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It's an (almost) FREE world! - part 4 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

by Mike McNamee Published

FastStone is free for home users and $35 for commercial users. It is one of the fastest image viewers and organisers around and will handle RAW files with as much ease as JPEGs. The format list is impressive, as are the facilities the program provides. It will, for example, support two screens, making image-management tasks even easier on the eyes. It has limited ability to colour correct images but effects such as sepia, monochrome and negative are available. There is adjustment for brightness and contrast. Images may be rated and then sorted according to rating on the virtual light box. More than one image may be viewed at a time for comparative purposes and the program is ideal for running photographic competitions or carrying out client viewing and selection tasks. It may be used to transcribe RAW files into less esoteric formats such as JPEG or TIFF, although there are limitations on the colour management when doing so - we could find no way of embedding a profile for example. For critical judgement of an image quality (eg sharpness) we found the program a little lacking, the previews are rather too 'enhanced'.

UFRAW

Available from ufraw.sourceforge.net, Unidentified Flying RAW is a utility for opening RAW files. New owners of the Nikon D3 or Canon 1D MkIII series of cameras might be dismayed to find that, having spent all their money on the camera, they are then unable to open RAW files in Adobe Photoshop CS2 - you have to upgrade to CS3. Now this might not be to your taste having just off-loaded a shed-full of cash and so the freeware UFRAW will at least get you going! As far as we can tell, there are no down-sides, the translation into a universal format such as Tiff or JPEG is accurate, auditing to similar values to those obtained with Adobe RAW in CS3. The available corrections are quite sophisticated, without, however, any ability to tune the camera profile in the way the Rags Gardner ACR Calibrator can. We have found ACR Calibrator to be far and away the most accurate method of bringing RAW files to near colourmetric perfection!
www.ufraw.sourceforge.net

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1st Published
last update 09/12/2022 14:54:27

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