We just want Fuji to provide a clean good simple RAW editor
And I want world peace, everyone being happy and dancing in the streets; with free beer and hot-dogs; and rainbows without storms—and unicorns returning to green fields filled with wild-flowers. Hah!!! Just close your eyes, turn around three times, click your heels together and wish real hard.
Hardware companies are not software companies. NikonView was worse than a virus—at least a virus does something. I have many bundled applications, and most are truly feeble.
Any programmer can hack together a simple RAW editor with a bit of study.
On the other hand, a
good RAW editor will never be simple—the parameters involved in RAW conversion are complex, if one is to take full advantage of what RAW offers in terms of control. It was said that anyone with reasonable ability could become a competent darkroom worker with a couple of years experience. There were only two controls—white balance and exposure. Now the learning curve is vastly beyond these.
We are faced with both of those—plus shadow and highlight controls; gamma, vibrance and saturation that are related, but react differently; sharpening that works different from clarity; colour temperature and tint; settings for the black and white points, luminance and chrominance curves, high-pass sharpening with four control sliders and noise control; hue, saturation and luminance control of eight bands of the spectrum; compensation for lens distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration, barrel and pincushion distortion, horizontal and vertical perspective—and you have not even opened the file in Photoshop yet. While film could be mastered in a couple of years, we in digital are still learning, and will be continuing to learn for the foreseeable future just to keep up with developments.
Under the hood where we can not look, there are routines that work with the RAW format. By the way, it is not an image file like JPEG, but rather a container file that may have an identifying header that tells the program the byte order, an embedded thumbnail and/or JPEG preview, makers' notes that inform the program of the camera's specifics, image metadata, and of course the raw data off the sensor. What actually is included in the container is up to those who create the RAW specification for the specific camera model.
Also under the hood is the de-mosaic engine, and with the X-Pro1, an entirely new pseudo-random colour filter array has been introduced. Fuji has been working with Adobe for months, and they now have a functional routine, but it may be many versions from now that something approaching a final fully functional version is achieved.
Not even Fuji could afford to wait for months with warehouses full of inventory around the world, while the engineers at Adobe worked upon solving the puzzle. It could well be a year or more before we really see the X-Trans sensor's full potential being realized.
Simple is easy—good is not. Also one no longer becomes a master in a couple of years like it was in fume-room days. The learning curve in comparison—is huge.
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larry!
http://www.larry-bolch.com/ 
