It all started on Friday when I had a look at the pictures I took in Berlin, during the KDE-Bindings meeting and on my way to the airport in the city center. I found them incredibly noisy, my digital camera is starting to age, it’s more than four years old, so I was wondering if it wouldn’t be a good idea to replace it. At first, I had decided to wait a little bit before buying a DSLR, but seeing how poorly hand-held camera still behave, yay they have more mega-pixels, but why is it useful if the results is completely noisy and blurry ? And you can’t tell yourself that you will buy one of the low mega-pixels camera, since they also have crap results, since they sell their product on the number of mega-pixels, no manufacturer will take the time of making a good hand-held camera, sad. So I turned myself to a DSLR (help with the fact that price have considerably dropped recently).

Since new babies are introduces with a picture:

I didn’t had time to use it much, but I still spend sometime yesterday afternoon taking pictures in Toulouse, but I already like it a lot, since I was able to concentrate on just taking pictures instead of spending time adjusting options, while still having the possibility to adjust them for extreme situation. Which is good, I am so used to take picture with a silver film, entry level camera Nikon F60, where the only things you can do is adjust the speed and aperture, which is about all you usually need.

Here is a view of the Capitole:

Darkroom 1.0

Back to the point, KDE applications, since that’s probably all you want to hear about. One of the usual feature of DSLR camera is the possibility to save pictures as RAW file, which is basically a dump of the sensor output to memory. To be precise, there is no such things as a RAW file format, there are about hundred of them, for each camera manufacturer, model and sensors.

Now that I have a camera with RAW, I want proper support for it in Krita and in my KDE environment. Especially that I was stupid enough to shot around 20 pictures as RAW files while I just wanted to have one or two for testing.

On unix, the main application to decode RAW files in something useful is dcraw. In the KDE side we have libkdcraw, which offers a front-end to a stable dcraw version (yes one of the bad side of dcraw is that it is not a library, but a command line tool whose option changes all the time) and a configuration widget. Using that library I told myself it would be easy to write a KDE based RAW decoder. Yes, I know there are already quiet a few of them, but Darkroom is like 400 lines of code, since all the logic is either in dcraw or in libkdcraw which is shared among KDE applications.

A few hours later, here is the result:

You can get it from my website if you want to play with it. I am not to sure about its future, one things is certain, I don’t want to invest much time in Darkroom, maybe on libkdcraw, or of course Krita, which would bring back improvements to Darkroom.

Import RAW in Krita

The next logical things to do is to get an importer for RAW in Krita, actually there was one in Krita 1.6, but did I mentioned that interfacing with dcraw sucked ? Well, that means the Krita RAW importer start stopping working and there was no one who had time to fix it and maintaining, that’s where using libkdcraw will help us, since the maintaining burden is shared (or currently delegated).

So a few minutes after Darkroom was finished, a new RAW importer from Krita was written (things are much easier when you know the API of a library):

I have some RAWorld Domination Plan for Krita, I am toying with the idea of editing the RAW file inside Krita instead of importing it, but that’s for an other time, maybe in a year or two.