[Rawstudio-dev] alternative library for decoding raw formats

[Anders Brander]

Hi,

On Sat, 2009-02-28 at 00:10 +0100, Gianluca Sforna wrote:
> while looking for a fix on the build problem I wrote about earlier, I
> found out this project:
> 
> http://libopenraw.freedesktop.org
> 
> which is on paper a nice alternative to the current decoding code
> which is AFAIK brought from another project (ufraw?) which in turn got
> it from a third one (dcraw)
> 
> What do you think?

Well.

dcraw and glue code from ufraw is working pretty solid.

The idea behind libopenraw is the right one, I have considered
contributing to the project multiple times, but I'm not really much of a
C++ guy, so I ended up getting lost in the code every time :(

At the moment there already exists a plugin for Rawstudio that uses
libopenraw - but for now libopenraw cannot replace dcraw simply because
of limited camera support in libopenraw. I believe Hubert Figuiere, the
author of libopenraw, follows this list too. Maybe you would like to
chime in Hub?

If we would like to use a library, but keep dcraws wide support for
cameras, there's LibRaw which is a rewrite of dcraw to behave like a
proper library. I don't know much about this project.
They have a nice site here: http://www.libraw.org/

Then there's kdcraw by Caulier Gilles - I don't know much about that,
but I _think_ it's a KDE/qt-inspired wrapper around dcraw. But I haven't
really looked at it.

Another possibility would be RawSpeed - not mature at the moment, but it
shows great promises. RawSpeed too doesn't support half the formats that
dcraw does, but it has other interesting aspects.

There's a short presentation of RawSpeed here:
http://sh0dan.blogspot.com/2009/02/introducing-rawspeed.html
- I'm pretty sure that Klaus Post, the author of RawSpeed, is following
this list too. You're welcome to chime in as well Klaus.

The short answer is: I think we could use anything to load raw images
with fallback to dcraw if the loader doesn't support it. Rawstudio
already supports multiple loaders with fallback.

/abrander