Originally posted by trumpyman Since you are talkin RAW. As a novice what is the easiest Raw program to use and needs the least ram to use.The software i got with my k10d crashs my puter is there one thats less demanding on puter ram.I havent been able to shoot raw because of this. Any suggestions appreciated.
I don't know about Windows, but on my Linux box:
digiKam is great for previewing images on your hard drive, and can even preview RAW files as a gallery on your screen with default exposure settings, allowing you to easily go through a set and throw away the "super duds". As I understand it, there are very similar programs available for Windows. If you want to PP an image further, you can open it up in digiKam's editor, or another editor such as the infamous GIMP or CinePaint.
ufraw is the de facto GUI frontend for Dave Coffin's dcraw RAW converter utility, which was known for quite a while as being able to blow away Canon and Nikon's RAW converters in terms of quality. (Maybe this quality difference is why Nikon tried to start forcing people to use their software via their NEF whitebalance encryption shenanigans - that kind of backfired on them as it's one of the reasons Nikon was 100% blacklisted as far as purchase choices for my first DSLR, same for many other people.) I don't know about the Windows version (there are versions for Linux, MacOS X, and Windows), but ufraw on my Linux machine is great for "batch postprocessing" in which I go through a set of PEFs image by image, quickly previewing them for exposure and sometimes tweaking the exposure away from ufraw's autodetection defaults. I usually spend 10-15 seconds per image on manual labor, of course on my slow computer it takes 20-40 to convert a PEF to JPEG. Exposure compensation is the limit of postprocessing for most of my PEFs. Note that since ufraw added support for dcraw's noise reduction capabilities, I have been shooting 100% PEF with my K10D.