Image File Conversion

For those who want to convert .DNG to .JPG out of camera quickly and cheaply try Faststone Image Viewer - freeware so its worth a look

Why? For my photography .JPG is perfectly adequate, but this lets me take .DNG as a quality file if I need one, whilst still enjoying the benefits of .JPG without filling up the SD card.

I have been using it for a few weeks and within the limits of my eyesight it seems to do a good job.

Must admit, don't think I get this.

It lets you take a .DNG from a .JPG? That won't produce a better quality file, as you have already lost the detail by shooting in JPEG instead of RAW.

Best way to avoid all of this and introduce extra steps into the workflow? Just go out, buy a bigger SD card, shoot in RAW + JPEG. Cards are dirt cheap nowadays, 4GB starts @ £7.99 with free delivery, so, no problem!

I think what he must mean, given that he said "convert DNG to JPG", is that mostly he's continuing to shoot in JPG, but switches to DNG occasionally, using this converter to make it into a JPG later.

I agree with you, though - I use RAW+ much more often than I ever expected to.

If he really doesn't want to go to bigger SD cards, but wants to save space, then I'd suggest continuing to shoot mostly in JPG, but use PEF (significantly smaller than DNG) for the occasional RAW shot.

Then use Picasa to convert the PEFs to JPG - it's also free, very easy to use, and lets you do some basic editing too.

Was re-reading the middle paragraph so many times, forgot what was mentioned in the 1st line!

In which case, just use the camera. It can convert Raw - Jpeg by itself!

Or use the software that came in the box, or multitudes of others freely available over the net.

Having said that, this one does sound like a new program I haven't heard of, and perhaps I've misunderstood the OP, but it does kind of sound like stating the obvious.

Now, if that software has new features we've not seen before, then great, thanks for bringing it to our attention, especially as its free, but let us know why it's better than the rest!

Well, he did say "out of camera".

I've never done it myself, but from the manual it appears that RAW-JPG conversion in-the-camera can be done only one frame at a time, unless I've read it wrong.

I can imagine this might be a bit of a faff, if there are a number of them.

Faststone will also take care of PEF files, and convert them. I find it better than Picasa.



Serendipity (Mick)

You can also open a jpg file in Photoshop Elements 6 as a RAW file to get access to the special adjustments available. I won't say you can resque blown highlights, but sometimes it's worth a try for other improvements.

Scott Kelby has a description of this technique in his Photoshop Elements 6 book.

Seems I confused everyone. From reading a multitude of magazines and postings there is a continual debate on whether or not it is worth the extra hassle of shooting RAW.

For many people, including me, .JPG is most convenient from a post shooting point of view, but shooting .JPG means that sometimes (with hindsight) .RAW might have been a better bet. However shooting all .RAW is a pain come processing time, whilst shooting .RAW + .JPG uses space on the card.

So, a quick and simple method of shooting .RAW and then batch converting to .JPG offers a solution. I appreciate that there are other approaches, but this seemed an option worth pursuing. - Just a thought.

Never mind raws , just generally speaking Faststone viewer is an absolutely spanking bit of software. it's small, free and can do a multitude of really helpful things with images. It's a great image viewer but it's more than that

I have used PhotoShop since 1992 But I use Faststone for viewing, rotating, resising and cropping quickly. The best thing is the fact that it can do most of these things without recompressing the image This is brilliant.

I recomend it to all my clients for their images. (I make web sites amongst other things)

Faststone is excellent for browsing quickly through lots of folders of images. If you have a picture somewhere, but can't quite remember where, Faststone is a great help.

Irfanview, in my opinion, is better for viewing one folder. It can edit pictures, or batches of pictures, very quickly. An example would be resizing/sharpening all the pictures in a folder for putting on the web.

It'll create thumbnails, too, and webpages. You can edit the webpage templates, and I don't know a quicker way to create an index of pictures which link to individual pages for each image.

G

sounds good, I'm going to investigate. does it recompress images if all it has done is crop or rotate them?

The choice is yours. You set the amount of compression you want.

G

I should add that if you want to modify the template, you will need to have a nodding acquaintance with HTML.

G

re compression I meant that Fastone doesn't recompress at all if all it has done is rotate or crop the image.
This is crucial as otherwise JPEG ruins images a little more each time. Lots of people don't realise this.

I know what you meant. Whatever you do, you can compress to whatever degree you wish, including no compression.

For rotating, there is an additional special command (Shift-J) that rotates without compression and without offering you a choice in the matter.

G