RawViewer

Images can be obtained with great ease nowadays, especially since you can find a powerful camera in nearly all mobile devices, and even notebooks and laptops. Depending on the device used, you might not be able to make much of the output format, unless you rely on specialized applications like RawViewer for viewing and converting between various RAW and regular formats.

On a first note, the application saves you a great deal of time and effort required to go through a setup process, which means you have the liberty of directly deploying it on a thumb drive in case you want to use it as a picture viewer regardless of the computer you’re working on. However, you need to be sure that the target PC is fitted with .NET Framework.

In terms of style, the application doesn’t really come to impress, but the simplicity in the design makes accommodation a walk in the park. Most of the space is where you view the selected picture, while the mouse wheel allows you to zoom in and out for a better view. Unfortunately, you can only have one picture active at a time, but it is possible to open up multiple program instances.

As the name suggests, the application’s specialty is to allow comfortable viewing of RAW image formats, and support ranges from NV21, NV12, I420, YV12, and more, to YUYV, and YVYU. On the bright side of things, regular formats like BMP and JPG are also supported.

Several changes can be made to the style of the viewer, in terms of choosing a different background color. Moreover, it’s possible to decide whether the alpha layer is used at all, and if so, how it acts. You can convert color values between YCbCr and RGB.

Last but not least, the application comes with a built-in converter to make RAW files a bit more accessible. Unlike viewing, however, the converter targets the content of an entire folder, so you might want to be careful on the source.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that RawViewer does manage to provide a comfortable set of features and decent support for RAW pictures. Conversion here is a plus, and even though viewing is done one picture at a time and there’s no real editing involved, it can be just what you need to make fresh captures easier to process.