Better RAW decoding with Digikam

My favourite photo editor and manager is Digikam. One of its features is easily importing RAW files. However, with its default settings you may loose details in brightly lit areas of your photos.

To get the details back, go to Settings, Configure digikam, RAW decoding. In there, set the “Highlights” option to “Reconstruct”. Now that you’re there anyway, set “Quality” to “AHD interpolation”, which is the highest quality of interpolation.

With these settings, you’ll get much higher quality images. They may turn out dark if the highlight is much brighter than the rest of the image. However, this is easily reconstructed with the white balance tool (CTRL+W) and playing with the exposure and gamma settings.