Just a heads up for digital photographers working with RAW files.
Adobe has, as part of their macromedia acquisitions, a public beta of
the program "Lightroom" available for download.
<http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/lightroom/>
After mucking around on it for a couple of days I have to say it
seems to be a better option than Apple's Aperture (admittedly I only
have a few hours racked up on aperture and wasn't overly impressed
given the price and minimum hardware requirements) and it certainly
beats the Canon Capture program hands down.
Remember though it is a beta and is time limited but apart from that
is, within what has so far been coded, fully functional including RAW
to Adobe's digital negative conversion.
running it on a dual g4 876 MHz processor importing and converting
is slow (ie well over an hour to import and convert 300 RAW images)
but is quite usable once files are imported.
Image manipulation is pretty intuitive and spits out a image that is
print/web ready or Photoshop ready if you want to do post processing.
just to compare the following images are from the same RAW image file
the first is a JPG processed in Canon's Raw processing program
supplied with their EOS D-SLR cameras (and comes up only marginally
better than using Apples own RAW import/process/export functions with
in the humble "preview" program) and the second is with Adobe
Lightroom
WARNING
BIG JPEG files between 5 & 7 MB each so not for dial up
Canon
<http://bits-mark.biz.uwa.edu.au/~marksecker//images/lightroom/CRW_canon.jpg>
Lightroom
<http://bits-mark.biz.uwa.edu.au/~marksecker//images/lightroom/CRW_lightbox.jpg>
for the technically minded EOS D60 with EF100 f:2 prime, shot at 200
ASA f:2 and about 1/2500 Second at about 4 meters captured
(obviously) as a RAW image file.
no post processing in Photoshop so this is simply exposure, colour
correction and some sharpening done in both programs ready for any
sort of post processing or printing.
--
~
Mark Secker Computer Support Officer
ph# 61-8-6488 1855 (ECEL) <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
University of Western Australia - CRICOS Provider No. 00126G
~
"It takes an idiot to do cool things.... that's why it's cool"
- Haruhara Haruka (FLCL)
Ubi fumus, ibi fumus
