UFRAW and GIMP

If you edit photos, GIMP is worth trying out. GIMP is far more capable than any low priced photo editors I have come across and is at least as good as Photoshop Elements. In some ways, it approaches the capabilities of Photoshop CS. However, the usability is clunky compared to the Photoshop variants. For example, GIMP does allow for bulk processing but you need to write the script. On the other hand, Photoshop allows for the easy recording of a set of actions that makes bulk processing a breeze.

If you shoot RAW, GIMP has the free UFRAW plugin available. This is well worth having even if you have the latest versions of Photoshop CS and Adobe Camera RAW (ACR).

My current DSLR came with a Silky Pix based software and even the internal JPEG engine is Silky Pix based. Silky Pix is a great stand alone RAW converter that many do prefer to ACR. The problems are that it is not cheap and it can not directly export the converted photo to photo processing software. I do prefer the look of Silky Pix to ACR but would like the abilities of RAW to fix things before making the final photo. Being able to go from the RAW converter to the photo processor is close to being a must as well.

UFRAW is DCRAW with a good GUI. This GUI is on par with that of ACR. Like ACR, you do need to work with it a while to really understand what is going on. On the other hand, UFRAW is more capable although it does not perform sharpening and may take longer to understand. Also, do not forget to load the color profile for your camera. This should be somewhere on your camera's RAW converting software CD.

UFRAW has sliders for both gamma and linearity. The combination of these two can provide a very nice fine tuning of the photos tonality. Setting the gamma to 0.45 to 0.50 and the linearity between 0.90 and 1.00 will produce natural, Silky Pix like results. I do see a little more colder but more realistic rendering with UFRAW. A slight boost on saturation or a slight boost in the warmer colors through GIMP can take care of the colder look.

I also found that I can get a more dramatic film like look by cutting the gamma slightly and boosting the linearity past 0.1. This look is further improved by the push button option for a more film like handling of highlights. This tones them down slightly and brings out a considerable amount of highlight detail.

After one is done with the RAW conversion, the photo can be opened directly by GIMP. GIMP does perform the standard photoshop tasks which makes using UFRAW preferable for me over converting in Silky Pix, saving as a tif file and then opening in Photoshop. Although GIMP is not quite as nice to use as Photoshop I much prefer the UFRAW/GIMP combination if I shoot RAW. ACR is good but UFRAW works better for me with the files from my camera.