Tertulia.ro

As I’ve stated in the first part of my review, RAW Drop gets the most pixels out of the RAW files. The bad part is that it can’t be really controlled and poorly exposed images would not benefit from the most advanced recovery algorithms existing in other applications.

RAW Drop can be found here: http://www.wizards.de/rawdrop/

Thanks to a tip from a reader on the forum at FourThirdsPhoto, there is a better method for recovering the “lost” pixels in a RAW file. Just use the DNG Recover Edges utility which was featured on the Luminous Landscape.

The best part is that you get the benefit of working with a DNG file. But be aware that not all the RAW Developers support the DNG file format and more than this not all the RAW Developers that support the DNG will recover all the data.

Adobe Camera RAW, Lightroom 2 and 3 beta, CaptureOne, SilkyPix do support the DNG file format and will recover the same number of pixels as RAW Drop.

LightZone, RAW Therapee, Scarab DarkRoom, SilverFast support the DNG file format but don’t save all the available pixels. They just reproduce their behavior with the original RAW files: i.e. they save more pixels than the specification. If you use any of these, the conversion to DNG is just a waste of time.

Bibble Pro 5 and DxO Optics Pro 6 don’t support the DNG file format.

IrfanView will see only the embedded preview and save only a small image 1024 x 768 px.

Breeze Browser Pro at first seems to read the DNG file but the convert function is disabled. Trying to send the file by email without downsampling is a useless attempt as the file attached to the email is the same small preview seen by IrfanView.

Related posts:

1. RAW Developers Review – The setup and the prerequisites
2. RAW Developers Review – Noise Reduction (3rd update)
3. RAW Developers Review – Color Rendering (updated)
4. RAW Developers Review – Color correction support in applications (part 1)