Sorry for the late replies. I was away from the forum for a while.
Originally posted by photog Hi Class A you ask "Are you sure about this?".
Yes, but my question only targeted your knowledge about Picasa. I know about the relationship between number of bits and colour depths.
Originally posted by photog I googled the question of 8 or 16 bit - Picasa. No where did I find and indication that it uses 16 bit.
But I guess you didn't find an indication that it uses 8-bit for RAW processing either?
Originally posted by ytterbium Talking about Picasa, i belive it does some fully automatic RAW rendering and then hands it to standart Picasa 8-bit editing tools used for all images.
That may be true but what makes you believe it is that way?
Originally posted by photog 8 or 16 bit does not refer to the number of colours rendered.
That's not true. The number of bits correspond to the number of colours that can be displayed. A simple example is a 1-bit format. It can only support two colours, say black and white or some other combination like orange and blue. You may choose any two colours because low-bit presentations like this typically use a palette which is indexed and may contain arbitrary colours.
Originally posted by ytterbium Just wanted to tell that Picasa and UFRaw ended up being really helpfull in such situations, where Pentax colour scheme could not manage to preserve detail.
There is no "Pentax colour scheme" as such. Pentax cameras support sRGB, adobeRGB and RAW (PEF, DNG) which (with the exception of PEF) are all Pentax independent standards.
The difference you are seeing does not come from a particular choice of a colour scheme but from the parameters you chose when converting the RAW data into an 8-bit format. You can get that oversaturation with any format and tool if you set the parameters accordingly.
To avoid oversaturation of flower shots, set your camera to "natural" and perhaps reduce "saturation" (and potentially "contrast") a notch. Granted, RAW shooting will give you a bit more headroom in postprocessing but usually it is possible to survive with JPEGs and even if you shoot RAW, the camera settings will often be respected in the conversion, giving you a better starting point to adjust from.