Digital BW, The Print

On Wed, 2004-10-13 at 16:54 +0000, Peter Nelson wrote:
> Is there a good way to download and convert my Nikon RAW files onto 
> my SuSE Linux box?   I really don't want to try to get Wine up and 
> running because I've been told that it's still pretty flakey; I'm 
> really not interested in trying to poke around and edit a lot of 
> config files; and anyway what's the point of even using Linux if I'm 
> going to be using it to simulate Windows?   

gphoto can download it easily.  For conversion, there's dcraw; that
utility's author claims it was the basis for the Photoshop plugin.  As a
command line tool it is fine, and there exist plugins for Gimp that
allow you to use it more or less transparently.  The problem that I ran
into is I prefer to edit my RAW images in 16 bit mode (to preserve the
dynamic range of the sensor) and Gimp is simply not up to that task; it
does fine with 8 bit and in fact I used that for a while.  Film Gimp (or
whatever they're calling it these days) has 16 bit support but I found
the interface different and less useful.

All of these are likely to have improved in the year or so since I last
tried, note.

Graham


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]