RAW/Tiff to Jpeg?

Faststone's great strength is allowing you to view lots of pictures in lots of folders very quickly. Great for when you are looking for a particular picture and can't remember where it is.

For viewing single pictures, or a number of pictures sequentially, I prefer Irfanview. It's also much better for simple manipulations, or processing a batch of pictures. Renaming, resizing, adding a copyright notice, etc..

Both have their place.

G

Faststone will also create a standalone viewer for you to package with your CD of images.
So you can be sure that your friends/family/clients will see the images the way you intended, fullscreen, rotated correctly and with the proper colours etc.

All my web clients get offered a copy so they can manipulate their images themselves and upload them to their e-stores etc.

Use sRGB colour space for the best results,see the second part of our president's report LINK.

John

For those who have asked, Faststone is available to download here. They also do a freeware image resizer, available from the same site. BTW, it's PC only software.

Terje says our beloved Pentaxes shoot in 12 bit. I've just gone into Faststone and pulled up one of my RAW images to check. The EXIF says it's 24 bit. Now I'm confused.
david

I think faststone only displays the jpeg preview - 8 bits per pixel = 24
I think the raw files are 12 bits per pixel = 36
Think that's right.
HDR images are 48 bits but need to be rendered at 24 on screen

Hiya David,
Thank's for the promt reply/info.
I am always dubious of downloading anything that is "free"!
I kinda wonder what might slide quietly in with it and screw up my works.
Presumably you have not had any trouble with it?
I don't understand why anyone would want to give me something for nothing,with no strings attatched??!?

Regards, Larry.

I can't understand the 'free' bit either but many of my friends in Durham Photographic Society have been using Faststone for years without any complaints. I certainly use it all the time for editting, retitling, sorting pictures into folders etc.
davidt

They make money by selling their other Faststone products. Giving away a free image viewer for non-commercial use only, especially if it's a well-regarded program, gives them a lot of great publicity. Not to mention the SEO benefits of bloggers and forum users who are linking back to the Faststone homepage

Plenty of great apps are free, in the hope you will upgrade to a better paid version (lots of shareware works like this) and/or buy products through the app (think iTunes, or FontExplorerX).

Greetings

... rather than start a new thread I've got a related question. I got my K20D delivered today and have been shooting in RAW mode.

I've installed the Pentax Photo Laboratory software that comes with the camera and thankfully it does batch convert from RAW to my preferred filetype, TIF. But it's awfully slow

Is there any software out there that can batch convert quicker?

Do you have a particular reason to batch convert to TIFF?
You will loose all the flexibility and non-destructive editing of the raw file and fill up your hard drive with TIFFs which you still have to edit?

Personally, I don't know the answer to your question because I never do it. Every file is treated differently and usually the top most working file is saved as PSD and further down will be a bunch of JPEGs at different sizes and sharpnesses.

Photoshop has batch actions although they are a bit of a pain to set up. Older versions of Photoshop came with a batch processing app called ImageReady which was much easier to use. Never used Pentax Photo Lab, so don't know which is faster, but if I had to bet money I'd bet on Photoshop.

If you are looking for a dedicated batch processing app I use PhotoDrop on Mac, and Fotosizer on Windows.

It's possible you just need a faster computer. RAW and TIFF files are notoriously large.

If Smeggypants could give us more details about his workflow I'm sure we would have an answer to this question. Working with tif is pretty similar to working with psd files - in Photoshop at any rate they both offer more editing options than RAW files but at the expense (sometimes) of destructive editing.

Adobe Bridge CS4 allows multiple files to be opened in Camera Raw, they can then all be selected within Camera Raw and opened or saved as tifs. I've never worked out how to do this direct from Camera Raw, only using Bridge as a starting point.

Automator in OS X has some really good image batch processing options but I can't remember if it will work with Raw files.

Another option would be to try out some 3 third party Raw convertors like Silky Pix (I think Pentax Photo Lab is based on Silky Pix, no?) with batch conversion options.

A definite possibility - my MBP chugs sometimes when batch processing large numbers of images. If you don't want to upgrade your computer just start the batch processing before you go to bed and turn off the computer the following morning - or while you're eating dinner

Is there any free software to work with raw?

Cheers for replying folks

I'm just used to using TIFs really. They open in anything, so it's even simple just to turn on thumbnails in windows to view the contents of a folder.

I'm really new to RAW files and from what you say about non-destructive editing I'm guessing that the file holds some kind of meta data for post processing such as contrast colour correction ,etc. Please forgive my ignorance on this

Regarding non destructive editing then surely any processed image you want can be copied from the master and edited without affecting the original. Or do you guys use Raws for general usage anyway and want to keep the option to re-edit?

I guess I'm trying to a feel of what sort of workflow is used when using RAW files. If anyone's got any links to "RAW files for dummies" then I'd be very grateful.



It's possibly the machine but on the same machine converting and saving a similar size ( 20Mb ish ) file in Photopaint is much quicker. Photopaint has a great editor for making batch scripts. ( I created one to resize images to a max hoz and vert size and that's really quick )

Cheers

Smeggy