geoderix
commented
8 years ago It would be nice to add OCR, instant messenger and a couple of games.
Open ghost opened 8 years ago
geoderix
commented
8 years ago It would be nice to add OCR, instant messenger and a couple of games.
Good evening,
RawTherapee (RT) offers a wide variety of tools to process raw images from digital cameras. However, there is a complete branch of raw data not accessible to RT, i.e. the raw data coming from (slide) scanners. The reason is twofold: • RT cannot handle the IR-channel for dust- and scratch removal. • RT does not provide – as far as I know – an easy way to convert scans from colour negatives to positives. Besides the software being delivered with a scanner by the manufacturer, which is in many cases not very good, there are only two programs on the market, which are in wide-spread use with scanners: VueScan and SilverFast. Both are commercial products and both have their severe drawbacks. E.g.: • VueScans’s colour management is sometimes called “fake” or “light”. Fact is that it only understands matrix based ICC-profiles with size less than 1kB. Its dust- and scratch-removal does not only correct defects in the image but makes changes to about 30% or so of the pixels, i.e. in areas where there clearly are no defects. • SilverFast gives considerably better results. But long-known severe problems are not corrected but instead manpower is used to develop gimmicks that at least I do not need. So the application of an ICC-profile is uncertain (sometimes it is applied, sometimes not). Dust- and scratch removal is better than VueScan’s, but again more pixels are corrected than necessary, albeit by orders of magnitude less than in VueScan. Here, however, the preview is not working reliable in that the result is quite often completely different from what is shown in the preview. So the user is flying in the fog. At the moment I do not want to go into more details. But given these drawbacks I thought that adding the above mentioned two features to RT would be an ideal solution, because both packages provide a raw data format. In VueScan’s raw TIF data each pixel has four values (R,G,B, IR) and in SilverFast a multi-page TIF is used with the RGB- image on page 1, the optional preview on page 2, and the IR-image on page 3. So the RGB-data as they come from the scanner and the corresponding IR-image are readily available for external processing.
More details are to be found on my server in the PDF.
Hermann-Josef