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If you want to get most out of your digital photography, you can't rely on the processing and JPEG compressing algorithms built into most digital cameras. Instead, you should record the sensor raw output and manually extract a JPEG from it. In other words, capture a digital negative and develop it later in your digital darkroom. Adobe Camera Raw and Capture One Capture One DSLR are excellent camera vendor independent tools for RAW file extraction. But what to use if you want to do it open source?

Try Dave Coffin's dcRAW. Dave wanted to "write an ANSI C program that decodes any raw image from any digital camera on any computer running any operating system" - and didn't exactly miss his goal: many free and commercial RAW extration tools use dcRAW code or parts thereof, there is support for more than 100 camera models, you can run it from the command line on Linux, and there are binaries and GUIs for Windows and Mac OS. Features:

• 24 bit non-linear PPM conversion
• 48 bit (16 bit x each RGB channel) linear conversion to PPM
• 48 bit linear conversion to PSD
• Customized hot pixel interpolation

Resources:

• Dave Coffin's dcRAW
• Francisco J. Montilla's dcRAW usage strategies
• dcRAW vs Canon File Viewer Utility comparison
• DCRaw binaries for Win32 in CPU specific versions
• Digital Picture Magic enables RAW file integration into Windows Explorer
• PowerShovel-II for Windows includes color profiles fine-tuned for the Canon PowerShot G2 and S40, the camera I use
• dcRAW-X for Mac OS X

If you can, try different RAW extractors and try to get a camera-specific color profile. Tests show that while one extractor, say Adobe Camera Raw, might excel in situations with high dynamic range, another extractor, say C1, might excel at night shots where drawing in shadows is all that counts. Both vendors spare few efforts to increase the quality of their respective algorithms, so I am exited to see how dcRAW will compare.