Notices

Thanks for the tip. The way I understood WB on RAW at least in the camera I owned is that both RAW and jpeg should produce the same output with same WB, the advantage for RAW is that you can play with it if you wanted to. Howeve, referring to the pictures attached, it clearly showed that the WB is different. I did not make any adjustment on the WB for the RAW file, I just converted it to JPEG, that's all.

Do you agree with my observation?

My observation is that RAW doesn't get affected by white balance. If I remember correctly it is even disabled on my Nikon when you shoot exclusively in raw.

I suppose that if you do the conversion in two-three different programs the result will be different (unless there is a universally agreed algorithm in applying white balance using color information), but I haven't tried.

If IIRC, whenever I open my Canon file on Lightroom, the WB sliders are set to a certain values. And I always thought that it might be the indication of the preset WB setting for the file, but given that nothing "baked" in to the raw file, I am free to adjust them. The reason why I developed this understanding was because many event shooters said that if you had time, it's best to tune the right WB so that you can save yourself a bit of time in post processing because the file already got the correct WB.

But you are explaining it is other way round, meaning that no WB settings at all are recorded in the RAW file. It is Lightroom/Picasa/Aperture that "Auto" determine the WB when I first opened it untouched.

Oh, it seemed that I'm getting more photography tip in Maemo.org than Photography site. Hahahaha

EDIT: I just fired up Lightroom (after getting home from work) to view the DNG and you're certainly right. The file certainly looked very "RAW" when untounched. In fact, I tried to retouch it to look like the output produced by Picasa by "only" adjusting the Temperature and Tint but failed to do so. In fact, now that I think back about the scene, the colours produced by Picasa is NOT same as what I saw. So I concluded that Picasa does some degree of processing when opening the file, which explained the difference between the DNG file and JPEG.

Untouched in Lightroom


Retouched in Lightroom adjusted according to actual scene how I remembered it.


Out Topic: Just curious, I checked and view the Raw file produced by Canon in Picasa and Lightroom. They both produced quite idenditical results and looked normal(no funny alien green look). Confusing myself now. Perhaps, both softwares supports Canon's propiertary format so it renders closely how Canon would render its JPEG when we first open the files?

EIther that, or there is a kind of 'flag' like the rotation flag. The picture isn't actually rotated by the camera, it just stores that this photo was taken like that. Consumer photo software rotate right away based on the flag and to the user the picture seems to have actually more pixels on the side (portrait). Highend software however usually ask before rotating.

Might be that a certain WB estimate is stored in the raw file by the camera so that the PC software has a nice starting point (but remains free to ignore), something rawcam doesn't do (I don't know if dng even supports that). The situation with jpeg is different. The color balance is "baked" into the image, meaning that the pixels are actually that color.

qwazix, thanks for the really great camera application! Default N9 camera autofocus was a real pain in the ***...

Two questions:

• Whe powersaver mode is turned on and i'm just looking through viewfinder N9 tends to enter standby mode. Can you make so that when pcam is in foreground N9 won't try to go standby?
• When i'm on S, I or M mode and shutter is set to very slow speed (almost 1 sec) pcam becomes very slow and laggy. Is it normal behaviour due to some program/hardware limitations or something wrong with my phone?

1. I must check it out if this can be overriden
2. It's normal behaviour. Frames come in as much as the shutter speed is. Most camera applications limit the shutter speed when on viewfinder mode so that the experience is better but this comes at the expense of not knowing beforehand how shaken your photo will be. I wanted to provide the most raw experience possible so that is going to stay. The fact that when you turn the phone to a lighter spot it takes some time to adjust is due to the same reason. Exposure data comes in with each frame, so it goes like this 1s -> data came in, rawcam decides it needs to adjust down -> 0,5s (it does not adjust right away to avoid flicker) -> more adjustment needed -> 0.25s -> 0.12s -> from now on things happen fast enough. Total time 1+0.5+0.25+... = about 2s (numbers are approximate for examples sake)

Ah well, don't bother I checked default camera app - it has the same behaviour, doesn't prevent standby. On the other hand, in reality, you hardly ever need more than 30 seconds (minimum time of inactivity to go into standby) to take a picture.

This is exactly how it works. Hoever, in case of RAW for N900/N950/N9, I have never seen such data saved anywhere , no matter if I used fcam or cssu's camera-ui (N900), or any other program.

It's kind of a pity, as I've never, *never* been able to reproduce equally good white balance results in RAW, as they're automatically done in jpg's (when, in N900, I've set camera-ui2 to save both RAW and jpg of same scene). RAW got advantage in many areas due to being not "baked" already, but Nokia's closed source picture optimization algorithms (tuned for certain camera module/lens characteristics), that is very hard to reproduce in RAW "bakers".

Hoever, if someone would be able to prepare pretty accurate "templates" for N900's, N9, and N950's cameras (that mimics different, pre-configured white balance settings), for ufRAW, it would be nice to share them

BTW, I suggest trying ufRAW, instead of embarrassingly closed, corporate, adobe's lightroom

/Estel

qwazix, I think I've found a very strange bug in rawcam.

After closing rawcam, any video you will try to play through N9 default player will look dark and dim. Like some kind of dark overlay was present. Only restarting the phone will return video player to it's original bright state.

So, steps to reproduce:
1. Open video - it's all ok.
2. Open rawcam, close rawcam.
3. Open the same video - now it is darkened.

This bug has been reported and it's solved in the latest version (except if there is a regression, or if it's not solved for everybody) try the version in my obs repo (see 1st post)