Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

I just released libopenraw 0.1.3. It has been a year since the last release. It mostly add new cameras.

I already have a branch for a new feature that will introduce Rust, for the next release.

I just released libopenraw 0.1.0. It is to be treated as a snapshot as it hasn't reached the level of functionality I was hoping for and it has been 5 years since last release.

Head on to the download page to get a tarball.

Several new API, some API + ABI breakage. Now the .pc files are parallel installable.

I just did a quick release for libopenraw 0.0.9. It just include a few fixes and enhancements cherry-picked from master. There is much more going into master including a serious API breakage. If you package libopenraw in a distro, I encourage you to pick this one up.

NEWS - tar.bz2 - gpg signature

Another quick release: libopenraw 0.0.8, because I found a crasher when updating gegl RAW support.

Changes

• includes missing for gcc 4.4
• Fix crash in or_get_file_extensions()

Get it !

Just a quick note to mention that I released libopenraw 0.0.7 to fix a nasty memory leak. I recommend the upgrade.

Last week-end I silently released libopenraw 0.0.6. It was almost a year since I hadn't done a release, and it was long overdue.

Amongst the changes are:

• Relicensed to LGPLv3 or later
• NEF decompress
• GdkPixbuf loader
• Various fixes and new APIs

For hackweek, I have been working on implementating the "rendering" in libopenraw. This mean I need to extract metadata for the various parameters need for the demosaic and color correction, including linearization tables^[1] and camera to XYZ matrices. For this I'm trying to stick to the DNG data model as it likely already abstract the different formats.

I'm at the Novell offices in Provo, UT for hackweek. The YOW -> DTW -> SLC flight was uneventful. There will be attendance at the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 as well.

What are my plans for hackweek? Some libopenraw work in order to have a version releasable with more and more features. If that release can be usable to actually render RAW files, then it will be great. So far I have committed some changes to the test suite and and fixed the detection by content.

I just committed some code in libopenraw that allow displaying digital camera RAW files in eog (or anything else using GdkPixbuf). The colors and the gamut are still off, that's because I only perform the demosaic.

Just to be clear, I haven't changed a single line of code in eog. It is the stock version from openSUSE 10.3.

Just released libopenraw 0.0.5.

Here is the announce mail.

Download it.

Long time no blog, mostly because I had nothing to say beside the usual rants.

This week at Novell it is hack week, and I decided to spend a good amount of time to put libopenraw into a better shape, mostly in the area of extracting and decompressing the CFA^[1] data (the RAW data).

Recently I got my first major outside contribution for libopenraw as support for Minolta MRW files. Thanks Bradley, you rock!

So far this week I have done:

• refactored and genericized the unpacking (12 bits to 16) as most RAW files have 12bits per channel and store it without padding in the file ("harder" to decode^[2], but less space wasted). This code I wrote it for the Minolta MRW but end up being usefull to DNG and Nikon NEF
• implemented an API to also obtain the CFA pattern. The CFA pattern describe the organisation of the CFA (Color Filter Array), mostly the order of the colors. Currently it only support RGB and 2 by 2 patterns. This data is required in order to perform the demosaic (ie convert the CFA to obtain a colorful RGB image)
• enhanced the test suite to checksum the data (in order to check that we didn't break anything) and to check for the CFA pattern.
• fixed various bugs needed to either go further or to that were actually bugs, like the unpacking that did fail because it was losing the last bytes of the buffer whose size was not multiple of 3.
• started dealing with the Nikon mess. Nikon files are either uncompressed, packed with some weird padding (discard 8 bits if column % 10 == 9), or compressed in a lossy way. As of right now, only the uncompressed files are supported. Oh there is also a bug where NEF file from the D100 might be marked as compressed when they are not^[3].

So far the file very well supported are:

• Canon CR2 and CRW (not the CRW from the "hacked" firmware)
• DNG (unless they are compressed, I need to support loading in tiles as I already have the lossless JPEG compression), and only with a number of bits per channel of 12 or 16. Strangely, the Leica M8 files seems to be 8 bits per channel.
• Nikon NEF uncompressed (D1, D1X, D2X)
• Minolta MRW (with the exception of the A200 for which I still miss a sample)

I forgot to mention, but Sunday I pushed libopenraw 0.0.3. It still does not do all I want it to do, let alone handling all the file formats I want, but nonetheless, I needed to push it, 10 month after the previous release.

It fixes several crasher, and implement the extraction of the RAW data, including the decompression for most format it already support. Notable exception is NEF that is not decompressed, and tiled DNG that needs to handled (I currently decompress the first tile only).

Get it

I'll try to get 0.0.4 out with meta data extraction. I need at least the orientation tag to fix raw-thumbnailer.

Last night I reached a new milestone in libopenraw: being able to decompress the RAW data from CR2 files using Lossless JPEG. The lazyweb has been helpful in finding code for it (libjpeg does not support it) code that I ported from old K&R to C++. I'm still not completely statisfied with the port but it works much better than my attempt to port some MIT-licensed Java code.

Above is the PGM I generated, that contain the RAW data, viewed in eog. The look is due to the fact that we have a GRBG 2x2 color filter array diplayed as a graymap, and that eog does sone dithering. This is the data I should be passing to the demosaicing code. The picture is one of the random sample I took from my own photo library, taken around the corner from where I was living in Montréal.

DNG support should come The code is in the git repository.

Following the experiments with gthumb, now that libopenraw 0.0.2 has been released, I commited my patch to partially fix gthumb bug 145564

I'm wondering if it wouldn't be smarter to bring this feature down the stack to the Gnome thumbnailer.

I just released libopenraw 0.0.2:

tarball - GPG signature

The library has a new .so major number due to ABI breakage.

Changes:

• removal of C++ API as they will likely to break. They'll be back once things are much more stable. If you really want to use them, link statically ;-)
• Gnome support for previews/thumbnail extraction. This is a separate library.
• Lot of bug fixes
• Better error reporting

In the mean time, there is now an IRC channel: #libopenraw on irc.freenode.net

And the wiki is growing slowly.