Change Log

Wednesday 6/9/2004, version 0.1.1 is released:

• Changed implementation of color balancing to hopefully reduce artifacts.
• Fixed bug in internationalization support.

Saturday 4/3/2004, version 0.1.0 is released:

• Gimp-2.0 compatibility (and incompatible with Gimp-1.2, sorry)
• Internationalization support.
• Localization for Australian English.
• Initial values for nearly all parameters can be set from the mrwtoppm.rc initialization file. (Note that many values are still persistent within a Gimp session.)
• Reduced effect of contrast control.
• Info panel displays aspect ratio of current crop and selection.
• Backing out of the crop stack sets the selected rectangle to the previous crop.
• Substantially improved the camera independence of most code.
• Changed version numbered scheme and tar achive filename pattern.

Wednesday 3/24/2004, version 0.0.a13 is released:

• Color saturation is now calculated using a gamma-like function.
• Cropping now saves the preview shrink factor, and backing out of the crop stack restores the preview shrink to its saved value.
• The AdobeRGB file was removed because Adobe's licence doesn't permit its redistribution as part of another software package.

Sunday 2/15/2004, version 0.0.a12 is released:

• Massive UI reorganization
• Initial support for DiMAGE A1

Wednesday 7/23/2003, version 0.0.a11 is released:

• Changed default install prefix to /usr so the gimp plugin is found automagically
• Fixed some non-C (that recent versions of gcc nonetheless accept)
• User can select rectangular regions on plugin preview window (press and drag with button 2)
• Can calculate white balance using region selected as above
• Can crop preview and loaded image to region selected as above

Friday 7/7/2003, version 0.0.a10 is released:

• Improved autoconf behaviour
• Preview generation is non-blocking
• Progress bar showing status of preview generation
• Minor changes to parameters don't reset preview zoom
• Automatically use different d7i WhitePoint
• Code cleanup and bug fixing

Friday 2/28/2003, version 0.0.a9 is released:

• Changed preview to use a back-ported eye-of-gnome viewer. You can have large previews with reduced CPU power required.
• Presets (daylight, cloudy etc.) are now obtained from the MRW file, since they seem to be very camera dependent.
• -dx option deprecated in favor of -scale option. You can now scale by any even factor.
• Added -xvmini flag to generate xv thumbnails. Use it with -scale to produce sufficiently small thumbnails (max size 80 pixels) in a script to create thumbails for the Gimp file loader dialog.
• Fixed manual page to make it clearer that mrwtoppm and friends only read from standard input.
• Added some simple automatic white-balancing algorithms.

Tuesday 1/28/2003, version 0.0.a8 is released:

• Tweaked the vector median code to not issue warnings if it can't converge in 50 iterations. I don't think you can see the difference between the value after 50 iterations and what it will eventually converge to. If you're interested, you can turn on a debugging option and see lots of detail.
• Added my own internal minolta raw color space to Lab convertor so you don't need to install Minolta's copyrighted .icc files. You can still use the Minolta supplied profiles if you want to.
• Incorporated manual pages contributed by Guus Sliepen.
• Incorporated bug fixes contributed by Guus Sliepen.
• Switched to autoconf and automake configuration. This is my first use of autoconf/automake, so any comments welcome.
• Changed color balance profiles to include gains for all three colors, because of rumors that some mrw files have a green gain != 256. (However, I've never seen such a file.)
• Started on cleaning up the code a bit. The intent is to separate the Minolta specific code (file format etc.) from the more generic (bayer pattern interpolation, tone curve adjustment, color space conversion).
• Added sections to mrwtoppm.rc. Program specific options can be put in their own section.
• Gimp-plugin: Added option to mrwtoppm.rc to allow user to specify, in advance, the size of the histogram area.
• Gimp-plugin: Added option to mrwtoppm.rc to allow user to specify, in advance, the size of the preview image (1/2, 1/4, or 1/8) of full size. (Previously hardcoded to 1/8 size.) Bigger sizes are better but slower. Eventual plan is to provide user controlled runtime zoom.
• Gimp-plugin: Reorganized UI to group elements more logically, and to increase room for a larger preview image.
• Gimp-plugin: Added average color levels to UI to aid white-balancing.
• Gimp-plugin: Added display of luminance range (after brightness and contrast adjustment but before tone curve, sharpening, or filtering adjustment).
• Gimp-plugin: Changed user control of white-balance. Lost ability to specify non-standard white-balances by name. Will reintroduce that after I learn how to create menus with runtime determined content. In the meantime, use the source Luke (or, better yet, send me the color balance data so I can include it in future versions).
• Gimp-plugin: Added display of some image data (time stamp, focal len etc.)
• Created new utility mrwautofocus to dump camera autofocus data.
• Created new utility mrwdumpsettings to dump camera settings info.
• Larger radius sharpening filters are now supported.
• Added experimental interpolation mode svmedian.
• Added undocumented, for-testing-only interpolation mode pseudoexp.

