What is Curve Surgery?

Most Nikon DSLR’s allow, through the use of Nikon Camera Control, to upload a custom curve into the camera. Unfortunately once the curve IS or ISNT embedded into your NEF file there is no way a changing that curve in Nikon Capture.

Curve Surgery allows you to extract/create/edit/embed curves to and from the NEF files.

So what?

The image that is displayed in Nikon Capture is AFTER the default curve or your in-camera curve has been applied. If your curve clips highlights badly, or you under/overexpose there is little way of reversing this effect. All other curves and levels edits in Nikon Capture are applied over the top of the default/user-defined curve.

And?

With Curve Surgery you can adjust these curves to your liking and then embed them back into a file. This means you are able to do some impressive post-editing at the most basic level of the RAW data.

Check it out here:

http://www.rawmagick.com/

GREYCstoration is an image regularization algorithm which is able to process a color image by locally removing small variations of pixel intensities while preserving significant global image features, such as edges and corners. The most direct application of image regularization is image denoising. By extension, it can also be used to inpaint or resize images.

GREYCstoration is based on state-of-the-art image processing methods using nonlinear multi-valued diffusion PDE’s (Partial Differential Equations). This kind of method generally outperforms basic image filtering techniques (such as convolution, median filtering, etc.), classically encountered in image painting programs. Other comparable image denoising techniques are available (for instance, Noise Ninja, Neat Image ) but are not open-source, and the corresponding algorithms are kept secret.

On the contrary, the source code of GREYCstoration is freely available and distributed under the CeCILL License (compatible with the well-known GPL). It gives similar results (not to say better) to existing closed-source denoising filters, and is absolutely free to use. Compared to other PDE-based regularization methods, our approach has several advantages : It performs very fast and is able to preserve thin image details since it works at a sub-pixel accuracy.

The tool is still a little bit hard to use (command-line based), but I hope the simple C++ API will ease the integration of the algorithm in more user-friendly interfaces. Previous versions of GREYCstoration are already available in Digikam and Krita.

There is a GIMP plug-in version available now which makes it a lot easier, I hope to see a Photoshop version soon.

There are a couple of GUI version here and here too.

You can download it here:

GREYCstoration-2.5.2.1.zip

Important note : You will need to install the ImageMagick’s package in order to be able to read compressed image formats (JPG,PNG,etc…). On Unix systems, this package is often installed by default, on Windows, you can get it here. Please download one of the static package only.

You can read more here.

You should grab this cool FREE software while you can as the company that created it was recently taken over by Adobe so it’s unsure if you’ll be able to get this in the future or not.

RSE (Raw Shooter Essentials) is a pretty good RAW file manipulator for all brands of RAW files (most importantly Canon, Nikon and the DNG or Digital Negative format).

Adobe Systems Inc has acquired the assets of Pixmantec (RawShooter). RawShooter Essentials will no longer be updated but will be available for download until shortly after Adobe Lightroom 1.0 is released as a shipping product.

RawShooter Essentials 2006, is a RAW workflow software tool that sets new standards for digital photography. It is a fully functional RAW converter which allows any level of user to get excellent results with the minimum of effort and knowledge. It provides the highest quality output and fastest conversion time for any RAW converter on the market today.

Now supports 15 additional DSLR cameras including Nikon D200 and Canon 5D!

RawShooter Essentials 2006 contains core functionality such as:

• Powerful File Browser: Full support for drag & drop, shortcuts, cursor sensitive hints and tips, scalable thumbnails, customizable background color and directory management including creation / rename / deletion and defining favorites
• Image Priority: Assignment of priorities to individual or group of images
• Slideshow: Full screen slideshow of RAW images. During the editing process, individual files can be assigned priorities via the slideshow, or consigned to the recycle bin
• Dynamic Preview: True to life representation of how your converted image will look. Unlike, other previews, the dynamic preview instantly shows the effects of any changes that you make to the RAW iage, even at high magnifications
• Powerful Image Correction Tools: Image adjustment tools are provided for white balance, exposure compensation, dynamic range (fill light), shadow and highlight contrast, hue & saturation, sharpness, detail extraction, noise supression (both low frequency and color). Effects of slider based adjustments will be shown on the Dynamic Preview, no matter what the magnification
• Snapshot: Several variations of the same RAW file, all with different levels of correction applied
• Integral Color Database: Fully color managed. No direct changes are made to RAW files. Any color changes made are stored externally from the product
• Multi-threaded Batch Processing: Options such as output format (TIFF/JPEG) and automatic tagging of ICC profiles. Converts huge files in seconds with images queued for conversion in the background. Supports dual processors for maximum conversion speed

Full info here.

You can download RSE here:

RawShooter Essentials 1.2