[Sore Feet]

http://www.morpheusmultimedia.com/ps/ps2.html For those of you who shoot Canon RAW, and can't afford C1 or Photoshop CS, this program is far FAR superior to FileBrowser that comes with Canon's offerings. It supports the S30, S40, S45, G2, G3, D30, D60, and 10D. I've been playing with it on and off today, and the dynamic range output is easily 2x that of FileBrowser. I'm going out into ugly contrast conditions tomorrow, so we'll see how it really handles sunlight in a forest tomorrow. There is, unfortunately, a really lame help document, so this page is quite useful as well. http://www.pmb.net/pics/powershovel.html

[hikermike]

Great find!

[Tom]

I tried powershovel with my G2. I never could get satisfactory results - just a large dose of frustration. Maybe things have changed with the G3.

[Sore Feet]

There's a bit of a learning curve, but I've gotten great results. Some people over at the dpreview forums even claim it produces better images than Adobe RAW w/ PS CS.

[Tom]

I must be missing something here - Power Shovel seems pretty much worthless for doing anything but recovering blown out highlights, and even then I can't get it to produce anything close to the original colors without major photoshop tweaks, not to mention there's tons of noise. I'm using the S45 color lookup for the G3 like the tutorial says to do.

[Sore Feet]

Maybe I'm just better at Photoshop than you... I've been using the CrefLUT1212lin_xlp3.tif lookup, I like the colors better than the S45 table. And yeah, it takes more pshoping here than it does from FileBrowser, but it's worth it imo. Maybe not iyo, but imo. Also, FileBrowser crops images down to a 1.3 ratio, PowerShovel converts all data from the sensor (though that only adds another 50-75 pixels to the image).

[Tom]

Based on the output I'm getting, it would take a half hour (or more) to tweak acceptable colors and brighness in photoshop, whereas the Canon conversion produces perfect output straight out of the camera. Like I said, I must be missing something. Canon Conversion

[Newt]

Big difference in those photos. I've had no qualms with the Canon converter. Seems pretty straight away. I also tried the Breezebrowser trial and didn't see any advantages that warranted my money. Tom, any advantages to BB? Seems like you do, or had used it? Newt

[Tom]

Breeze Browser is nice because it allows you to batch process RAW conversion. That's all I really use it for. When I purchased BB, the price was reasonable ($35) and it came with free lifetime support and upgrades. At $50 today, with only 1 year of free upgrades, I'd probably consider the other options.

[Sore Feet]

It shouldn't be that dark. Here's the settings I use. If they don't improve the shots, then, I dunno, maybe it just doesn't like you. Interpolation Method - VNG(G)+Bilin(chr) WB - Camera Value Keep Highlights - Cheched Keep Full Range - Unchecked Green border - default Clamp Red Highlights - 200 Hot Pixel Noise - Checked Ultra Resolution - Unchecked Color Filter - 9 tab fork median Smoothing - Checked Output - 8-bit tif Color Lookup Table - CrefLUT1212lin_xlp3.tif Contrast Enhancement - None Sharpening - None BTW - Powershovel does batch processing too, so long as you want to spend the time in Pshop tweeking the results...keeping in mind that every RAW conversion will need at least SOME tweeking.

[Newt]

What you have for other options Tom? Newt

[Tom]

SF, I tried those settings. Looks slightly better, but still doesn't come close to the spot on colors you get with standard RAW conversion. IMO this thing is pretty much useless unless you need to recover highlights and are willing to spend a lot of time in photoshop getting the colors right.

[Sore Feet]

To each his own, I guess. I likes it. But I also likes messing in Pshop, so...whatever.

[Newt]

Tom, I'm curious as to what makes BB better with raw batch conversion over the canon program? Newt

[Tom]

Does the Canon Zoom Browser software have batch processing? It didn't used to, but they may have added it. Zoom Browser sucked so bad in the past that I never bothered to install it when I got my G3. I shoot in RAW, transfer the files to PC via card reader, run BB to batch process everything to JPG, then manage everything from there via FotoAlbum.