fCamera and RAW
 

Hi guys,
I don't think I saw this in any of the other threads so I'm starting a new issue. If this is somewhere else, please merge or delete.

I am not yet convinced that fCamera is really shooting RAW. First I want to start off saying DNG != RAW. DNG is a container, it can contain RAW or a TIFF or anything else. Now why do I say this? I say this because when I pop it into Lightroom the first thing I did was go for chrominance noise which is my biggest beef with camera phones(the blue red and sometimes green speckles you see in the final image). It did nothing. It was like the photo was a JPG or a TIFF. Now, does this mean that the files aren't RAW? No, not really. I see this behavior with newer cameras that Adobe hasn't had a chance to profile yet, the noise sliders for chominance and luminance do absolutely nothing. So we're left with a few options:

a) DNG created by fCam isn't RAW
b) DNG file is RAW and Adobe will profile it. It's highly unlikely but if they do, then this will give us the best image quality from the phone.
c) DNG file is RAW but Adobe won't profile it. As this is likely the case, what is the advantage of RAW? Why not shoot JPG or TIFF? RAW gives you latitude to push the file if your white balance or exposure is off and that's great but honestly I'd say unless they can get the color noise and detail noise issues resolved there is really no reason to shoot RAW on the N900.

Now, I don't know if this is an fCam thing or if this is an Adobe thing but these are just my $0.02. I really like this app and it has great potential. I'm curious what others think.

Re: fCamera and RAW
 

actually, DNG is a non-proprietary camera raw format. For more info, listen to this podcast: http://tinyurl.com/2ubbq2o

Re: fCamera and RAW
 

For the record, FCam reads in and stores the pure sensor data in the DNG, with no processing in between.

That said, there are plenty of optional fields and other metadata in the DNG spec that we currently don't write out, and it's possible that not having those filled in might limit what the Adobe converter can do. We'll keep looking into it, and improve our DNG saving code as we can. (If there's a dramatic improvement at some point, we can produce a tool that takes your old DNGs and updates the metadata to the new information, without disturbing the raw data)

And we certainly see a great deal of chrominance noise in our raw images, especially in dark conditions.

Finally, if you're really suspicious, the code is all open - go take a look!

-Eddy, one of the FCam developers.

Re: fCamera and RAW
 

It might be useful to compare the noise generated by the N900 and the test camera that you use at Standford. Remember, even though it's a 'german' lens....it's a very, very entry level lens, and software can only do so much for the image quality.

Re: fCamera and RAW
 

Note that the lens have very little to do with sensor noise (unless indirectly, via the available aperture limiting the amount of light)

Re: fCamera and RAW
 

Which application are you using in Linux to view and process the DNG-images?
- Gimp refused to deal with the application
- Rawstudio as well (shows red colored rudimentary image only).
Currently in Linux I can only use Eclipse document viewer to view Fcam DNG picture and to save it as TIFF, but this is no RAW processing.

Which application are you using in the N900 itself to view and process the DNG-images?
Currently in Linux I can only use Eclipse document viewer to only view Fcam DNG picture.

Re: fCamera and RAW
 

Yes, any tips for working with these dng images in linux would be GREATLY appreciated.

Re: fCamera and RAW
 

There's an interoperability bug between FCam and dcraw, the source of RAW support for most Linux programs. It'll be fixed in our next release this week.

Re: fCamera and RAW
 

In case anyone is still watching this thread: We've just pushed a new version of fcam-drivers and fcamera that produces dng files correctly readable by dcraw. In fact, dcraw seems to do a better job with them than Photoshop. They're in extras-testing.

There's also a utility we have to update your old dngs if you took photos you care about with the old version of fcamera. You can find it here: https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_...elease_id=3924

Re: fCamera and RAW
 

Sweet, thanks!