Raw Photo Processor

Raw Photo Processor is a Raw converter supporting almost all available digital Raw formats made for photographers by a photographer-software engineer.

Think of RPP as a development machine in terms of film photography - first you have to develop your roll right, then do whatever you want with it. So this is NOT a full-featured photo processing package, you may need Photoshop or some other tool to apply sharpness, cropping and so on. RPP is easy to integrate with other tools though and can work directly with Photoshop. You may use RPP for these carefully chosen operations:

• 4-channel white balance - this is probably the most important operation in Raw processing and it has to be applied at very early stages. RPP supports various ways of working with white balance - automatic detection, "as-shot" (taken from a camera), custom white balance from neutral areas and color tone adjustments on "cold - warm" scale.
• Linear and compressed exposure compensations - another very sensitive step, should use high precision math to preserve shadows and highlights and it is almost impossible to make it properly during post-processing in Photoshop. Compressed compensation allows preserving highlights in more film-like style instead of clipping used in traditional linear exposure compensation.
• Built-in support for camera profiling with excellent free and open-sourced ArgyllCMS.
• Saturation - very tricky operation, because it has to account for specifics in human's color perception and traditionally it's implemented with very crude methods. I'm trying to keep up with Color Science and using a lot more sophisticated approach.
• Brightness and contrast - these represent my and Iliah Borg’s attempts to create tone curve adjustments based on actual film density measurements in different development modes. Having done this, you should finally be able to obtain that dearly-looking film-like tonality in your pictures.
• Interpolation - RPP supports 3 methods at the moment. VCDMF, AHDMF and Half. Actually Half is not interpolation - this is a half-resolution recombination when four single-colored pixels (RGBG) combined to one RGB, very fast, color-accurate, but at a price of lost resolution.
• Highlights recovery - a simple tool to restore clipped channels if present (e.g. the "pink sky" problem).
• Local Contrast - a tool based on HiRaLoAm technique by Dan Margulis to give your images more contrast without heavy impact on overall tonality as with regular contrast.
• Monochrome mode - a scientific way to produce black&white, sepia and other kinds of monochrome pictures based on measurements of actual photo papers made by Iliah Borg.
• Calibrated histogram with eV, L* and Adams Zone system scales.

FAQ

List of supported cameras