RawTherapee is a little gem when comes to converting and editing your RAW photos. It also supports editing of jpg, png and tiff files, but with some features unavailable. Here are the features at a glance:
- Exposure and white balance adjustmens;
- Highlight recovery – works extremely well;
- Shadow/Highlights control;
- ICC Based color management;
- Color and Luminance noise reduction;
- Control thresholds to avoid color clipping in various operations;
- Color changes in CIELab space;
- Chromatic aberration and vignetting correction;
- Rotation/Crop/Resizing/etc.;
In RawTherapee you can also create “postprocessing profiles”, so it is very easy to apply the same settings to multiple photos.
One thing I found it lacking is a batch mode, but with the saved profiles this is not really needed. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the images produced. Very nice program to complement your image processing toolbelt.
Have you ever wondered how these pictures, composed by only characters are made? Ascgen dotNET is a software that can help with the task. Basically it works as a converter from a real image and then this image is converted to characters. Very easy and intuitive to use in just a few steps. It works best if you have a relatively high contrast image with distinct shapes, so it is easily recognizable.
The program allows you to select a whole or part of an image, tune the brightness and contrast of the input image as well as fine tune the output (ASCII) image. For the output generation it allows brightness/contrast changes, levels cropping and midpoint selection, dithering level. It offers real time view of the changes, so you see what the output is.
It is portable and only requires you to have the .NET 2.0 framework installed (available via windows update for XP and below and Vista comes with it…). Very interesting and fun to play with…
Viewing and manipulating image metadata has some challenges and I’ve been looking for a while for a software to do it nicely and intuitively. The solution I have found is PhotoME. Even though still in beta, the program behaves very stable.
PhotoME has a very functional and easy to use user interface. Here are the most important features:
- View and Edit EXIF metadata (2.21 specification);
- Support for IPTC;
- Reads and displays embedded ICC profiles;
- Support for many formats including RAW formats;
- Support for Maker Notes tags for most major camera manufacturers;
- Import and Export metadata;
- Explorer, IE and Firefox integration;
Overall a very useful utility if you work with images.
Picturenaut is a software to help you generate HDR (High Dynamic Range) images. It allows loading several photos with different exposures and producing one image (16, 32, 64 bit colors) with higher dynamic range (i.e. with bigger difference between the lightest and darkest areas).
The program has a fast and responsive user interface. It allows you to create HDR from multiple images as it supports:
- Automatic alignment of the images
- Color balance
- Automatically determines the camera settings from the EXIF
- Exposure correction
There are two built in tone mapping algorithms
- Adaptive Logarithmic
- Photoreceptor Physiology
, although more can be added via the plugin interface. Several plugins are available and the program seems to do a fine job. Many settings are available to adjust for the tone mapping and they are previewed real-time, so you can get the best results.
Excellent program, which does not need any installation. Just unzip and run!
FastStone Image Viewer is a fast image viewing and browsing application, supporting most major image file formats as well as excellent RAW support. It has a very nice cropping and resizing interface, including jpeg lossless operations. The full screen view has various options and operations, which show up when you bump the mouse onto an edge of the screen (the different edges give different options).
Here are the feature highlights I like the most:
- Fast and responsive image browsing and viewing.
- Very nice cropping interface, which supports standard cropping formats, 4×6, 8×10, etc…
- JPEG lossless operations including crop – most editors would only do lossy operations, which degrade the quality of the image.
- Support for RAW formats.
- Dual monitor support – if you have two monitors it can show the browser on one and full screen view on the other.
- Support for batch operations to convert, resize, crop, watermark, etc. multiple images at once.
- Contact sheet builder
Overall an extremely useful program with many other features I did not mention.
RawTherapee is a little gem when comes to converting and editing your RAW photos. It also supports editing of jpg, png and tiff files, but with some features unavailable. Here are the features at a glance:
