My Chequebook / Paypal account is ready the moment the program goes on sale - can I assume raw conversion within the program is not essential, or if it is, then Mamiya ZD files will be supported?
Quentin
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Well, I have found that many people don't feel comfortable with the idea of any program developing their RAW files. I can understand it perfectly, you are used to some tools and workflow, and don't want to change.
However a very important point to make all algorithm and calculations easy is that images are in their primitive
linear state; while all commercial RAW developers generate gamma corrected and usually colour profiled images.
[a href=\"http://www.guillermoluijk.com/tutorial/dcraw/index_en.htm]DCRAW[/url] is a very good RAW developer, and supports an always increasing (till his author David Coffin decides to stop updating; that will be a sad day) list of cameras; including your Mamiya.
Find a list here:
FORMATS SUPPORTED BY DCRAWIn addition to this, no matter if you used 2 or 10 shots for the same scene, all of them will be quickly developed and their relative exposures accurately calculated (not read from EXIF), and this can be done thanks to having total control of the development process. So not having to develop the images by yourself avoids errors and saves time.
Some people asked for a 16-bit DNG output that could be later developed on any RAW developer of your own. I think this is a great idea but, at least at the moment, far of my intentions and skills.
However I am planning to introduce a tonal richness quality increase and a virtually unlimited DR expansion (16 f-stops or more is definitively possible) thanks to the introduction of the gamma correction performed in floating point precission, prior to one only 16-bit final integer rounding. In a 16-bit linear RAW no more than ~12 f-stops can be coded with a reasonable tonal richness due to the lack of levels in the lowest f-stops.
The difficult part will be to find in the real world a scene with such a huge dynamic range!
PS: BTW Quentin, I looked through your portfolio and your images are oustanding! do you think you really need this tool? lol