I wanted to try out raw image processing with my Canon EOS 350D (Rebel XT). I have been using digikam for about a year now to edit and sort my photos, so I wanted to see if its (new) raw handling was usable.

The first thing I noticed was that handling of raw images in the viewer/editor was a little rough around the edges in the current release 0.9.2. A comment in the kde bug tracker suggested that some of these bugs were fixed in svn, so off I went.

Compiling from SVN went relatively smoothly. To avoid the hassles of having KDE pieces in /usr/local, I used the nifty (when it works) checkinstall to build debian packages. Because I have one debian package for all of the libs and one for digikam, this conflicts with several existing debian packages. Not to fear, just keep removing things and try dpkg -i again.

The next gotcha is that graphicsmagick on debian does not currently grok 16-bit (per channel) PNG images (Debian Bug). A workaround is to install imagemagick instead.

In our next exciting episode, I discuss workflow.