FastRawViewer

(News from the Ether).

A new product, FastRawViewer may be of interest to some. It is made by the same people that produced RawDigger. As the name implies, it is a viewer with minimal editing capabilities. Its value is that it offers a genuine RAW histogram, that you don’t get in Lightroom for example, or I would think other RAW processors. It also offers focus peaking to help assess sharpness.

This means that you can quickly scan your RAW files and determine which are accurately exposed (with no blown highlights) and perhaps sharpness. You can then assign stars or colours to your selected images and these will come across when you import them to Lightroom.

If your images are already in Lightroom, the stars or colours you assigned don’t come across automatically. You will see a little vertical arrow at the top right of an image. If you click on that you get a warning that metadata has been changed and can select [Import Settings from Disk]. You can do this for many images at a time.
Alternatively, if your images are already in Lightroom, you could remove them first before assessing them in FastRawViewer. (Press Delete, then select Remove rather than Delete from Disk)
- Ratings will then show automatically when you re-import the images to Lightroom
- However, if you have made changes to the images in Lightroom and you have Edit/Catalog Settings…/[Automatically write changes into XMP] unchecked, you will need to first save metadata to file (Metadata/ Save metadata to file or [Ctrl][S]
  - In other words, in Lightroom you can write change to the catalogue or also write them to sidecar files. If you only save to the catalogue and remove images from the catalogue without first saving the metadata to file, you will lose any changes you have made).

Here is an example of the main screen. I also have an array of thumbnails to select and navigate with on a separate pane in my other monitor . You can see overexposed areas by pressing [O] and underexposed areas by pressing [U]. There are both in this image. The underexposed areas (with no detail) are behind the grille and do not matter. The overexposed areas are mainly reflected sky on the windscreen and probably do not matter. If I really wanted to correct that in Photoshop, I could sample the windscreen colour, apply that to a blank layer at just off full white and blend using “Darker” blending mode. It is, incidentally, an infrared image and this is not its final appearance.

When I first checked FastRawViewer out last month, it was too slow on my PC to be usable, taking around six seconds to turn over from one image to the next. Nasim Mansurov did not find this in his review so it may depend on how your PC is configured. However, having downloaded the new version 1.1.1, speed is no longer a problem for me so it becomes usable. It’s quite cheap. You can download a trial for free and it only costs $US20.