vendredi 9 janvier 2015

RAW workflow options - more testing with Shotwell RAW support (this was nasty) and using Rawtherapee

Shot RAW+JPG (mostly to be able to import separately in order to compare camera output to what I get with different kinds of RAW developments). I renamed the *.JPG to *C.JPG (for Camera JPEG) in order for Shotwell to see these as independent pictures and not link them to the RAW files.  These were ORF from the XZ-10 so I know Darktable will need a DNG conversion to use them.

Imported 6 files with Shotwell.  They got in the library, Shotwell extracted the 2400x3600 or roughly 8 mega-pixels preview images.  They are visually almost the same as the 12 mega-pixels camera JPEGs even full screen (this is not a big surprise as my screen is 1680x1050 or only 1.7 mega-pixels.  However there is more fine details in the camera JPEGs so I bet the compression/quality is compromised also in the preview JPEGs.  They are also only about 5 times smaller than the camera JPEGs!  There's also quite a few differences in the EXIF data from these embedded JPEGs.  Not that interesting to me though.

I then reconfigured Shotwell to import in folders named %Y/%Y-%m-%d (2015/2015-01-01 for example) which is more compatible with Darktable as this uses the folder name as "roll" id.

I renamed the "09" folder into 2015-01-01 and moved it under ../2015/ where it should have been.  My 6 images went to the "missing" folder in Shotwell, along with the 3 "ORF_embedded.jpg" that got extracted from the RAWs.  Navigating Shotwell to the ../2015/ folder, it was failing to notice the new 2015-01-09 folder under that.  No apparent function to ask for a refresh so I stopped and restarted Shotwell to get at my images again.

After restart, Shotwell found my 6 images back but decided to re-extract the embedded previews for showing me the RAW files.  These ended up in *_ORF_embedded_1.jpg files.  But I also got new _ORF_shotwell.jpg files which are bigger than the *ORF_embedded.jpg files.  About double the size and a resolution of 11.6 megapixels.  It also found and recataloged in a separate event only 2 of the original *_ORF_embedded.jpg (why?).  I removed all 6 of these embedded jpegs and shotwell happily recreated them (without the _1 suffix though. And the 2 extraneous *ORF_embedded.jpg files went to the "missing" files where I removed them from the library.  So far so good, I have my 6 images in Shotwell in the event for 9 january.  But I also have an extra 3 jpegs. 
Plus, when I tried to view the ORF files I got a message that the file was missing, and they went all 3 to the missing files as well.  I was left with the camera JPEGs only (*C.JPG).

So I moved the ORF files outside shotwell's monitored tree and cleaned up the remaining extra .jpg files then cleaned the remainings from the "missing" section, also found and removed some in the trashcan section, and reimported the 3 RAWs.  So far so good, the _embedded.jpg files came back and strangely enough the names of these files now appear in Shotwell under the image (instead of the .ORF suffix).  Then I noticed that my camera JPEGs were gone... Did I deleted these manually (I think so).  Go figure... so got them again from the memory card and started over again.  Cleanup, import from card...  Again I got two separate events (one with the embedded.jpg and one with the rest).  Trying to open a ORF file ended up in a shotwell crash...

Restarted shotwell with logging activated. Tried re-import, no joy (again 2 events).  Cleaned up and renamed the RAW files on the card with R.ORF suffix and re-imported (shotwell failed to import the OLD names, apparently it hadn't noticed the file system level rename that I did just before).  Cleaned up again the restarted shotwell.  Re-imported (now it was seeing the new names with R.ORF suffix).  This time it went fine, except that one of the _embedded.jpg was again in a separate event... not 2, not 3. I removed it from the library (no delete). Then merged the remaining 2 events into one.

Ok now it looks fine.  The *C.JPG displayed by Shotwell is slightly sharper than the equivalent *R.ORF as expected.  The embedded.jpg files are there (only 1 per RAW file) and are still 20% of the size of the *C.JPG.


Changed the developer from Camera to Shotwell.  Little pause, the _embedded.jpg file is removed and a _shotwell.jpg file appears.  It is color (not B/W like the camera JPEG) and clearly lacks lens distortion correction and contrast/color punch.  It is significantly larger than the old embedded.jpg file and the resolution is a little larger than the camera JPEG (probably due to the lack of lens distortion correction which implies a small crop).  I adjusted contrast and removed color (saturation->0) and compared.  Appart from the lens distortion this is not so bad but despite the resolution increase the camera JPEG is still sharper (and over double the size).  Not very good thus.

So the next test was to set my RAW editor preference to Rawtherapee and open with the RAW editor (from with Shotwell).  I applied the BW1 style, fixed the barrel distortion manually, activated the noise reduction with the default settings (which didn't make a big difference) and increased the already active sharpness level. Did a few cycles of "export from Rawtherapee - let Shotwell import the new JPG - merge events" to compare.  I ended up with a smaller JPEG than the camera one, less contrasty too (the in-camera settings are pretty high on sharpening and contrast, I would need to increase that in Rawtherapee to get a closer match and I guess the file size would increase too).

Unfortunately the integration between Rawtherapee and Shotwell stops there.  None of the metadata can be shared (as Shotwell doesn't write that to RAW files).  Rawtherapee has a metadata editor but I can't make it spit out the hierarchical keyword/tag format that Shotwell understands so it's all flat keywords.  For the rest I could title the photos through IPTC "Title" or "Legend" (Shotwell picks them in that order if specified).  But couldn't find a "Description" field to use in Rawtherapee and show in Shotwell (however if the JPEG contains one, maybe other apps might pick it but it wouldn't be visible in Shotwell unfortunately).

Aucun commentaire: