This can be accomplished without editing any source code and without doing a custom compile of ImageMagick.īecause Libraw provides internal libraries, ImageMagick no longer needs to delegate to an external command-line utility. However, ImageMagick does have an external delegates file (delegates.xml) where a programmer can set parameters to have ImageMagick delegate to RawTherapee (instead of to UFraw or DCraw). ImageMagick does not work with RawTherapee out-of-the-box. It appears to be a well-maintained project, and in our testing, it was able to handle quite well the images that did not work well in UFraw and DCraw. It has both a graphical user interface and a command-line utility. RawTherapee is a utility for working with raw camera files. RawTherapee: Advantages and disadvantages DCraw does not work on Linux and Apple systems, and so an application that is running on Linux could do better by using Libraw, and as mentioned, Libraw is natively supported by ImageMagick. Libraw’s methods are inherited from DCraw, and so, unfortunately, we have found in our testing that files from certain newer cameras that do not work well in DCraw also do not work well in Libraw. However, ImageMagick must be compiled from the source code with certain parameters, rather than using the installer, in order to do this. Libraw is a library, rather than a command-line utility, and ImageMagick is programmed to be able to use Libraw natively rather than delegating externally. A couple of alternatives for UFraw and DCraw are Libraw and RawTherapee. In our specific examples, they came across full color but with a heavily yellowish tint.īecause of this, programmers and system administrators whose applications rely on ImageMagick for the conversion of raw camera files may wish to consider changing how ImageMagick handles these files. In our testing, the images that converted into shades of pink in UFraw converted better in DCraw, but they still did not look right. This means that these images might not look right when converted – for example, in our testing, we found images from one newer camera ended up converting into shades of pink, rather than full color.ĭCraw has had more recent updates than UFraw, but DCraw’s development has also stalled within the past couple of years. The use of UFRaw as a delegate of ImageMagick has presented some challenges in recent years, largely due to the fact that the open-source UFRaw project has not been maintained in several years, and the project is not being updated for newer cameras. The manufacturers’ software is intended for handling images from a specific camera, whereas the open-source projects try to cover as wide a range of cameras and formats as possible. This is where both specific proprietary software provided by the camera manufacturer, as well as much-wider-ranging open-source software such as UFRaw and DCRaw come into play. And they need to be converted before they can really be used. Because of the lack of standardization and the wide universe of different cameras on the market, these files are more complex to work with than standard formats like JPEG. The data varies depending on the camera model and manufacturer. There are many raw file formats, from CR2, to SR2, to K25. These are files containing largely-unprocessed data directly from image sensor of a camera or scanner. On Windows systems, ImageMagick delegates to DCraw. Although it natively handles a wide range of standard image files, such as JPEG and PNG, when it needs to handle raw camera files, it delegates the conversion of these files to other command-line utilities that are included in the ImageMagick installation. ImageMagick itself also delegates to other open-source programs when it needs to handle certain types of files. Because it is open-source and has these command-line utilities, it has ended up being widely used in other open-source projects that need to handle images programmatically. These command-line utilities are very powerful and can be used to programmatically edit and convert images, such as photographs, and even to programmatically create new images, such as procedurally-generated slates for video projects. It has both a graphical user interface as well as command-line utilities. It was first created in 1987 and has been maintained and developed since then. ImageMagick is open-source software for running a wide range of operations on images. This article provides instructions on how to improve ImageMagick’s handling of raw images by changing the open-source utilities that ImageMagick uses by default ( UFraw on Linux and DCraw in Windows) to other utilities.
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