FastRawViewer Developers' Blog

In today's world, "dynamic range" (DR) has become, in the minds of (many) photographers one of the main characteristics of a digital camera.

Unfortunately, the public data on DR is limited to "DD - ISO sensitivity" graphs and tables. With this, the nature of noise (for example, random noise, banding) isn't accounted for, however the noise character is important for visual quality.

In reality, any practicing photographer knows that the degradation of the image in the shadows (or because of low exposure) happens gradually. With the lowering of exposure, small details disappear, the contrast between bigger details diminishes, color fidelity becomes worse. Depending on the quality demanded of the image (which will depend on presentation size, viewing distance, other viewing conditions such as screen resolution, etc.,), the practical dynamic range for the specific camera will be different, even for the same ISO setting.

Almost all digital cameras that are released today are color cameras. Nevertheless, there is demand for BW (Black and White) cameras because of reduced artifacts and higher resolution of resulting images. And many photographers want BW cameras with the same lens mount as their main (color) camera, so that they can use the lenses they already own.

Converting a color camera to BW is done by removing the CFA (Color Filter array). However, during such conversion, the firmware of the camera doesn’t change, and the camera doesn’t know that it’s become monochrome, which leads to several problems, which Monochrome2DNG - a file converter for «monochrome-converted» cameras - is going to address.

As Adobe Lightroom Windows users know, this application has been oppressive for users of removable media (disk drives, flash cards), imposing some limitations that puts image culling applications that produce XMP files (including FastRawViewer) in a bit of a bind. It's impossible to cull/rate/label files right on a flash card - they first need to be copied onto a local disk, XMPed, and then imported into Lightroom from there.

Aside from problems with flash cards, the same happens with removable USB disk drives. If Lightroom detects the disk as being removable, it wil neither read nor write XMP files from or to that location.

Since we're a bit overwhelmed with the questions regarding this problem, and the answer "that's just Lightroom" is both overly repetitive and not very satisfactory, we suggest the following lifehack.