IQ compromise for fast viewing

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 11/21/2015 - 11:10
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General discussion

FRV seems to be optimised to quickly cull out bad images.  This is a useful function but I find the biggest challenge is to sort out the best images for futher processing.  For example, I just returned from a trip to Africa and have 13,842 images that I need sort through to find the best images.  I expect fewer than 1% to qualify as best images.  I use a multi-step process that starts by finding good images, then a second round to find better images, and then a final round to find the best images.  FRV has the metadata tools needed for such a process.  The problem is that the rendered image is not representative of what I will get with LR.  The LR rendered image is significantly better.  I see from your response to a bug report that you must make IQ compromises to achieve the fast display speed.  This compromise in IQ means that FRV is useful for the first round, marginal for the second round, and not helpful for the third round.  I expect about 10-20% of images to make it past the first round.  That means I will have about 2K images to sort through in the second round.  If I need to move to LR for round 2, that's a big improvement!  But I would like to use FRV for at least the second round.  Is there any prospect that the IQ will be improved?  Is it possible that there will be a " very fast" mode (i.e. the current mode) and a "fast" mode (faster than LR) with better IQ?

lexa

Sun, 11/22/2015 - 11:41

RAW processing is always balance between speed and quality. Raw processing software (Lightroom, etc):

  - interpolates CFA (bayer) data in a complex way

  - applies sharpening (unsharp mask)

Both steps requires lot of CPU power (e.g. 1:1 preview generation for 36Mpix file is about 4sec on my Intel i7-4770K/32Gb/SSD desktop).

In FRV we use fastest possible CFA (bayer) data interpolation, so IQ is not as good as in 'full-scale' raw processors, but we do it about 20x faster (36Mpix image from Sony A7R takes less than 0.2sec to process and display).

In future releases we definitely will add screen sharpening and, possibly, 'high quality' interpolation.

If your camera embeds full-size JPEG preview in your RAWs (or you shot RAW+JPEG) you may use this JPEG representation to inspect image fine details.

And, yes, you're right: FRV was created as 'first pass' tool, to be the very first step of workflow (FRV 1.0 even do not have Filmstrip and Folders panels, because these panels are not needed for one-by-one inspection). Now we're migrating to 'general puprose' RAW viewer, but it will take some time to satisfy all requests from our users.

--

Alex Tutubalin/FastRawViewer team

d__net

Mon, 11/23/2015 - 09:21

FRV is a powerful tool for the first round of the process I follow.  After that round all the bad images have been identified and deleted or moved out of the way, and the good images have been tagged for further review.  Typically that eliminates 80-90% of the reviews with the painfully slow LR.  That is a major time saver and will speed up my process by at least a factor of 2, probably more.  
As FRV continues to evolve I will find other ways to use it to save even more time.  If FRV evolves to the point of being faster than LR for all three rounds of my culling process, that would be ideal.  
Thanks for creating this excellent program!  I really like the clean UI design and the way you have made it customizable to suit the user.

Dave
 

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