Raw pre-processing

Portland Headlight - Portland, ME

When traveling I generally take pictures in raw format, in my case Nikon NEF. I shoot raw for a few different reasons; higher dynamic range, full control over the picture, post exposure error correction, the list goes on. It does come with it's disadvantages though, one of which being that my underpowered travel netbook bogs down to a crawl when processing them. There is however a bit of salvation. Since I use linux on my netbook I have access to the powerful command line and a little program called ufraw.

By using this program I can convert all of my raw images from my memory card to jpg format for easy and quick review. I can review all of my photos and prune out the duplicates and bad shots. The whole process is incredibly easy and only consists of 1 line of command-line-fu.

ufraw-batch --out-type=jpeg --out-path=/home/Pictures/export --compression=85 /media/memory_card/MyPics/*.NEF


This leaves you with jpg files in a separate folder for reviewing so you know which of your raw files you should keep and which you should delete.