teratogenesis

""I've been playing around with RAW Shooter Essentials and, for a free product, it's quite nice.

I'm curious though, what problems have you found with the RAW conversion software that came with your *ist DS?""

Thanks Bob, I'll check it out.

I tried an evaluation copy of the Silky Pix, and I found that it had much more accurate tools than the photoshop converter. It was a while ago, but I recall for example that the exposure correction was more accurate, and it had separate curves for red green and blue in comparison to the Photoshop converter that only has one curve for the luminance or brightness or whatever. Of course Photshop has many tools when you are working in TIFF or JPG but it sort of misses the point to start tweeking the colours in TIFF with Photoshop when you could tweek separate curves in a good raw converter. My point is that Photoshop is a very powerful software, but the raw conversion hasn't been thought out very well, for a leading image processing software they should've done a better job. Not worth all that money for a raw shooter.

As for the Pentax raw software, it's useless. The same controls can be found in the camera, and therefore I might as well shoot straight in JPEG as shoot in RAW and use the Pentax software for conversion.

The best solution would of course be to learn how to take really good pictures that don't need any tweeking, but before that happens i think i'll just check out the Raw shooter essentials :).

Could anyone recommend a cheap or free raw conversion software? I

really enjoyed using Silky Pix but the 70euro registration fee is a

bit too much for a student. I have a Photoshop CS 2 but my opinion is

that it doesn't give a lot of freedom. I use a Pentax *ist DS.

Thanks, Tom