dlRaw: first steps

Just a short introduction about dlRaw.

dlRaw is a RAW converter in the spirit of UFRaw. Once a RAW file is opened several filters can by applied, some curves can be set, color profiles are applied and then the image is saved as JPEG or TIFF or sent to gimp for further manipulations. On the processing page you find all available filters in the same order in which they are applied to the image.

On the camera tab you get all the possible settings of dcraw, allowing full control over RAW demosaicing. Things you probably want to change here are the white balance and the highlight handling. While "Blend in Lab" gives usually good results, you can get more control with the other options. 'Rebuild' tries to get most out of the highlight data, but it usually needs some adjustments with 'Parameter', so don't expect it to look good right out of the box, small values for parameter will help here.

The lensfun tab allows you to apply lens corrections for lenses which have correction data. This still needs some work, to allow full manual corrections on all lenses...

The tabs RGB to Eyecandy contain the filters. All these filters are applied one after another, so with many active filters rendering time will increase. You'll find standard filters like crop and rotate or exposure which you know from other tools and also curves are available. There are several contrast filters to make your image 'pop' and enhancement filters for sharping or denoising. To allow more creative output, there are some creative filters, like toning or grain simulation, too.

During the whole processing the image data is represented linearly, so this means with respect to gamma 1.0. In the Out tab the conversion to the output profile and with this the output gamma is managed. There are mainly two ways for doing this. One with sRGB gamma compensation and one without. So the one with sRGB gamma compensation gives you the same sliders which you are probably used from UFRaw to adjust the output gamma. Depending on the gamma this darkens parts of the image and adds contrast. Without that compensation just the output profile gamma is applied, e.g. the gamma from the sRGB profile. This doesn't add contrast, it even makes the image look 'dull'. But with this you have more flexibility to alter the applied contrast with the basecurve which you can adjust to match the dlRaw output to your incamera JPEGs for example. So it is up to you, which method you prefer.

For most of us Photography is for fun, and dlRaw aims to help here. It tries to make RAW processing easy with high quality output. Filters which usually need 'layer techniques' like shadow recovery or local contrast are available just with a few sliders. You can try and alter all the settings until the output pleases you. There will be no loss in quality if you change the sliders numerous times or in random order... Just play with the settings to get the best out of your picture. Have fun!

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