I just downloaded and built rawstudio 1.1 on my Fedora 8 box. Kudos to the team for bringing it to life.
I've been using ufraw for ages in combination with gqview. Its a painful way to work with raw images because the viewing and manipulating of the images isn't coordinated. I've been looking for something better for a long time. I love the way rawstudio mimics Adobe Lightroom. I've considered buying Lightroom several times, but it doesn't run on Linux. And of course it isn't open source. But I have always liked the layout and workflow of it. Its nice to see that rawstudio incorporated its basic concepts. Unfortunately, rawstudio doesn't work particularly well for me. I'm not sure if I am missing how its supposed to work or if it needs a bit more development. Nevertheless, here are my issues: #1) When an image is selected and placed in the main editing window, it needs a lot of adjustment to get near the final product. In ufraw one can select between using the camera settings for the parameters or one can save a set of parameters and they get applied to every image that is worked on. I don't see how to do that with rawstudio and thus the images require a lot of adjustment to get to the final product. Its interesting that the small images in the library view bar have pretty good image parameters and are much closer to the final product and thus would be a good starting point for displaying the image in the main editing window. #2) The image adjuster sliders are quite coarse and finicky at least on my computer with my 40D images. For example, the tint slider moves from -2.0 to 2.0. I question if such a wide range is really needed. I don't need anything nearly that wide. The wide range of adjustment leads to finicky operation of the sliders. A single mouse wheel click on my system is 0.20, which is pretty coarse. To get finer adjustment than that, I have to use the mouse pointer to adjust the slider and that is a pretty finicky operation, especially when it needs to be done for just about every image parameter. Between 1) and 2), it just takes too long to get every image adjusted to the final settings it needs. I wonder if the parameter numbers on the left of the sliders could be made into text edit boxes with up/down arrows for fine tuning. ufraw does this and it seems to work pretty well. #3) I need a white balance spot selector. Ufraw has a good whitebalance spot selector whereby one can select a spot as gray and then use it to adjust the white balance for the rest of the image. I often shoot gray cards and use them to calibrate the white balance on my images. I find that this single adjustment can make the most incredible difference on an otherwise correctly adjusted image. I look forward to feedback on my issues. Please don't take my comments as negative criticism of rawstudio. I am very happy and excited to see what a great application rawstudio will be with just a few tweaks. In any event, keep up the good work. I am available for testing should the team want my further input during the develop process. LG _______________________________________________ Rawstudio-users mailing list [email protected] http://rawstudio.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rawstudio-users
