Best RAW photo editing tool?

[Bill Ricker]

On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 5:22 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
<rozzin at geekspace.com> wrote:
> Hrm. Is that actually an appropriate use of floats?

I think so. With modern hardware, even efficient time-wise. But chews
up RAM a little faster.

> I imagine
> people working with JPEGs as source material basically can't care
> about whatever precision is being lost; is the lost precision
> `down in the noise' for RAW, too?

yeah, JPEGs are hardly precise or accurate or anything else. One
reason to access the RAW ...

RAWs *are* precise, like a 12, 14, or 16 bit per channel GIF/PNG/TIFF;
the only compression if any is RLE. If i save a RAW out again as
TIFF16, I shouldn't have lost any original bits in the diversion into
Floats with 'merely' 24 bits of fraction, but autoscaling avoids
trouble in exposure compensations etc. (File-on-disk hash difference
should be dominated by metadata changing when re-writing.)

( A little noise down in the noise may actual help avoid Mach banding
during processing, so 'useless' extra precision of 24 bits may
actually be helpful too.)


-- 
Bill Ricker
bill.n1vux at gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux