Re: Canon Raw format support for gdk-pixbuf

[Tor Lillqvist <tml iki fi>]

Jens Ansorg writes:
 > do you know about dcraw?
 > 
 > http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
 > 
 > it does encoding for a lot of digital camera formats, i.e Minolta and
 > Nikon

However, before somebody suggests using that to write code to load the
actual image from a RAW file in gdk-pixbuf, please consider that the
main reason why one uses RAW format in the first place is its support
for more than 8 bits per channel, and the gdk-pixbuf (AFAICS) only
supports 8 bits per channel.

What would be really useful, IMHO, would be to convince Dave Coffin to
convert his really useful code from a freestanding single-file program
into a library with a clean API, and no static data. (Then the dcraw
command would be a very small program that calls that library to do
the job.) I suggested something like that once to him, but he didn't
like the idea.

(This probably should be done by creating automatic Perl or whatever
scripts that converts his dcraw.c into the source file(s) for the
library, so that you can reapply it whenever he updates the
functionality of dcraw...)

I don't like to use dcraw only through separate invokations, because
for applications like what I have in mind (an Open Source alternative
to interactive RAW manipulation tools like Phase One's Capture One),
that just isn't good enough. It would be too slow to have to convert
all of the RAW file for each tweak you do interactively, just to check
the result in a part of the image, for instance.

In fact, there already has been such work (look for "libraw"). But at
least when I looked at it, even if it did have a clean API, it
suffered from being forked early from Dave Coffin's work, and then
dramatically restructured, and thus diverging without hope of backport
of the actual RAW decoding enhancements that Dave does all the
time. Thus the idea to use an automatic script.

--tml