PlayRaw - The raw processing competition

Will there be a resumption of the PLAY RAW thread? I found this most a useful thread.

Biff

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Hey

I moved your post from the introductory topic into this new one.

While I no longer have the time to run the competition, the fact of sharing a forum with the developers and users of other software would make such a competition more exciting if the rules permitted using any libre graphics program for processing the raw file. If anyone feels like taking charge of a reincarnation of PlayRaw, you have my support.

I was going to share some older raw files from model shoots soon in the forum. While not a competition per se, it might be fun at least!

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Very! In the original PlayRAW we accepted JPEG images following certain requirements, and each one had to have an accompanying sidecar file so that anyone can reproduce the effect in the matching version of the program. It would be nice if we could make a reincarnation of this competition, one which doesn’t capitalize “raw”, and one which allows the use of any FOSS. I think it would still be valid to require the sidecar file, to make sure images weren’t GIMPed… unless we want to allow that too. Be wary though, you’re about to hear 20 different opinions from 10 different people :wink:

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While not an active playRAW participant, it was good to watch on and see the results and see what people thought and how they judged. It would be good to see it start up again.

If I have any thoughts though, I’d stick to just raw processing using the raw processors, rather than allow for image manipulation in something like Gimp.

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I think it would be fun as well to have different rules per challenge, and a wider interpretation of “raw”. I can imagine that it would be interesting what people get out of an old, scanned photograph. And I think it could be interesting do have different “rules” depending on the picture. E.g., for the scanned old photograph, allowing GIMP/Krita/etc. would make sense. Another challenge idea, a bit more design oriented but still something in a photographer’s responsibility, would be something like “make a triptych from these three pictures (e.g. with 3 totally different pictures color- and contents-wise), allowing inkscape and scribus. Or make a photobook cover with the given image and a given title. Or allowing only command line tools for a certain challenge. And so on.

Disclaimer: I did not know about “PlayRaw” until this thread, and I tried to get information what it is about from the old RT forum. Unfortunately, the links there do not work any more and I have only a vague knowledge about “PlayRaw”. It could be that my writing above does not make sense at all …

Let’s play! I would enjoy playing more frequently than once per month too… Just sayin’

Is anyone free to share a RAW for PlayRaw, or should candidates be approved first? Are there any desired characteristics for such RAWs?

We do not have an approval process nor does any mod need to do anything. The community is free to do as they please.

With that said, (1) you should own the rights to the raw file you post and be willing to license the file such that others are free to share their results (that is the point!) and (2) we don’t need a new play raw every day. :slight_smile:

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