I’m looking at various RAW editors, including UFRaw and Adobe’s Camera RAW but also downloaded a copy of RawShooter 2006. The company that produced this tool, Pixmantec, is no more having been bought about by Adobe. However, the tool can still be downloaded, though the registration process fails each time you open it. A minor nuisance, no more.
It’s not the best of the RAW editors, but it is fast and one of the simpler to use. I like the batch conversion, but I also like the slideshow, similar to what you get with Lightroom or Aperture.
I was testing it out yesterday and started the slideshow for a set of photos I had taken of tulips at the Botanical Gardens this spring. No matter what tools you use in your photo workflow, nothing beats a slideshow to give you your first really good look at the photos as a set.
I keep most of my raw images after a shoot. Not the obviously bad ones that can’t be recovered: too blurry, too overexposed or underexposed, or missed subject; but the ones I didn’t especially care for at the time. You never know how much your perspective is going to change after a few months, and a picture you thought was uninteresting one day may suddenly seem to have potential another.
More importantly, when you’re stuck inside because it’s 108 degrees in the shade outside, and all the trees and lawns are baked brown, there’s nothing more refreshing than sitting down to a slideshow of rain kissed tulips. It just doesn’t matter if 99% of the photos will never see the inside of a web page or picture frame, or if the only person to see them is the same who took the pictures originally. It doesn’t even matter if they’re ‘good’ or art.
There is just something very satisfying about sitting down to monitor-sized slideshow of old photos.