Digital Pre-Editing

[garry611]

I know that many may have their own preference or opinion with regard to culling digital photos. I've had the opportunity to try PhotoMechanic, Digikam, and Fast RawViewer. I mention this because while two of the software mentioned is often commented on in different forums, and I had not heard of Fast RawViewer before. The Fast RawViewer displays the raw image with the option to view the internal JPG. Many just show the internal JPG.
I found the Fast RawViewer software to be the most usable to me. The manual is crammed with all the features but the software itself is easy to use. RawViewer seems to fit my workflow quite well, and seems to be not advertised as the rest.
I was surprised to see Photo Mechanic only has a condensed on-line manual and it seems to be a version old, from what I've read in their forum, I wasn't impressed. I'm not affiliated with any of the software companies but thought I'd post something since I had not heard about Fast RawViewer.
An interesting feature is that when rejecting an image, it will automatically build a rejected folder under the current folder and place the image there, along with any file with the same name with difference extension so the sidecar files are automatically removed as well. All this is able to be customized.
For me it had many features just not found in the other software.

 

[jvo]

thanks

 

[Kino]

Good information. Thanks for taking the time to write this up...

 

[lantau]

I easily found it when looking for, well, a fast raw viewer. In the sense that it shows the actual raw, not the preview. I'm not sure, but I may have had the benefit of coming across it a few years prior. Hence my search may have been more focused.

Also by buying it, you support the development of the open source libraw library, the underlying software, also used by other, free (as in freedom) software, which is using it for reading raw files.

In 2019 I bought the bundle, also containing Rawdigger. It's a fancy analysis tool for raw files. Mine is the exposure edition. It's a bit like doing sensitometry on film to optimise exposure and development. But haven't really used it much. Too busy playing with film.