meetthegimp.org

They are! No information is lost in the RAW files, while the JPGs are automatically pre-processed within the camera according to your picture style settings. This means when you look at the RAW files, you see 12 bit absolutely untouched data while when yu look at a JPG file, you see 8 bit touched data. By touching, information is lost. And by shortening the color depth from 12 bits to 8 bits for each color, even more information ist lost. You can mimick the camera internal processing from sensor data into JPG within Lightroom, Aperture or even GIMP. But you cannot do it the other way round.

So what my suggestion is (assuming you are using, say, Lightroom to develop your RAWs), that you get hold of a RAW file and the same one as JPG and then adjust the color and sharpness settings etc. to make the developed image match the camera JPG. Then you save this as a development preset. Choose this as the import image setting. Now you can start your own work on the image with about the camera JPG but with the additional advantage that you still have the full informations and are therefore able to do much better in developing than you could do based on the canera JPG.

Once you are sure about the workflow, you can safely change your camera setting to omit teh additional JPG, savng CF card space.

Hope this helps.

All the best,
Dirik

I am using GIMP as a replacement for the $2000 Photoshop and as the extenal editor in Lisghtroom. The $200 LR is more centered on development and archiving images, the latter not really being the domain of GIMP. I feel the both products fit together very well together and they would do even better would GIMP learn 16 bit... ;-)

I am running Mepis 8.0 linux so, GIMP is my editor. However, I was viewing in shophoto as I noticed the difference. I will try to figure out how to get the color right in the raw and then how to get that info to my camera as Mainzelmann has suggested. If there is a way to do that, it would greatly improve my photo taking experience. I have also gotten to where I can download right into linux using digikam rather then going to the windows side to use the canon software.

I know how you feel. UFRaw especially, is so powerful and has so many options, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. Try out RawStudio, which is a little bit more obvious. As far as editing the RAW files, it does not make any permanent changes, but records the changes in an external file for RawStudio use. On most photos, all I use is the exposure slider, the curves tool, and white balance adjustment (by clicking on some white-ish color in the photo or typing the letter 'c' for "camera" white balance. It does not have to be complicated, but you can do a lot.

Also, I was a little confused with the numbered tabs at first, but now they are my best friend. Those help you rate your photos. So, I run through the photos, typing 1, 2, or 3 for each photo (being keeper, ok, not so good) or "del" to tag it for mass deletion if it is useless. Then, I click on the 1 tab and just edit the good photos, thus saving my time going through every single file. BIG time saver. In my opinion, UFRaw is more powerful, but you have to edit every file one by one and then compare the JPGs later to see which ones to keep, thus wasting editing time (and time to save the JPG) on photos that you do not want anyway.