History:
RAWHide started its life as a spare time project I called WinMRW. I started to write WinMRW after I found I didn't like how the Konica Minolta 7D and software available for it at the time (Dec 2004) handled highlights. The most logical starting point for WinMRW was David Coffin's dcraw.c source code. My little dcraw based project was command line based for the first 6 months or so. During that time, I came up with a fairly good routine to correct / reconstruct blown highlights. One thing led to another and before long I was writing my own Bayer decoders and incorporating color profiles. Around June of 2005 I started to "wrap" the program into a GUI. By August of 2005 I added the dark frame feature for astrophotography, which, as it turned out, was one of its most attractive features earily on. Around this time I invited a small number of "Alpha-Testers" to help evaluate WinMRW.
The release and subsequent popularity of highly "workflow" oriented raw conversion programs highlighted the need to greatly improve the workflow of WinMRW, These programs were made popular because of their excellent workflow characteristics even though the actual resulting image quality was often criticized and disliked.
The problem was WinMRW was written in an antiquated language using old outdated compilers and programming frameworks and could no longer be "upgraded". I approached a programmer friend of mine about developing the user interface so I could focus on image quality. The result was that many of the core ideas and code was ported into what is now the RAWHide DLL. However, After some deep and careful consideration my friend decided that he could not support these efforts (BTW I fully supported him in that decision). Anyway the result was I began to learn a new set of programming skills. The user interface was completely rewritten and redesigned utilizing Microsoft's .Net framework. The result of this long, slow transformation was... RAWHide.
RAWHide is by no means perfect. My skills as a programmer are limited, and it often takes me a long time to find the proper way program in some new feature. As a result it still crashes from time to time. I'm very satisfied with RAWHide's image qaulity (as are most who try it) and I'm happy with the way images are batch processed, but I'm sure users will still request better control and have some great new ideas. (I hope so anyway!). A few users have pushed me and RAWHide to new levels of image quality and to add some unique features.
Some of RAWHide more unique capabilities have been used to process data from experiments from the International Space Station and experiments that monitor the health of coral reefs in the worlds oceans.
Thanks for Looking!
Frank
The Future:
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Last
Updated:
07/18/2015 8:37 AM