Sony’s Image Data Converter latest version – 4.0 – will handle all Alpha raw files from A100 to A77, and all NEX raw files. It offers improvements in performance and stability, but it also eliminates the need for the Lightbox application (found in v3) as a separate item. You simply browse for a folder of images, and IDC now shows a regular thumbnail browser with image information not unlike Adobe Bridge.
Double-clicking the thumb opens the image as expected in the raw editor. This has all the features of v3 are a bit more, but at least on a latest MacBook Pro with 2GB memory it seemed to crash and quit (normally after processing the file) rather too often.
One new feature, found when you save the file and not in the main processing controls, is a crop with Inclination Control and a grid:
Testing Alpha 77 raw files on the new software, the Bayer conversion seemed to be incredibly noisy and the noise reduction left fine detail heavily smeared much the same as for in-camera JPEGs, but the colour styles, DRO settings and some other aspects read from camera EXIF data are retained. It can not be recommended as a main choice for raw conversion, and certainly not for high ISO images, but it’s available and is a fairly small application to install on laptops or less powerful machines.
Download links:
– DK
Hello,
Sorry but the link “PC/Windows .exe installer” above doesn’t work anymore (at least for me;-).
Could you fix it please ?
Thank you for your help,
Emmanuel Darlix,
Sorry, the previous comment had what appeared to be HTML tags and got screwed in the end. Here is the continuation:
… press SPACE/BACKSPACE to close the current RAW and open the next/previous one in the same directory. Press DEL to delete the current RAW.
I made it work on five different computers; still I feel I won’t be able to support it if distributed. So I decided to keep it at home.
The best thing I can do with this extension, is persuading Sony to implement these or similar features. But it turned out that as an Israeli I don’t even have valid customer contacts. If anybody helps me to reach out to Sony, it would possibly benefit the whole Alpha community :).
While I’m glad to see Sony improving usability of their RAW converter, believe it or not, but … I went much further.
I used “AutoIt” utility on Windows to extend IDC Raw Converter (v3.x so far) through GUI automation.
Here is what I did:
(1) Provided keyboard control for the features I use the most – like adjustment of brightness, contrast, WB, DR0, NR, etc.
(2) Enabled batch processing using settings stored in DSCxxxx.XML files instead of the RAWs themselves.
(3) Automatic choice of noise reduction parameters. Applied the same procedure I’d do manually otherwise.
(4) RAW browsing from within the converter application. Works like a typical image viewer – press / to close the current RAW and open the next/previous one in the same directory. Press
to delete the current RAW.I made it work on five different computers; still I feel I won’t be able to support it if distributed. So I decided to keep it at home.
The best thing I can do with this extension, is persuade Sony to implement these or similar features. But it turned out that as an Israeli I don’t even have valid customer contacts. If anybody helps me to reach out to Sony, it would possibly benefit the whole Alpha community :).
Just downloaded and played with it. Thank the gods of software sensibility that separate & clunky lightbox is finally gone AS WELL AS the different image preview resolutions for rendering selected effects.
I’ve seen some comments on dPreview that v4 radically improves A77 high ISO, compared to v3.2 delivered with the camera – well, my camera came with a v3.something which did not even recognise the A77 files at all, so the comparison was not possible! I don’t think the processing comes even close to Adobe Camera Raw quality.
It will not remove CA, and although it can apply some corrections it does not seem to be ‘correction coded lens’ aware or able to apply the same suite of corrections as the in-camera firmware.
And presumably V. 4 still does not provide for the removal of CA?