JP2, TGA, PNM, RAS, DCRaw Viewer Plugin for Directory Opus

This viewer plugin for Directory Opus allows you to view several file formats in addition to those built-in to Opus and provided by other plugins:

• JPEG 2000 (JP2) (Note: A better, faster JPEG 2000 plugin is now available.)
• TGA (including alpha/transparency)
• PNM (PPM, PGM, PBM)
• Rasterfile (RAS)
• Raw Digital Camera formats including Adobe DNG (supported cameras)

Directory Opus is a file manager for Windows. Read my guide, Getting to know Directory Opus, for an introduction.

For Everyone

• Download
• History

For Programmers

• C++ Source Code

Configuration

You can disable the plugin's support of different image formats via the File Formats tab. This allows you to disable unwanted or problematic image formats without disabling the entire plugin.

The File Formats tab also allows you to specify file extensions for Raw Digital Camera images. Only files which match one of the extensions will be examined further to see if they look like raw images. This avoids false-positives where files of another format are matched as raw images.

The non-raw formats supported by the plugin do not have configurable file extension lists because, where possible and sensible, the plugin will detect their files purely by file contents, ignoring extensions completely. (TGA files inside zip archives, as well as those lacking the optional TGA footer, must have the .tga extension to be recognised.)

The other two configuration tabs only affect Raw Digital Camera images:

Decoding Raw Digital Camera images is very slow. At the highest quality settings it can take a minute or more to decode a single image. Fortunately, most raw files also contain a standard JPEG preview image which can be read extremely quickly and these preview images will be used by default when Opus needs to generate thumbnails. The preview images are often reasonably high-resolution and you may wish to use them for Opus viewer windows as well as thumbnails. The drop-down at the top lets you pick which images to use.

Note that one or two cameras (e.g. the Kodak DCS Pro 14N) save completely black, bogus thumbnails into their raw files. To deal with this, and to provide flexibility in general, you can create different configuration profiles for different types of camera. To add a new camera profile, just drop a raw image saved by that camera onto the list of profiles.

The Full Image Decoding options are exactly the same as those provided by the DCRaw.exe command-line. For most cameras the default options will produce high quality results but they will also be very slow. You may wish to enable the lower quality and reduced resolution options to speed things up, or you may wish to define additional options for even better quality. For a description of what each option does, please refer to the DCRaw website or the DCRaw manual page.

Image Library Credits

Raw Digital Camera support is provided by a modified version of DCRaw, (c) 1997-2006 Dave Coffin. I've modified Dave's code a fair bit and, due to a small set of test images, haven't been able to fully test that everything still works. In particular, Kodak DC120 and Sony support needs testing; if you can help please let me know.

Decoding of other formats is done by JasPer (c) 1999-2000 Image Power, Inc., (c) 1999-2000 The University of British Columbia, (c) 2001-2003 Michael David Adams; CxImage (c) 2001-2004 Davide Pizzolato; the Independent JPEG Group's Software.

Thanks!

Thanks to the Opus users who sent me test images. Special thanks to Radish from the Riovolution forums who was kind enough to send me his raw Karma photo even though he probably has no use for this plugin!

Image and download bandwidth provided by GPSoftware, makers of Directory Opus. (Ta Jon!)