Blue goes to the chicago bike show [pic embedded]
Picture retrieved with the Phillips driver. Seems to be the best quality without hand-editing. BMW's new R1200S <img src="http://www.brokedown.net/Image2.jpg"> Lighting was poor and I'm no photographer, but you get the idea :wink:

I think PV2FETCH is the best, all other drivers come out blurry.

Here is the same image, using PV2FETCH. <img src="http://www.brokedown.net/IMG_0050.jpg">

Interesting. To my eye it looks like the Phillips driver also has a variable noise-reduction blur like pv2fetch's, only they tune it high if the source image has little overall brightness. You can spot the variable blur by the cartoony look in places - ie. areas of similar color have little detail but areas of high contrast, like color boundaries, are sharp. (look at how the grey and black stuff near the license plate is very blurred, but how the white letters pop out) IMO It's probably a good idea - slight cartoony effects are preferable to noise in low light situations. If you're willing to pass on your RAW file squash, I'd be willing to see if I could emulate the behavior.

Sure, you can get the file here: http://www.brokedown.net/IMG_0050.RAW I'm still on the fence about which method is more pleasing. The noise sucks, but I don't much care for the fuzz either. If you look at the wheels on both shots, you get a LOT more detail with pv2fetch.

Cool, I'll take a look at it. I still think I can do better in low light situations, where sensor noise is pretty bad. Worth exploring anyway.

I dont know how does PV2FETCH work, seems that it has a preset gamma only works well with pictures taken outdoor. however IMO PV2FETCH still beats other drivers in most of cases, other drivers "smart blur" the picture, permanently damaged the image clearness. When PV2FETCH is not working I would rather use rawVB + Photoshop. Layer Mask Colorization: Another approach: Median Noise Reduction

use dcraw to process the raw file, it makes a good pic (not too blurry and not too noisy) uncorrected result: http://bluesceada.bl.funpic.de/miscstuff/IMG_0050.jpg (maybe direct linking doesnt work, sry) if you adjust the black point, it's superior to the others (imo) dcraw: http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/ or http://www.insflug.org/raw/software/download/windows.php3 for a windows binary.. if you want a gui, try ufraw: http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/Install.html

Same downloaded with FF2 driver. Grainy but keeps shoelace and instrument detail.

bluesceada, the problem with processing with dcraw is that there's a bug in the SMaL raw decoder that occasionally results in green and purple streaks on images. I used to use that decoder in pv2fetch but abandoned it in favor of Sailpix's decoder when I couldn't fix the bug. Take a look at IMG_0015 in my comparison shot directory for an example ( http://camerahacking.mine.nu/phils/demanufacturing/pv2/www/billw/pv2fetch/ ) but it's not limited to just this one pic. It seems to manifest itself in very bright areas of some pics. Don't interpret any of this as slamming dcraw or DC personally; I use a lot of code from dcraw in pv2fetch. Just be aware of it, and if you see the artifacts show up you can hang onto the RAW and process it with some other method. Neither RawGUI, Sailpix's decoder, or recent pv2fetch releases have this bug, so you can take your pick.

Okay thanks I just looked at it ... quite bad :? otherwise everything could run over the same program using dcraw.. (in linux here..)

You might want to get a hold of the pv2fetch source and take a look at the "dcrawlib" directory. It basically contains a hacked version of dcraw that uses libjpeg and sailpix's raw decoder. IIRC, a lot of the usual dcraw switches still work, and I added a jpeg output one. The Makefile.bcc32 should give you an idea of how to compile it. Feel free to fork, fix, submit makefile, etc. Looks like I wound up obliterating the switches and hardcoding the pv2fetch defaults. Whoops! Well, at least you can compile an executable that will run the pv2fetch engine on the RAWs. The only thing you should need to remove/replace is the GetPrivateProfileString calls that are used to check the .ini file for settings.