Rubenerd

One of the features I love about my FinePix S9600 (yes, a prosumer one Julee, rrrrr) is the ability to save images in an uncompressed RAW file format. Only catch is the RAW format FujiFilm cameras exports is RAF, which my beloved open source photo editing GIMPShop can't open, nor can the default Mac OS X Preview. Adobe Photoshop can open them, but the GIMP does everything else I ever used Photoshop for, and it's a lot cheaper (read: free!).

Fortunately as usual the open source world has come to the rescue in the form of UFRaw, a GTK+ based RAW image manipulator and exporter.

Assuming you already have MacPorts installed already, fire up a Terminal and type in sudo port -v install ufraw. Go grab a cup of coffee or something while you're waiting, it will take a while.

Because this is an X11 app and not a native Mac Aqua one you need to start it with X11 (obviously). So once the MacPorts install has finished, fire up X11 in /Applications/Utilities.

At this point you could just open an X11 Terminal and start it, but I like having a neat menu item I can access from the X11 icon in the Dock. So go to the X11 Application menu and click Customize Menu…, click Add and fill in the command as /opt/local/bin/ufraw (assuming you're using the MacPorts defaults):

Now you can open X11 and click UFRaw in the Applications menu whenever you need it ^^. It has a very nice set of features, or optionally you can just export to JPEG if you want as well.

Here's UFRaw running on my MacBook Pro with a crappy RAF image I took outside my window this evening of an urban Singapore sunset: