![]() When photographing weddings, photographers often average between 15 images, and those who photograph sports and wildlife can potentially end up with many more. 2) Why Use FastRawViewer?Īfter coming back from a photo shoot, one of the biggest problems many of us face is the sheer number of photographs that we end up with. Being a non-destructive editor (meaning, it only reads RAW images and does not modify them in any way), FastRawViewer can be used effectively for picking, ranking keepers and discarding problematic images before they are imported into a photo catalog. ![]() Unlike many RAW image viewers, FastRawViewer does not just read embedded JPEG images from RAW files, but it also renders RAW files as a normal RAW processor would (such as Adobe Camera RAW, Lightroom, Aperture, etc). ![]() Whether the software is used for the culling part of the photography workflow process, for technical analysis or basic corrections, FastRawViewer is not only capable of opening RAW files from virtually every known digital camera, but it also does it at an incredibly fast speed, as the name implies. In this review, I will take a closer look at FastRawViewer, go through some of its features and hopefully help you in simplifying both your workflow and your photo backup / storage needs.įastRawViewer is a software utility for both PCs and Macs that is specifically designed for efficient viewing of RAW and DNG images. It was developed by the same folks that created RawDigger – one of the best scientific tools for analyzing RAW images. Enter FastRawViewer, an amazingly fast and truly inexpensive RAW file viewer that has become my personal choice for culling images. At $150, however, Photo Mechanic costs as much as a retail version of Lightroom, becoming a cost barrier for many. Sadly, Lightroom is quite weak at quickly previewing images, so working pros and enthusiasts usually end up complementing the culling part of their workflow with additional software like Photo Mechanic. Those who try to cull images in Lightroom know that if a full size image preview is not generated at the time of import, it can take a long time to render each image. Many photographers end up keeping all RAW images on their computers, because they do not want to go through the hassle of deleting bad images they will never use, only to realize overtime that their hard drives get filled up quickly and their post-processing time takes much longer. And this gets even more painful when working with RAW images, because operating systems usually have no built-in capabilities to view and properly render RAW files. □ I’ll be testing it out though, and see if it’s worth the $15 to have something that really shows what I need to see, and at a speed that is acceptable.No matter what software one uses for post-processing photographs, the process of selecting what images to keep and work on, also known as “culling”, can be quite painful when dealing with thousands of images. So now I’m back to looking at FastRawViewer again! The free Beta testing period is over, so I’ll have to pay $14.99 to use for longer than 30 days. Now, I can set it to preview the actual RAW data, but that slows it down so much (3-8 seconds between photos) that it’s actually faster to use Lightroom! But, unfortunately, it views the jpeg preview, which is so highly compressed that it is almost worthless for judging critical sharpness at 100% zoom. Now this would not be a problem if FastStone read the data from the RAW file. DNG files are already so large, (20-30 MB each) that they implement some extremely high jpeg compression for the built in previews. Lightroom seems to have a bit of an issue with Pentax’s. However, I have a problem with it now… I upgraded from my Canon Rebel T3, to a Pentax K-5 DSLR, which shoots RAW files in either. I guess it’s been about exactly a year since the last post on this thread! I’ve used Fast Stone Image Viewer for probably 95% of all my photo viewing, and I’m still happy with it!
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