo menu).
2. Adjust settings and update thumbnail by clicking on it .
3. When you are happy with the thumbnail, click “Execute” and wait for the finished result to be opened.

Some notes:

• You might have noticed that I’ve written “photo(s)” in the first step above – you can select just one photo and Rawstudio will help you export different exposures from that photo and you might get a better result than the initial photo (or not).
• To get as high a quality as possible, Rawstudio exports photos in 16bit PNG and Enfuse hands it back to Rawstudio as 16bit PNG. Even though the files are PNG, the extension are “rse” (RawStudio Enfuse) to make the files easy to identify.
• Be patient! I’ve done a lot to speed the process up as much as possible, but exporting, aligning and enfusing full size photos does take time!
• Photos that have been enfused might need some extra work as you are used to with RAW :)

Well, go ahead and give it a try – I’d like to get some comments on it (here or at http://bugzilla.rawstudio.org/)

I’ve made a few screen captures of it in use. This is the speed I have on my relatively slow laptop. Check them out below…

Multiple photos with camera mounted on a tripod:

Multiple photos with handheld camera (aligning required)

Single photo:

Here are links to the articles.

• RawSpeed Developer Information
• Camera Definition File

If you have any additional areas you’d like to have covered, or have any questions, just leave a comment, and I will try to address it.

Asynchronous Display Rendering

One of the most common requests is a more responsive UI, when adjusting settings.  I didn’t expect this to be a huge win, since it will not actually speed up rendering. However, after an experimental implementation, it really makes a big difference in how responsive the program feels.

Basically all adjustments are now pushed to a separate thread, that begins re-rendering the image, if no further adjustments are made for 50 milliseconds. This makes sliders much more responsive, since an instant re-render isn’t triggered right away.

Since multi-threading in a complex application such as Rawstudio can bring some unforeseen consequences, this is also the most likely source of instability. Not in the sense of data loss, but it could still result in some unexpected and hard to reproduce crashes.

System Display Profile

You can now use the display profiles you have assigned to your monitors. You can select the to use the system display profile in the Preferences box:

New “Advanced” profiles

We have created a number of “Advanced” color profiles, which will hopefully give a more precise color reproduction than the “simple” matrix-based profiles. You can read more about them here in a previous blog entry.

Full changelist

New Stuff

• System Display profiles can now be used
• Automatic “Quick Export” is now available when using tethered shooting, allowing direct tethered -> picasa/facebook/flickr upload.
• Exposure compensation is new read and displayed in the iconbox. (patch by Erik Wognsen)
• Add error notification when unable to save image settings.
• Add more metadata info to filename generation (iso, shutter, aperture, focal length & week number)
• Faster DCP profile processing
• Add option to lenses for correcting for fisheye effect. Selectable per lens.
• Update image while dragging curve points.
• Cropping can be done by moving single borders.
• Allowing to de-select a lens in lens editor.
• Exposure Mask colorspace now used for histogram – not using display cs anymore
• Multi-threaded processing when using ICC profiles
• Lens Correction cropping is now done without doing actual cropping of the image, faster image display because of that.
• Overlay scrollbar is disabled, since it makes usability of the iconbar much worse.

Camera Support, Color Profiles

• Canon Powershot S100
• Nikon E5100
• Panasonic GF3
• FUJI Finepix X100, F600 EXR
• Olympus E-P3, E-PL3, E-PM1
• Panasonic DMC G3, DMC GF3, DMC GX1
• Pentax Q, K100D, K110D,* istD,* istDL, * istDL2, * istDS, * istDS2
• Sony NEX C3, NEX-5N, SLT A35, SLT A55, SLT A65V,  SLT A77V
• Leica M9

Camera Support, File Loading

• Canon Powershot S100
• Olympus E-PM1, E-PL3, E-P3 added
• Sony NEX-5N, NEX-C3, SLT-A35, SLT-A77V added
• Panasonic DMC GF3, DMC G3, FZ150 added
• Faster ORF (Olympus) decoding
• Olympus cameras read black level from makernote.
• Updated Canon 450D and 7D ISO 12800 white level
• Fix White level of Panasonic GH-2
• Add black area to Pentax K-x for better black estimation
• More precise black/white on Sony A550.
• More precise white level on Canon 600D/1000D at ISO 100.
• Dcraw updated to v9.12.