Thursday 7/25/2002, version 0.0.a7 is released:

• Implemented proper interpretation of the directory structures inside the file instead of using many magic numbers.
• Added preliminary support for DiMage 7i RAW files. (It uses the same icc profile file as the DiMage 7, because I don't know what ships with the D7i. Would someone let me know?)
• Added a Gimp plugin for directly loading Minolta RAW files into the Gimp.
• Added better checking of out-of-memory conditions and other errors.

Monday 3/18/2002, version 0.0.a6 is released:

• Added a blurring/unsharp masking capability. In Lab mode, the two chrominance(?) fields can be sharpened/blurred independently of the luminance field. The default is to sharpen the luminance and blur the chrominance.
• Added a dark field compensation mode. It takes as input an mrw file taken in the dark and with the same ISO and shutter speed as your main image, and subtracts these values from the pixels in the main image before any other processing is done.
• Lab mode is again the default. I compared mrwtoppm's output with DIVU's for objects of known colour (books, lego, toy car) and think mrwtoppm's using Lab mode is the most accurate.
• Created new utility, mrwguesswb, that determines the named colormap that's closest to the color balance in the mrw file. Useful in scripts.
• Changed white balance data for flash, based on the colour balance data stored in the mrw files. I still think daylight balancing looks better.
• Slightly enhanced the green pixels. The green channel is now multiplied by 264/256, which is approximately that needed to increase the maximum green value of 3965 to 4095. This appears to correct a slight lack of green in the high end.

Thursday 3/14/2002, version 0.0.a5 is released:

• Totally redesigned internal architecture to reduce memory requirements and improve performance.
• Implemented tone curve adjustments instead of applying gamma correction twice (the lcms library already does gamma correction when converting to sRGB output color space). Includes modified tone curves developed by Bryan Biggers.
• Lab mode is no longer the default. It does funny things to the color, so it's not the default until I better understand what's happening.
• Implemented rotation angles of 90, 180, and 270 degrees.
• Probably a few other things I've forgotten about.

Monday 2/11/2002, version 0.0.a4 is released:

• Fixed places where the name change to mrwtoppm didn't happen.
• Wrote color balance files for the other camera defaults.
• Implemented initialization files.
• Now use lcms's built in sRGB profile for the default color output space.

Thursday 1/31/2002, version 0.0.a3 is released:

• Name changed to mrwtoppm to fit better with the naming of other ppm conversion utilities.
• Color median filtering,
• median interpolation in CIELab space,
• quite acceptable color balancing, and
• a preview mode that averages 2x2, 4x4, or 8x8 blocks of pixels.

Monday 1/14/2002, version 0.0.a2 is released:

• Implemented Gupta and Chen's Vector Median demosaicking algorithm. It produces much cleaner images than bilinear interpolation, but it's also a bit slower. Nevertheless, the reason for using raw files is high quality, so it's now the default.
• Added a new command line option (-vtol) for selecting the error tolerance of the vector median algorithm allows some tuning of the quality/speed.
• Added a command line option (-imethod) for choosing the interpolation mode to use (bilinear or vmedian).