[comp.sys.amiga] RAW file conversion

padre@dsoft.UUCP (Brian McNett) (05/02/90)

The FrameGrabber only grabs in 12 bit color, so converting its RAW data to a 
GIF wouldn't produce a better-than-HAM picture once the data was stripped
down to GIF's 256 colors.

bbs.sauron@dsoft.UUCP (Ron Stanions) (05/02/90)

In article <882@dsoft.UUCP> padre@dsoft.UUCP (Brian McNett) writes:
>
>The FrameGrabber only grabs in 12 bit color, so converting its RAW data to a
>GIF wouldn't produce a better-than-HAM picture once the data was stripped
>down to GIF's 256 colors.

This is true, but I beleive what he's looking for is a straight 21-bit to GIF 
conversion.  Not a conversion from Ham to GIF.  This will look significantly 
better when done straight.

In the same vein, I'm trying to do a similar thing with absolutely no 
success. I'm trying to use the fbm utilities to convert Digi-View RAW files 
to GIF, but I get consistent results of either program hanging, or reports 
that I have bad file lengths (or somesuch.)  I haven't yet gotten one single 
conversion from RAW to GIF ever.  I've tried using both 3.0 and 4.0 DigiView 
versions. Raw2FBM says nothing, fbcat crashes on a straight RAW to GIF 
convert, or tells me I have a short file if I use a raw2fbm converted file.  
Anyone have any ideas how I can deal with this?

padre@dsoft.UUCP (Brian McNett) (05/04/90)

Framegrabber can only capture in 4,096 colors, unlike Digi-View and VD-1,
which capture in 16 million. If you took the same Framegrabber image and
saved it as both a RAW and a HAM file, and then converted both to a 256
color GIF file, both GIFs would look almost exactly alike, because RAW
files have the same 12 bit color resolution that HAM pics do.
HAM fringing does not really come into play here- the pictures that have
fringe, the ones with "too many" ranges of color, and too many of them,
would lose most of their color in conversion to a 256 color GIF file
whether they're HAM or not.
Digi-View and VD-1 have true 24 bit color, and they would make much
prettier GIF files.