Bug Fixes

• “Quick Export” now properly applies de-noise.
• Be sure to set camera default when applying settings to previously unopened images.
• Be sure to reset color profile when changing it.
• Always add EXIF colorspace info.
• Fix horizontal scrolling on touchpads.
• Don’t copy DNG private data tags.
• Add missing Whitebalance -> Auto to rightclick menu.

Here is a shot of Adobes DNG Profile editor in which the profiles were created:

Advanced profiles are available for the following cameras:

• Canon EOS 1000D
• Canon EOS 400D
• Canon EOS 40D
• Canon EOS 450D
• Canon EOS 500D
• Canon EOS 50D
• Canon EOS 550D
• Canon EOS 5D Mark II
• Canon EOS 600D
• Canon EOS 60D
• Canon EOS 7D
• Canon EOS-1D Mark III
• Canon EOS-1D Mark IV
• Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III
• Canon PowerShot G10
• Canon PowerShot G11
• Canon PowerShot S90
• Canon PowerShot S100
• Nikon 1 J1
• Nikon 1 V1
• Nikon D200
• Nikon D2Xs
• Nikon D3
• Nikon D300
• Nikon D3000
• Nikon D300S
• Nikon D3100
• Nikon D3S
• Nikon D3X
• Nikon D40
• Nikon D40X
• Nikon D5000
• Nikon D5100
• Nikon D60
• Nikon D700
• Nikon D7000
• Nikon D80
• Nikon D90
• Olympus E-3
• Olympus E-30
• Olympus E-410
• Olympus E-420
• Olympus E-5
• Olympus E-510
• Olympus E-520
• Olympus E-620
• Olympus E-P2
• Olympus E-P3
• Olympus E-PL1
• Olympus E-PL2
• Olympus E-PM1
• Olympus XZ-1
• PENTAX 645D
• PENTAX K-5
• PENTAX K-7
• PENTAX K-r
• PENTAX K-x
• PENTAX K2000
• PENTAX K200D
• PENTAX K20D
• PENTAX Q
• Panasonic DMC-G1
• Panasonic DMC-G2
• Panasonic DMC-G3
• Panasonic DMC-GF1
• Panasonic DMC-GF2
• Panasonic DMC-GF3
• Panasonic DMC-GH1
• Panasonic DMC-GH2
• Panasonic DMC-LX3
• Pentax K100D
• Sony DSLR-A200
• Sony DSLR-A230
• Sony DSLR-A290
• Sony DSLR-A330
• Sony DSLR-A350
• Sony DSLR-A380
• Sony DSLR-A390
• Sony DSLR-A500
• Sony DSLR-A550
• Sony DSLR-A560
• Sony DSLR-A580
• Sony DSLR-A700
• Sony DSLR-A850
• Sony DSLR-A900
• Sony NEX-3
• Sony NEX-5
• Sony NEX-5N
• Sony NEX-C3
• Sony SLT-A33
• Sony SLT-A35
• Sony SLT-A55V
• Sony SLT-A77

You can try out the new profile by installing the Rawstudio daily (which also includes other goodies).

If you cannot install the daily or wait for Rawstudio 2.1 to try them out you can download them from here, or simply pick the one for your camera here in the subversion repository.

Unpack the profiles into “(home)/.rawstudio/profiles”, and they should be picked up if you are so lucky to have a supported camera.

If you want to tinker around with them, and have access to a Windows or Mac based computer, you can pick up the free DNG Profile Editor, and download the recipe from here. You will also need to convert your test images to DNG, for that pick up the (also free) DNG Converter. All of these are also rumoured to work under WINE, but if you try, do tell us your experiences below.

You might have to re-calculate the whitebalance, since the camera to white calculation might be slightly different in some profiles.[*] To re-calculate the camera whitebalance use the ‘c’ key. This should only be an issue if you change the profile. If you have the advanced profile set as your default the whitebalance will be calculated from that.

As always, feel free to share your experiences. Thanks to Imaging Resource for making colorchart RAW files available.

[*] Rawstudio stores the Kelvin Temperature and Tint, and not the adjustment resulting from this being run through the profile base matrix. You feedback is of course welcome, but the difference would of course be that changing this would have the temperature jumping back and forth when you change profiles.

Technically the de-noising is automatically adjusted based on the scaling performed of the image. Due to the order in which the size is set (or rather isn’t set), the de-noising filter thinks the image is scaled to 0%, which completely disables de-noising.

