Raw Image Viewer and Thumbnail Pre-viewer

 

Most digital SLR cameras are capable of taking pictures in RAW mode. There are many advantages of this, but a big drawback is that you loose the ability to see previews of these images when browsing through your folders.

Microsoft have released a raw image viewer but this has not been updated for some time. With the release of some of the newer cameras on the market this no longer works with all of them, most noticeably the Canon 400D. But there are alternatives.

There is a free program from ArcSoft that will generate thumbnails of raw images taken with the following cameras:

  • Adobe (DNG)
  • Canon
  • Hasselblad
  • Kodak
  • Leica
  • Mamiya
  • Nikon
  • Olympus
  • Pentax
  • Ricoh
  • Samsung
  • Sigma
  • Sony

Their website is at http://www.arcsoft.com/products/rawviewer/

If you want a program that can quickly open up the thumbnails to view them at full screen without loading up full blown editing packages such as Photoshop, then why not try another free program from Faststone. They produce an excellent program for previewing images in most formats, including raw images from the latest range of digital cameras. The program can be download from their website at http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm I recommend setting you file associations as follows. Open or edit your raw image - Photoshop. Preview raw image - Faststone Image Viewer. This will leave your raw images opening up in Photoshop for editing, but will allow you to preview them in the Faststone image viewer which, being a much smaller application, loads a lot quicker, making it a lot faster to preview your images with.