192 Better Available Light Digital Photography
Raw software
Once these RAW images have been captured, we’re off to the
kitchen, so to speak, to work our magic. Remember, these fi les
won’t work at the local photo lab for instant prints and won’t
open when sent as e-mail attachments. Windows users may want
to download the free ArcSoft RAW Thumbnail Viewer plug-in
(www.arcsoft.com), which displays virtually all RAW photo
formats right within the Thumbnail view of Windows Explorer,
instead of the default icon that Windows displays. RAW Thumb-
nail Viewer lets you browse and manage images without launch-
ing special software. Their thumbnail preview will be visible in
a number of photo-browser software programs, but the images
will need additional processing and a fi nal step of outputting to
a more universal fi le format (JPEG, TIFF, PSD).After you’ve transferred the RAW fi les to your hard drive,
they’re available for any number of enhancements, changes, or
conversions, individually or in groups. Adobe’s Photoshop
Lightroom is Barry’s favorite and he’s worked with Lightroom
since its inception as a beta program. He swears by one of its
strongest features: highlight recovery. Apple has Aperture soft-
ware. Bibble (www.bibblelabs.com) also processes and converts
RAW fi les. These programs allow you to make all of the adjust-
ments, and more, that the camera would have made if JPEG fi les
had been shot. It’s possible to change the color temperature—
Color Balance—and the entire image can be warmed up or
turned cooler. The program’s Eyedropper tool can be used to set
a precise white point based on an area selected in the image. The
overall exposure can be adjusted to compensate for an over- or
underexposed image. The most amazing feature, in Barry’s
opinion, is the Highlight Recovery slider in Lightroom. It can
bring back overexposed (blown-out) areas better than anything
else he’s seen. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Fill
slider opens up shadow areas, as if you had used a fi ll fl ash.
Lightroom can add/subtract vibrance and saturation, and can
convert the image to black and white.RAW: What’s Missing
Thomas Knoll has created a new utility called DNG Recover Edges, which is designed to reveal pixels at the
edges of RAW fi les converted into DNG format. These pixels are not available when these image fi les are
displayed normally because the camera manufacturer masks off pixels at the very edges of the frame. One of the
reasons is that sometimes the size of an image sensor doesn’t match some of the accepted standard aspect ratios.
DNG Recover Edges is a droplet utility that can recover between 4 and 16 pixels around the edge of the image.
The Luminous Landscape photography resource site (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/contents/DNG-Recover-
Edges.shtml) hosts the free, independently produced utility and provides additional information. Adobe’s John
Nack blogs that Thomas decided to write the utility after taking a photo of a bird that had its wing tip outside
the frame. The extra 10 pixels he recovered in that shot were enough to include the entire bird in the shot.