Luckily the next version is right around the corner, and the current development version is quite stable. And since Anders has fixed the daily Ubuntu build system, you can grab a version there, or do the build yourself from SVN if you have that type of skills.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Here are some of the things I have noted for upcoming major things that come to mind. If you have any input on any of the topics or new suggestions, we are very interested in hearing your opinion in the comments below.

Cool image from sxc.hu with reference to the future :)

Here we go – here is a braindump of the issues that are top-of-mind right now:

• Improve Demosaic

The current algorithm is fine, especially considering the speed, but has some worst-case scenarios which doesn’t look too good.

I still have a research project going on this, which could be fun to keep going.

• Improve Sharpen+Denoise

De-noise and sharpening is already one of the best, but on very high settings it will create artifacts. I would like to improve this by implementing “soft overlapping” areas, and a limiter, that limits the amount of change permitted similar to “Limitedsharpen” and its successors.

• Faster Image Switching

Even though we are very fast at switching between images, the  time the UI is locked is still quite annoying. Implementing either a file or memory based cache could help that somewhat.

I am not sure a filebased cache approach will help much, since we are already very fast on displaying the initial image with the high quality render taking a “considerable” time.

Offloading rendering to a separate thread may also be needed for this, so it is no easy task to make this work well.

• Float Precision Image Pipeline

Switch the entire pipeline from de-mosaic and forward to a planar float-point precision. Most filters are internally processing in float point. Memory usage for caches will go up, image quality will be largely the same, processing speed will be largely the same on SSE2 machines. So there isn’t any huge gains, mostly internal stuff.

• Implement “Post Processing” Filters

We could implement an interface for having more postprocessing effects available. Not sure how this is best implemented, but there seem to be some proposals regarding libgimp, and some commandline tools, which we could also implement. Suggestions are of course welcome.

• More Output Modules

Adding more output modules gives more possibilities. We could add export modules, that export to new formats as well as common applications, much like the GIMP export, so you can continue working on your images there. Obvious applications are DigiKam, Darktable and similar programs, which allow you to do more detailed editing of your images.

• Edit Modes

An adjustment I would have like to have made before the 2.0 release was edit modes, since the “default whitebalance on left click” isn’t exactly intuitive. This will also more expose some of the features like crop, rotate, loupe, and make stuff like panning more feasible to implement.

Watch on Vimeo in HD
Watch on Youtube in HD

Hope you enjoyed the video. You can download the music which was made for the occasion by two of our good friends. I had a bit of fun afterwards and threw together a remix, with a bit more of a “party” feeling.

Music by Rune Stowasser & Jakob Birkedal
Remix by Klaus Post

Download Original Music : raw-studio.mp3
Download Remix: rawstudio-remix.mp3

We all needed a short break after 2.0, but now we will begin looking into what the future brings!

Linux.com has published a very well written and researched article by Nathan Willis, called Editing RAW Photos on Linux with Rawstudio 2.0. It is a very good introduction to all the features of the 2.0 release, and what they will mean to you. Be sure to check it out!

First I want to make sure you understand the concept of colorspaces. I will not go into details about the technicalities, since there are a lot of great resources on the topic on the internet [1], [2]. We are only dealing with RGB colorspaces, so you can disregard talk about CMYK, Lab, YCrCb and other colorspaces.

In overall terms a color profile determines how an RGB value in the image is displayed on the screen. In general colorspaces are handled in different ways in different image formats, but it is very common that an ICC profile is embedded in the image, that tells how the image data should be interpreted.

Maintaining correct colors can be quite a puzzle (sorry for the bad pun)

In a perfect world all applications would handle images the same way. However, since 99% of the images you are encoutering are in the sRGB colorspace (in approximately gamma 2.2), many applications simply skip the conversion and assume that all images you give it is in sRGB. This is much easier (and faster), so it is understandable that applications do this.

In general applications can be separated into two categories:

1. Applications that understand color management in images
2. Applications that do not understand color management and doesn’t care
3. Something between 1&2.

When you are dealing with a color issues, it important to know into which category your application falls.

