Picasa from Google has .RAW support
Hi all! Was wondering if anyone elese has fooled around with Picasa from Google and what there impression of it was? ( http://picasa.google.com/ ) Its a totaly free software that supports .RAW files Ive used it a few times myself with so so results. It can read the RAW files from the PV's but sometimes it leaves bars in the picture. When it reads the RAWs right it does a nice fast conversion to .JPG. I also found it useful for quick and fast editing although I still like GIMP best :D .

Interesting. Do the images from it look better than from other apps around here? Guess I'll try it myself...

W o w. While the little bar thing is a little anoyying (it's at the bottom, cropable), the images look less noisy (images of brick walls, grass/greenery) than the normal apps, now if only the app could import straight off the PV2 :D

I'm guessing the bar thing is due to the slightly non-standard aspect ratio on PV2 raw files, due to the fact that they chop off the bottom of the image to make room for the text. I wonder if the SMaL RAW compatability comes from using DCRAW code.

I expect the SMaL RAW capability _does_ come from using the DCRAW code. That code is free and well known. Pegasus Imaging - one of the leading imaging library vendors - supports SMaL RAW via DCRAW. Dave Coffin (DC) adapted my SMaL RAW decoder - but he didn't use my final version which included code to handle a special case in the .RAW data. (I think it's handling lossy compression for some areas of the image that they only use occasionally.) The "bars" may be from not handling the lossy image compression - or maybe from converting the whole RAW file into an image. The RAW file has borders which are not meant to be part of the final image. Send me a .RAW file that shows these "bars" and I can check it out.