Don't Let qtpfsgui die!

Qtpfsgui is the tongue-thorning acronym that identifies one of the most interesting graphics application of the last years. It was registered two years ago on Sourceforge by Giuseppe Rota who as a student saw a need waiting to be fulfilled and an opportunity for a good project: an Open Source graphic user interface to the HDR/Tonemapping process. There are plenty of HDR/Tonemapping tools out there, some of them free (as in beer, not as in speech). Most of them limited to a few tone mapping operators (TMO). And then there is the scientific community, chruning out new TMOs on a regular basis. Rafal Mantiuk is doing a great job at keeping the command line driven pfstools up to date with the latest scientific developments to which he is a significant contributor himself. But the command line is not what graphic artists are used to, especially in a context in which they need visual feedback when turning the knobs and playing with the different parameters of the TMOs.

Unfortunately, not much has happened with Qtpfsgui in the last half year. Giuseppe asked for help with a new name and maybe an icon. Nothing happened yet. With the help of Roman Bednarik and Alexandre Prokoudine, he mentored Vladimir Smida in a season of usability project. But Giuseppe is now busy with his day job, and so little has been going on in the repository. If there is somebody out there reading who knows C++ and Qt (or who wants to learn it), this is a great and very useful project with a significant number of users.

And it is the only tool that got the conversion from RAW of my son’s beautiful eyes just right. Below is standard RAW processing, with Photoshop.