You can also temporarily punch the shadows way up to get a sense of what the shadow noise is going to look like. If you want to push or pull exposure on an image there is a simple plus/minus option that moves exposure in ⅓ stop increments. Otherwise I would have been zooming in to check every file. This was very useful for the airshow images because the sky was so hazy. It also can show you focus peaking for edges and fine detail, very handy if you want to see at a glance if your image is sharp. You can also set indicators for both under and over exposure, and work with the white balance right in the Fast RAW Viewer. Any modifications you make, such as changes to the title or description get written to the XMP file as well.

In fact the EXIF data window is very comprehensive and you can easily set what information you want to see and what information you don't care about. In addition to culling, you can also set rankings and colour flags as you scan your images and this metadata is written to an XMP file so when you do import the keepers into Lightroom, your ranking and colour coding comes with the image. Yes, I should have made sure her hair was neat first. I loaded a shot of Sondra taken in the studio into the program to show what this looks like. The histogram also shows you the percentage of each R,G and B channel that is under or over exposed. What I really liked is that not only does the program show you right away what your RAW converter will show you after you import, but it will also show you the true RAW histogram, not the JPEG vague approximation that you get on the camera LCD or in Lightroom until the actual RAW conversion is completed. How nice that they made it possible to simply create shortcuts that work for me. I don't like having to hit more than two keys at once for a shortcut I will use all the time. I wasn't nuts about the default hotkey to move an image to the _Rejected folder, so I used the simple keyboard shortcut tool to make a new one that suited me better. Moreover, I don't have to import everything into Lightroom just to throw the rejects away. Wow! It's very quick and you get a proper RAW conversion, not an embedded JPEG or some other thing. So since I had a LOT of culling to do, I gave it a try.

But if you buy before September 10, 2015, you pay only $14.99 If you like what it does, buy a license for $19.99 USD. You can download it at Download it and give it a go. He wrote about this program for Macs and for Windows called, go figure, Fast RAW Viewer. I sure as heck don't know every great tool out there and so it was serendipitous as I sat down to cull through over 2000 images from the Canadian International Air Show today that I encountered a short note from #NasimMansurov, a very bright fellow who writes for Photography Life.

Fastrawviewer review