UFRaw

Just a quick post on UFRaw and Gimp.

For the past couple of weekends i've switched to shooting in RAW for the first time. I have a lowly Fuji S5000 and as i've played more and more with post production using GIMP i thought it was about time i tried RAW.

So, i downloaded UFRaw.

The general process is to open up your photo in UFRaw, change exposure, temperature etc and then open it up in Gimp to play with the curves, layers etc etc.

I'm still learning the best way to use it, but i find its greyscale handling to be alot better than Gimps (might simply be because its a RAW file) and got a nice greyscale here.

One gotcha is that when you close UFRaw is that it 'remembers' how various settings were set so when you open the next shot they are used again so it took a while to work out why all shota were being opened in black and white!

Also, my laptop's monitor at home would appear to need calibration as some of the shots seem a lot redder on different machines when viewed, e.g. this one.

I can't compare it to any other RAW handling kit as i've never used any, but for now, whislt i'm still getting to grips with the whole RAW thing, its an interesting piece of free software.

One thing i have had to do is order a bigger memory card; however the biggest xD is still only 2Gb but its better than the tiny one i had.