Description of problem: One of the annoyances with digital cameras these days is that many are starting to move away from writing GIF or JPG formats directly to the memory cards, instead prefering to go down the RAW image route. At present in the Fedora Core dist, there's nothing to help facilitate this and people are coerced into running windows to convert the images into something manageable. Fortunately someone out there has done significant and impressive work on this issue, in the form of dcraw by Dave Coffin. I've looked at the licencing and it appears to be compatible with OSS At a personal level I use a Sigma SD9 and this conversion utility does work quite well with it. It may not be as pollished as the windows conversion tools but it's sufficent. Note that the list of cameras supported is 80+ so well worth adding the support. Cheers Phil (aka bryce (ex RHAT)) =--= Additional info: From: http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/index.html dcraw.c -- Convert raw photos to PPM Supports 86 cameras at last count. Compile with "gcc -o dcraw -O3 dcraw.c -lm". Run with no arguments to see a usage message. (For fedora core use you may need to uncomment the ushort typedef on line 54) rawphoto.c -- GIMP plugin to load raw photos After installing "dcraw", do "gimptool --install rawphoto.c". Now the GIMP can load raw photos without creating a PPM file.
Hi Bryce, how's it going? Sorry for the lag -- I'm maintaining the gimp package since a while and some stuff was assigned to Matt Wilson. I'll change the component to distribution as it really belongs there (new package). I also don't have any digital camera to test this with ;-).
I also vote for this. I don't know if dcraw et. al belongs with GIMP (maybe that is an upstream decision for the GIMP folks), but there is definitely an opportunity for a "digital-photo-tools" package. It should have the dcraw programs and also some or all of the tools listed on this page: http://bugbear.blackfish.org.uk/~bruno/panorama-tools/ If I could choose only one additional tool, it would be this one: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/
"9pcgvl502", please open individual RFEs for these others. Bill, putting dcraw and the plugin into upcoming FC3 seems a good idea to me for owners of cameras that can produce raw images. What do you think?
Sure, go for it.
Although, it really sounds like the pluging should go in upstream gimp. :)
If you are going to consider bringing RAW file support into the gimp distributed with FC, may I suggest looking at <a href="http://www.aei.mpg.de/~udif/UFRaw/">http://www.aei.mpg.de/~udif/UFRaw/</a> instead, I am using it with my Fuji S7000 and FC2 on x86_64 and finding it to give good results. It uses the dcraw code, works with the same cameras (presumably) and is GPL'd. That said though, I would lean towards Bill's opinion in that it should probably be brought in upstream rather than at distro-level, but if something is going to be brought in, I think UFRaw has the best interface out there. I agree with an earlier comment about including some pano tools, but that's probably a separate RFE.
Both dcraw and the ufraw plugin are in current Rawhide. Please consider opening _separate_ RFEs for other plugins but as I see it they should probably go into Fedora Extras.