That's what I like about Linux/Perl and scripting - do it once, let the script do it from there on in.
free has certain advantages, but if you have to put in twice as much work, how much is your time worth?
I agree completely. In addition to my distain for Windows, I find the "intuitive" interface and pointy-clicky junk seriously gets in the way when you know what you want to do. I, too, have spent a little time rigging up a script that automatically copies my RAW files, extracts the JPG within it, converts the RAW to a JPG using dcraw auto white balance, and an ICC camera profile, copies over all the EXIF info to the JPG, and applies a bit of USM using ImageMagick. For 95% of what I take, that's all I do with it and it's pretty much equivalent (though better quality) to the JPG I'd get from the camera. Any hand-tweaking on the remaining 5% is generally due to some requirement of dynamic range, white balance, etc.
After that, I'll run 'webAlbum' on everything to generate static HTML thumbnails/medium/fullsize so I can at least view them remotely. It takes almost no time at all. My dual Athlon helps in the conversion since my script is (crudely) threaded and uses both of the CPUs in the conversion.
Also, I'm planning on generating a custom ICC profile for my -DS to incorporate into the process. The one I'm using with dcraw now was lifted from the bibble demo. It seems to be more vivid than a straight conversion, but I'm not sure that it's completely correct. I'm a big believer in keeping things true and accurate up until the end... no need for a "vivid" or "enhanced" color profile to manipulate the image. The conversion of latent image to linear RGB should be as colorimetrically accurate as possible.... I'm not convinced that any of the RAW converters do that.
-Cory -- ************************************************************************* * Cory Papenfuss * * Electrical Engineering candidate Ph.D. graduate student * * Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University * *************************************************************************
