Raw power

Imagina already supports the main image file format of jpeg of course, but what about the legion of semi-pro photographers that want to get their raw images from the camera to the screen? Imagina is right there with you, giving you the raw power to take the image direct from the CCD and develop it in exactly the way that you want.

Raw image processing is a complex business often involving many stages, and even just interpreting a raw file format into something intelligible can be a nightmarish task for the programmer; camera manufacturers often go out of their way to make this hard by withholding information and encrypting raw data. For these reasons, we haven't tackled the problem entirely on our own. Instead, we've harnessed the power of the processing engine behind DCRAW and capitalised, on your behalf, on the 12 years of development it has had lavished upon it. So what we have here then, is a strong, mature raw processing facility, coupled with a user interface to die for.

When you open a raw image in Imagina you will be presented with a plethora of raw development and exposure options, that control how the raw image is taken from its native format into something that you can display upon your screen. Ranging from white balance, through other options like demosaic interpolation, to fine-tuned exposure control, Imagina allows complete control over the development process.

Most of these options mirror those that are available within DCRAW itself, with a couple of extras that we've thrown in ourselves for good measure; enabling you to adjust the luminance curve with intelligent functions that go way beyond the normal gamma encoding, though gamma encoding is also featured as standard of course.

In short, when you load a raw image into Imagina you rest assured that it has the features and the know-how to turn it into the picture that you're looking for, with a user interface that makes it oh-so-easy and goes out of its way to explain each part of the process to you. Once you've settled upon a bunch of settings that are optimal for your particular camera, you can then instruct it to use those settings every time by default, rather than prompting you and wasting your precious time.

Concerned about the accuracy of operations performed upon raw images? Don't be. Once developed, raw images are stored internally in floating point format in order to preserve the detail in the images, and allow you to expose that detail with the luminance or colour transformation functions. Only when you're done manipulating the image and it comes to storing it away again do you need to consider whether you want to lose some of that detail or not. At that point, you can choose to save it in a stock file format like JPG, in which case the colour resolution will need to be reduced accordingly. Or, you can be a pro and store it in a high-accuracy format like DDS or EXR, in which case you lose absolutely nothing.

So you want raw? We got raw. Come get some.