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[RandyP]

I've been using MC for work-related stuff - mostly textures and demo videos. Last night I decided to look at some of my photo collection. I was taking RAW images on my honeymoon last year, making NEF format files. To my surprise, MC displayed all the NEF files just fine! Even more, I could edit them within MC.

MC is nicer to use than NikonView, for sure. I'd like to make a couple suggestions:

1. With such large files, thumbnails take a long time to generate on an as-needed basis. It would be nice to have a background thread preparing off-screen thumbnails within the current selection.

2. When saving a file from the editor, it would be helpful to have a list of the available file formats, rather than needing to know to use BMP or JPG.

3. Support for PNG output format from the editor would be great.

4. A "Convert format" variant for images would be useful; in this case, NEF->BMP as a batch operation.

[JimH]

Thanks for the kind words.

1. With such large files, thumbnails take a long time to generate on an as-needed basis. It would be nice to have a background thread preparing off-screen thumbnails within the current selection.

MC does build thumbnails in a background thread.  You can force it to build all thumbnails.  It's in Tools/Options/Tree&View/Thumbnails.  Always doing thumbnailing in the background can affect performance for other purposes.

2. When saving a file from the editor, it would be helpful to have a list of the available file formats, rather than needing to know to use BMP or JPG.
3. Support for PNG output format from the editor would be great.
4. A "Convert format" variant for images would be useful; in this case, NEF->BMP as a batch operation.

Reasonable suggestions.

[RandyP]

MC does build thumbnails in a background thread.  You can force it to build all thumbnails.  It's in Tools/Options/Tree&View/Thumbnails.  Always doing thumbnailing in the background can affect performance for other purposes.

Thanks. I didn't realize it was a background thread. FYI, when viewing large WMV files, MC scrolls as appropriate then fills in the visible thumbnails one-by-one. When scrolling through NEF files, scrolling doesn't occur until after some number of thumbnails are built, making MC appear frozen for a few seconds (build 101).

[RandyP]

Should you decide to update the Save dialog for the editor, it would be helpful to have a 24- vs 32-bit selection for the output file. This way, alpha can be stripped to make smaller image files without needing to use another program such as PhotoShop.

[marko]

I noticed that building thumbs on my NEF files takes several seconds per file too, and the UI freezes while building.

I've also noticed that despite choosing to have MC build a jpg cache for my NEF files, it does not appear to be using it, or I am not understanding the cache's purpose. When the mouse rests over a NEF thumbnail, the whole interface freezes for several seconds again while MC generates a popup preview image. I would expect it to use the jpg from the cache for this, but it is not, and it is putting me off using MC with my NEF files.

Finally, MC is showing all of my NEF files with a purple band down the right hand edge, and this same purple band is present in the jpg cache files. When these files are opened in photoshop or Nikon's own "ViewNX" software, the purple band is not there.

My first ever foray into the world of RAW has not been a resounding success!! Is it likely that any of these issues will get any attention in the near future?

-marko.

[DarkPenguin]

That is a pretty new camera, right?  Might not be supported fully (or correctly) by the version of DCRaw included with MC.  I wouldn't pull raw files into MC unless you're using MC to tag them.  They just will not look the same in MC as they will in whatever RAW software you're using.  This is a limitation of RAW.  There is no standard for applying RAW edits.  MC will do a default DCRaw conversion.  This will probably not match the conversion you'll do.  I would pull only finished images into MC.

edit: It should be mentioned that another way of working with RAWs in MC is to do the conversions in another application.  Then have MC try to auto stack the files.  (Test a few to see if this works.)  Then you should have the RAW file available and its preferred incarnation as the stack top.

As an aside I would be really happy if this $%@#$ reflux would settle down so I could go to #%$!#@$ sleep.

[marko]

Makes sense, thanks for the reply.