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JP2, TGA, PNM, RAS, DCRaw Viewer

Plugin for Directory Opus

Allows you to view JPEG 2000, TGA (with alpha), PNM, RasterFile and Raw Digital Camera images in Opus.

Directory Opus is a file manager for Windows. Read my guide, Getting to know Directory Opus, for an introduction.

This plugin is obsolete unless you are still using Directory Opus 8.

The following plugins have replaced this one in Directory Opus 9.1.2.0 and above:

JPEG 2000:JPEG 2000 plugin.
TGA:Improved TGA plugin comes with Opus.
PNM:Raw Digital Camera plugin handles a subset of PNM.
Rasterfile:No replacement plugin. Does anyone actually use this format?
Raw Digital Camera:Raw Digital Camera plugin.

This viewer plugin for Directory Opus allows you to view several file formats in addition to those built-in to Opus and provided by other plugins:

  • JPEG 2000 (JP2)
  • TGA (including alpha/transparency)
  • PNM (PPM, PGM, PBM)
  • Rasterfile (RAS)
  • Raw Digital Camera formats including Adobe DNG
JP2Raw plugin viewing some raw files
JP2Raw plugin viewing some raw files.
Thanks to Radish from the Riovolution forums for the Rio Karma test photo.
JP2Raw plugin generating info about some raw files and showing a TGA with alpha channel.
JP2Raw plugin generating info about some raw files and showing a TGA with alpha channel.

You can disable the plugin's support of different image formats via the File Formats tab. This allows you to disable unwanted or problematic image formats without disabling the entire plugin.

The File Formats tab also allows you to specify file extensions for Raw Digital Camera images. Only files which match one of the extensions will be examined further to see if they look like raw images. This avoids false-positives where files of another format are matched as raw images.

The non-raw formats supported by the plugin do not have configurable file extension lists because, where possible and sensible, the plugin will detect their files purely by file contents, ignoring extensions completely. (TGA files inside zip archives, as well as those lacking the optional TGA footer, must have the .tga extension to be recognised.)

The other two configuration tabs only affect Raw Digital Camera images:

JP2Raw raw configuration
JP2Raw raw configuration

Decoding Raw Digital Camera images is very slow. At the highest quality settings it can take a minute or more to decode a single image. Fortunately, most raw files also contain a standard JPEG preview image which can be read extremely quickly and these preview images will be used by default when Opus needs to generate thumbnails. The preview images are often reasonably high-resolution and you may wish to use them for Opus viewer windows as well as thumbnails. The drop-down at the top lets you pick which images to use.

Note that one or two cameras (e.g. the Kodak DCS Pro 14N) save completely black, bogus thumbnails into their raw files. To deal with this, and to provide flexibility in general, you can create different configuration profiles for different types of camera. To add a new camera profile, just drop a raw image saved by that camera onto the list of profiles.

The Full Image Decoding options are exactly the same as those provided by the DCRaw.exe command-line. For most cameras the default options will produce high quality results but they will also be very slow. You may wish to enable the lower quality and reduced resolution options to speed things up, or you may wish to define additional options for even better quality. For a description of what each option does, please refer to the DCRaw website or the DCRaw manual page.

  • Directory Opus 9:

    Do not install this plugin as it is obsolete and replaced by other, newer plugins. See the top of the page.

  • Directory Opus 8:

    dopus8_jp2raw_1101.zip (378k) (PGP signature)

    Copy jp2raw.dll from the Zip to your DOpus viewer plugins directory (usually "C:\Program Files\GPSoftware\Directory Opus\Viewers").

    Users of previous versions of the plugin should add .dng (Adobe Digital Negative) to the list of Raw File Extensions in the configuration dialog to enable DNG support.

    If you have the old Targa.dll plugin installed you may wish to disable or remove it to ensure jp2raw.dll handles TGA files instead. The old plugin does not support alpha (transparency and translucency) nor 8-bit TGA files. (With Directory Opus 9, this is no longer the case and the Targa.dll plugin should be used again. But you shouldn't be following these instructions in the first place if you are using Directory Opus 9!)

  • Directory Opus 6:

    There is no similar plugin for Directory Opus 6.

Version 1.1.0.1 (18th July 2006):

  • You can now toggle TGA alpha-channel support via the config dialog. This can also be toggled via an Opus button which runs "RunDll32 jp2raw.dll,ToggleTgaAlpha", using the full path to jp2raw.dll.
  • Plugin obsolete as of 22nd May 2009. See the top of the page.

Version 1.1.0.0 (19th June 2006):

  • Updated DCRaw code/port to version 1.326 (2006/05/18 06:34:26). This means we support several additional camera formats as well as Adobe DNG. You should add .dng to the list of Raw extensions if upgrading from a previous version.
  • Various minor improvements. (e.g. Will stop working if Opus says the results are no longer required because the window was closed.)

Version 1.0.0.5 (17th April 2005):

  • Very minor release which changes the default preferences to favour fast decodes over full-quality, full-size ones, in the viewer pane as well as for thumbnails.

Version 1.0.0.4 (16th January 2005):

  • To avoid false positives, raw camera files are now only detected if they match a configurable list of file extensions. Other image types are still matched by file contents, not extension, where possible and sensible.
  • Configuration dialog now enables and disables raw camera options appropriately.
  • Now checks for Opus 8 since it turns out it doesn't work with Opus 6.

Version 1.0.0.2 (10th January 2005):

  • Initial public release.
  • Additional features and improvements are planned, but this version is reasonably complete and should be useful.

Raw Digital Camera support is provided by a modified version of DCRaw, (c) 1997-2006 Dave Coffin. I've modified Dave's code a fair bit and, due to a small set of test images, haven't been able to fully test that everything still works. In particular, Kodak DC120 and Sony support needs testing; if you can help please let me know.

Decoding of other formats is done by JasPer (c) 1999-2000 Image Power, Inc., (c) 1999-2000 The University of British Columbia, (c) 2001-2003 Michael David Adams; CxImage (c) 2001-2004 Davide Pizzolato; the Independent JPEG Group's Software.

The plugin's C++ source code is available from the Pretentious Name Opus Plugin Source page.