What is a good raw converter?

[RebeccaAPhotography]

I recently have been shooting in raw+jpeg. What do you prefer to shoot in?

What is a good converter? I use my lightroom3 to edit then convert it into jpeg is that a good idea? or should I find another converter?

 

[tirediron]

Lightroom is as good as it gets IMO.

 

[RebeccaAPhotography]

Is there a way without using lightroom to view your pictures tho?

 

[shootermcgavin]

You can view your pictures in any program you would like... I think google picasa is my default image viewer and then I just pull up the file I want to look at it. Although my Raw images usually look bad until I put them through the Camera Raw in photoshop. You will definitely prefer to shoot in RAW after awhile, it's almost like preferring a color pencil drawing over crayon, there's just more information saved which gives you more control of your image.

 

[Big Mike]

There is another thread around here, where people are talking about the fact that different RAW converters will each have their strengths and weaknesses. The software that came with your camera, will probably be pretty good. Adobe Camera RAW (the Raw engine in both Lightroom & Photoshop) also does a a pretty good job. Some images/edits will benefit from one over the other...so the moral of the story is that no single RAW converter is best for all situations.

Since you already have Lightroom, what exactly are you looking for?

If you just want a way to view thumbnails of RAW images, without having to open LR. I think you can do that in Windows, with the right codec (or whatever).
You could also check out Irfanview. It's a free image view that has support for RAW files (with an extra download).

 

[RebeccaAPhotography]

Yea I've heard that about raw. That's why I figured I'd start shooting. I just went to only raw just so I wouldn't use double the space on my camera and in my computer.

 

[RebeccaAPhotography]

That's exactly what I'm looking for bigmike. A way to just flip thru my photos that are raw with out having to open lightroom.

I have a lot of snapshots of my kiddo that I like to flip thru and just use the windows opener or just glance thru the thumbnails. I noticed my raw pics don't show the specific image for the thumbnail.

 

[fjrabon]

Yea I've heard that about raw. That's why I figured I'd start shooting. I just went to only raw just so I wouldn't use double the space on my camera and in my computer.

Just to be clear, RAW + JPEG isn't double the space (that is 100% more). Depending on what quality of JPEG you use, its between 4% more and 35% more space.

 

[shootermcgavin]

try google picassa(free), you can open an image and tab through them but image quality is poor like I mentioned before I would think thumbnails would load at the same speed as flipping through the photos in an image viewer. Also Jpeg is about 1/3 the size of raw so it's not that extreme to shoot in both. You can also right click on your desktop, click new, and compressed folder and compress older images so it doesn't take up so much space.

 

[RebeccaAPhotography]

I am deathly affraid of picasa. Long story short I deleted it in my old computer and it was attached to every folder of pictures I had and it deleted all 10,000 pics I had of my son from pregnancy,birth up to 1 1/2.

When I was a kid (and to this day) I love looking thru the pics of when I was younger and I was absolutely devastated I did that! Literally i called my botfriend im hysterics over photos and cried for days. I'm ready to cry just thinking about it. I was able to recover some and thankgod for crappy fb bc I moved far from my fam so I was uploading a lot for my family to see so I had something left.

Long story short me an picassa dont get a long lol

 

[Futurelight]

Personally I use photoshop and save as .tiff with minimal compression. This way there is least depreciation in the image quality (although it does use more HD space). The solution is lots of external HD's.

 

[Big Mike]

Maybe it's time for a computer/hardware upgrade. If you don't want to use LR because it's too slow...getting a faster computer will certainly help that.

I import almost all of my photos into LR (several different catalogs) and I try to remember to keyword them. I also sort the 'keepers' into collections. So when I need to find photos, it's pretty easy view/find them with LR.

 

[RebeccaAPhotography]

Big mike I agree. Before I came to this site I thought a laptop would be great. My boyfriend bought me a nice one I guess. It has 2x the memory and all those other creative words involved with computers lol

Well now that I know more I want a desktop. My boyfriend had a good idea which I did want to ask on here. What about a docking station? I'm pretty sure the monitors we have can be calibrated.

I also have cs5 Dave said my laptop can support it BUT Dave is lazy and I'm not good with comps like how he is so I'm waiting for him to install it.

 

[RebeccaAPhotography]

I think I wil just start importing everything it lr. I'm pretty organized about my photos. It never really crossed my mind to import everything.

 

[shootermcgavin]

I am deathly affraid of picasa. Long story short I deleted it in my old computer and it was attached to every folder of pictures I had and it deleted all 10,000 pics I had of my son from pregnancy,birth up to 1 1/2.

When I was a kid (and to this day) I love looking thru the pics of when I was younger and I was absolutely devastated I did that! Literally i called my botfriend im hysterics over photos and cried for days. I'm ready to cry just thinking about it. I was able to recover some and thankgod for crappy fb bc I moved far from my fam so I was uploading a lot for my family to see so I had something left.

Long story short me an picassa dont get a long lol

I'm not a computer expert but rarely are things actually deleted, in the future if it's something priceless I would check into ways to recover the data and obviously back up the information but I'm sure we all make mistakes like that at times. I was told that unless you use a program to purposely write over deleted files they are recoverable, but that might not work for photos. Download Details - Microsoft Download Center - Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP here is something that might work for you also.