On Nov 14, 2005, at 10:04 AM, Mark Roberts wrote:
I think Thumbs Plus does real RAW previews. I know it does RAW
conversions (even batch conversion) and will display full-size RAW
images. It has its own built-in RAW converter.
Just looked it up. Thumbs Plus Professional Edition v7 can do RAW if
you download and install the RAW converter plug-in. The RAW converter
plug-in can do updated thumbnails with the RAW converter. Per the
release notes on http://www.cerious.com/digicam_notes.shtml, the
default is to use the embedded JPEG Preview and thumbnail files, but
you can turn on the RAW processing for these renderings.
Nice feature, $90 is an excellent price for the Pro Edition. Now if
they would have the sense to produce a Mac OS X version, I'd be
happy. ;-)
My present workflow goes this way:
- Download PEF
- Convert to DNG with DNG converter
(that updates the JPEG preview/thumbnail)
- View, sort and rough in RAW parameters with Bridge
(that updates the preview/thumbnails)
- Catalog DNGs with iView once in the archive
(which sucks in the current preview/thumbnails)
That way I have the advantage of using roughed in ACR settings from
Bridge in the catalogs. Bridge is excellent for sorting, setting up
RAW parameters, processing big bunches of files into .PSD originals.
I have Camera Raw set up with defaults that let me see what my base
exposures look like in Bridge, that lets me grab groups of images
with similar adjustment needs and do rough out adjustments quickly.
The thumbnail/preview output from DNG Converter looks similar to
using Bridge and ACR 3.1 with adjustment controls set to "Auto".
That's remarkably close for a lot of cases.
iView MediaPro is then excellent for producing the thumbnail
catalogs, and the thumbnails reflect what I expect to see in the
final work pretty closely.
Godfrey
