dcRAW-X: Raw done right

As a followup to C.K.'s complaints about Apple's RAW image handling, I thought I'd take a look at effective RAW handling under OS X. dcRAW-X is Bryan Chang's OS X Cocoa wrapper for Dave Coffin's dcraw program. It performs transformations on RAW files and outputs them in PSD format ready for Photoshop (or other PSD-capable software) manipulation. dcraw is the industry standard (it's probably lurking under iPhoto somewhere, too), and reads almost all RAW formats. It also allows for extensive modification of the original RAW data, including custom color profiling.

Of course, this still doesn't solve all the complaints about OS X RAW handling: you still won't be directly manipulating the RAW file. This strikes me as a good thing, though. The RAW files are the negatives of the digital world. You want to keep them somewhere safe and untouched, in case you want them later. Performing manipulations on a RAW output stream is a different matter, though, and pre-processing with dcRAW-X is head and shoulders above iPhoto's jpeg manipulations, even if you end up putting the final image into iPhoto later.

If the $15 shareware is too steep for you, the dcraw engine is open source. You can pick up the source from Dave's site and compile the command line tool yourself.