Scott Murray, author of Scott Professional dropped me a line to let me know that he's just released the first (beta) version of his Canon RAW (CRW) conversion and workflow application 'Scott Professional Photo Studio'. The interesting detail about Photo Studio is the interface, it's based around (and very similar to) Kodak's DCS Photo Desk, look and feel are almost identical. Photo Studio uses the Canon SDK to do the final image conversion, although Scott has written some custom decoders for quick preview of RAW images. Photo Studio is compatible with RAW files from the D30, Pro90 IS, G1 and G2.

Click here to download Scott Professional Photo Studio beta
(For those who hadn't worked it out by the screenshot below,
this is a Windows only application)

Quick Overview

Anyone who has used or seen Kodak's DCS Photo Desk will immediately feel at home with Photo Studio, the thumbnail view with mini-icons as well as tools and image adjustments panes are almost identical. It employs the ability to change RAW processing parameters on groups of images at the same time (such as white balance, sharpening etc.) as well as a quick preview mode which allows you to quickly browse through your RAW files (at either quick or final quality). Photo Studio also has the ability 'tag' images for selection later (again, something which will be very familiar to Kodak DCS users).

With multiple images selected you can choose 'Save selected as' to process a batch of images, you can choose where the batch will be saved (and what format), any image adjustments to be overriden as well as enabling / disabling the false color filter (EOS-D30 only). Assuming you've selected JPEG format there's also a fairly flexible JPEG output option selection.

Performance

The table below represents the amount of time it took to process 51 RAW images on my dual AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz workstation (note that none of these applications use parallel threads and thus get no boost from multiple processors).