Unfortunately there isn’t any good way to determine the level of support in the applications, other than visual inspection, which gets even more tricky when you are dealing with output for print. Here are some examples:

Original image

Image displayed in wrong color space

Image displayed with wrong gamma (16 bit images)

The two last images where opened in “Eye of Gnome 2.32.0″, which does support color management. A lot of similar programs, like desktop thumbnails and similar “simple” apps will display the same problems when you open the image, because GDK+ does not handle color management until very recently.

Applications that handle CM correctly

Update: Rather than listing which applications, I’ve found, I found this list on Wikipedia:

• A list of Linux color-managed applications.

These are the applications I know that handle embedded ICC profiles, as you would expect. There are likely many others – if you know some, please leave a comment below.

Applications that does not handle CM at all

This is actually the easiest case. In this case, you must export images in 8 bit in sRGB color space. No other options will look right. 16 bit images are most likely being displayed with wrong gamma. So if you are not delivering images to a professional, who you know will be able to view and handle images correctly, you should always deliver them as some form of 8 bit sRGB, to be sure they look all right.

We think we have achieved a level of operation, that will enable you to process a huge number of images quickly and easily, enabling you to get a high quality result you can share with everyone in a short amount of time. Our main focus in this version has been to have much more control over the color correctness and overall image quality. At the same time it has been a high priority for us to maintain a high speed of operations, so you can edit your RAW files even on netbooks and similar hardware.

Rawstudio 2.0 ready for takeoff!

At the same time we also feel that Rawstudio is now more usable out-of-the box. We have attempted to minimize the amount of “bumps” that new users should encounter when they try out the program the first few times. We hope we have gotten closer to this goal, and will continue this work in the future.

Official changelist

Overall Feature Improvements

• Overall re-write of image processing engine to have a render graph for better speed and flexibility [1]
• Tethered shooting [1]
• Fullscreen display on secondary monitor [1]
• Loupe function to see a 100% view of an image in zoom-to-fit view(Ctrl+Left click image)
• Navigator image that allow you to navigate the image in 100% view
• “Make settings default for camera” sets default values for new images
• Reset button to reset a setting
• Edit the value of a setting manually
• Batch processing done in the background
• Much nicer thumbnail display

Color and Adjustments

• DNG Color profiles support [1]
• Color profiles for more than 300 cameras included
• Select different profile per image
• Color Mixer added
• Support for DNG profiles from Adobe [1] [2]
• Exposure done by an exposure ramp, for better exposure compensation look
• Contrast much more useful
• Curve tool adjusted, and operate on light-component only
• Completely color managed workflow.
• Selectable colorspace for display, histogram and exposure mask
• Better satuation adjustment [1]
• Black level estimation done individually per photo if available

Image Quality

• Noise Reduction with individual light/color denoise parameters [1]
• New, much improved sharpen algorithm [1]
• Automatic hot/dead pixel removal [1]
• Image resize is now done by a 3-tap Lanczos interpolator for sharper images [1]
• Curve adjustment is done by interpolation to avoid posterization

Lens Correction

• Automatic lens distortion correction [1]
• Vignetting compensation/addition
• Chromatic Aberration correction

Input/Output

• Support for more than 100 new cameras
• Direct (batch) upload of images to Facebook
• Direct (batch) upload of images to Flicker
• Direct (batch) upload of images to Picasa Web Albums
• Ability to select output color profile in the export dialog
• EXIF info to output images now much improved
• EXIF can be excluded from exported images
• Metadata read from non-RAW images
• Non-RAW images now read the profiles attached to the images
• Highly customizable output filename templates [1]

Tagging

• Internal tag editor to add tags to your images
• Tags automatically added from EXIF info
• Quick search through all your images
• Support for moving your images on your file system without loosing tagging information [1]

Speed

• Much faster load of image for more than 170 cameras through Rawspeed [1]
• Much faster updates of image in 100% view
• Color adjustment, Demosaic, Rotate, Resize, Sharpen, Colorspace conversion fully multithreaded
• Color adjustment, Rotate, Resize, Sharpen, Colorspace conversion fully implemented in SSE/SSE2
• Fastest 100% view of newly opened image of any known viewer
• Internal colorspace converter between common colorspaces
• Significant speedup on loading directories with more than 1000 images

And of course hundreds of small corrections and changes that didn’t make it into this list.

We hope you will enjoy this new version. Again, we would like to thank everybody who contributed – with testing, feedback, test photos, translations and good spirit. Without you this release would not have been possible.

Now go to the Download section and grab the version you’d like.