Iliah Borg and his team at LibRAW have been working hard on a major update to my favorite image culling software FastRawViewer (FRV). Today, the team released the final 1.3 version of the software and this time the updates are truly exciting! Now FRV sports an awesome grid mode, so that you can quickly go over your images just like you can in Lightroom. In grid mode, you can perform all kinds of file management functions such as copy/move (including move to “Rejected” folder) and image functions such as changing file orientation, setting labels and ratings (you can even set ratings and labels on multiple images at once!). Once you pick an image for viewing, you can double click on it to switch to image view and perform all the functions like zoom in to 1:1 view. There are many new features such as focus peaking, highlights inspection mode and sharpening for display, along with performance improvements and other changes to the core software. Overall, this is a huge update for everyone who has purchased FRV and if you have not tried it already, it is about time for you to take a closer look at FRV!
The above is a screenshot of the new Grid system, which allows viewing a number of images at once. You can fully customize the sizes of thumbnails all the way down to 125 pixels.
Here is the new “Focus Peaking” feature in FRV 1.3, which allows seeing the areas that are sharp in your image:
You can switch between two different focus peaking modes – “Contrast Edges”, which shows sharp edges as illustrated above and “Fine Details”, which only highlights the areas that contain very fine details, as the name suggests.
Another cool feature is “Highlights Inspection”, which allows one to look at the highlight detail and decide if it contains enough information for potential recovery:
That’s on top of the existing “Overexposure Display” feature, which shows all the burned out areas in colors! With overexposure and underexposure features turned on and now with the Highlights inspection tool, you can quickly identify images that you keep vs get rid of. And don’t forget, all of this is happening at the RAW level (not JPEG like most others), so you can make decisions way before you decide to import those images into your favorite RAW image software!
To be honest, all these changes are too many to list and talk about, so if you want to find out more, head on over to this page or watch the below YouTube video:
If you have not yet checked out FastRawViewer, I highly recommend that you do – it is the fastest RAW image viewing software on the market and it literally is capable of reading every RAW image you throw at it, thanks to the support of close to 900 cameras (by the way, support for the latest DSLRs like Nikon D5 is already there). I have been using FRV since its early release and I must say, the software development is progressing faster than I anticipated. The best part is that folks at LibRAW are actually listening to customer feedback and making significant changes to the software every day. Iliah Borg is a valuable team member at PL and he always takes the time to answer each and every query posted by our readers. I would like to also point out that we are in no way affiliated with LibRaw. None of our team members receives any kinds of payments from the company and every time we talk about the software in our articles, we only do so because we believe in their efforts and want to support them in every way we can. I have been trying to talk Iliah into taking their software to another level and giving us a tool that could compete with Lightroom, which I know many of our readers would support! Obviously that is a huge endeavor, but perhaps our support can help LibRaw get more resources to keep the ball rolling. One thing for sure, Iliah’s team is a very talented group of programmers and if they took upon such a task, they would deliver. I am hoping to meet Iliah and his team in the near future and discuss the bigger plans – I will share them with our readers as soon as that happens!
Starting from today until May 20th there will be a great promotional discount, which you can see on the Purchase page.
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