I personally don’t use Windows, I have to use it at work, but for private things, photo related things etc, I don’t, I have my Debian Sid machine and I am happy with it.

I am using F-Spot to manage my photos. But Lately I was searching something similar to F-Spot for Windows for my sister and my father in law. This is frustrating as there is no application which supports keywording or tagging, searching for tags and keywords, displaying all photos recursively in a directory sorted by date taken (EXIF date). Picasa does not. XnView does — almost. At least XnView supports displaying all photos recursively in a directory and all subdirectories and sorting by EXIF date. But it does not support any keywording, tagging or searching.

The frustration brought me to try out Windows Live Photo Gallery (for Windows XP). Well, it is Windows Live. Fancy user interface distracting the user, the UI is not as responsive as I would wish it to be and so on. But at least it supports all the criteria I was searching for. Without having to buy any other expensive Software. So I recommended it. The tags are written into the EXIF data, in the “Subject” and the XMP Keyword EXIF tags. You can change the date taken of your photos and this date is written into the EXIF tags, too. So there does not seem to be any proprietary Microsoft stuff in there.

Trying it out I recognized that it supports automatic face detection. :-) It is interesting that this monkey face is recognized and the face in the same photo but with less of black margin is not.

You can even display Nikon RAW files (NEF) with this application, see this Windows Experience Team Blog entry and this one, too. You just have to download and install the Nikon RAW Codecs.

My D90 RAW files are imported correctly, displayed as thumbnail but not displayed in large view, The application sais that I might have too less memory to display it… don’t think so.

Well, at least not the high Active D-Lighting settings.

I set the Active D-Lighting in my D90 to “Extra High” some day and I did not change it since then. I am shooting RAW and JPG in the highest resolution for now so I can compare the JPG produced by the camera software and the RAW directly.

The first photo is a crop of the in-camera JPG. As you can see, the Active D-Lighting is creating a halo in the sky around the very bright area. The Nikon software is trying to produce a kind of pseudo HDR tonemapped image here. I played with the curves in Gimp a little bit (not much) enhancing the contrast.

The second photo is the RAW processed with ufraw. Don’t care about the sharpness, colours, exposure as I used different settings. But it is obvious that in the RAW file is not affected by the Active D-Lighting halo effect.

Don’t care about the noise here neither… I forgot to set down ISO to 200 and shot whole day with 800… shit. Although, the huge amount of the photos is usable (which would not have been the case with my previous D70s).

As conclusion: There are cases where Active D-Lighting is great, if you don’t want to process RAWs and you are taking pictures of scenes with high contrast. But care that you don’t leave it as your default setting!

I got my Nikon D90 with the kit lense Nikkor AF-S DX VR 18-55 mm 1:3,5-5,6G, which is not as bad as I expected. I had a closer look at the images and I compared the test results on dpreview.com (by the way, the lense database review flash tool they made is great.)

Of course the kit lense suffers from chromatic abberation, like all lenses. And this one a bit more in the center areas of the photo than my more expensive one, the Nikkor 18-200mm VR. Interesting is the in-camera image correction, correcting lense distortion and chromatic abberation. Not sure if this only works with Nikkor lenses, I will check this some day. As far as I know those corrections are done by the Nikon Expeed technology (which is built into a lot of Nikon’s cameras such as D80, D90, D300, even one or two Coolpix models, etc).

Comparison of an image corrected by the in-camera software of the Nikon D90 and without any corrections (processed with UFRaw)

This is a 100% Crop of a photo I made with the D90. The left version is the in-camera JPG, the right version is the RAW processed with UFRaw (without any corrections). You can see clearly the red and magenta chromatic abberation fringes on the right photo. At the lower right corner you can see that the distortion was corrected by the camera, too, as this are the exactly same crop areas.

I think this is quite impressive. It will be a reason for me to shoot JPG instead of RAW if the dynamic range of the scene I want to capture is not too high. At least until I discover a RAW processing software which is able to do corrections with a similar result. (The Nikon ViewNX software seems to do the same corrections as the in-camera software leading to the same results.)

Ultimately I had a look at the latest versions of UFRaw to process the RAW files of my brand new Nikon D90 DSLR, as Bibble does not support those RAW files yet (although, there is a workaround posted in the Bibble forums).

I came across a few interesing links:

• Color profiling your own DSLR http://blog.pcode.nl … -your-own-dslr-redux
• Getting Nikon color profiles, explaining how Nikon software is doing this: http://blog.crushedr … r.com/nikon/raw.html

After reading the second one I booted my windows machine, installed the Nikon ViewNX software I got with the camera (you don’t need CaptureNX) and got a color profile for my “default” camera settings. The Nikon color profiles require gamma 0.45 and linearity 0, as explained above.

I did not discover any legal constraint, so you can get this color profile here, for the case you don’t want to boot any windows machine or you don’t want to install any Nikon software.

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