Download GRIP
Sections in this page
GRIP is available here free for you to use. Please mention www.grelf.net when describing it or copying it.
Compiled version
All software contains bugs, even if, we hope, they are only extremely subtle ones. The author has tested this software to the best of his abilities to ensure that it is generally fit for its purpose of processing and measuring digital photographs.
The author makes absolutely no claims and gives no guarantees whatsoever as to the accuracy of any output from this software.
Anyone making decisions based on any output from this software has a responsibility to first convince themselves of the appropriateness of so doing. They should test the software for themselves and understand how it works, sufficiently for their needs. Source code and explanatory documentation are available for that purpose.
Prerequisites
Requires Java 6 Run-time Environment (JRE) which can be downloaded (free) from Sun's Java web site - look for the Java SE download page. Perhaps easier to find is the big download button on java.com.
If you try to run GRIP in an earlier JRE than version 6 you will get an error message similar to this in the command window:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Bad version number in .class file
The solution for this is to upgrade your installed Java to version 6.
Download
- Download the compiled application here. Version 12.1.1 (1.6 Mbytes)
- Unzip the down-loaded file (in Windows right-click and Extract all).
- The file called run.bat is for launching GRIP. You may want to create a short-cut to it on your desk-top.
- You may need to edit run.bat to include the path to your JRE, if java.exe cannot be found in your system.
- Unix users may want to modify run.bat, a Windows batch file, to become run.sh, a shell script.
- If you change "java" to "javaw" in the command line inside run.bat there will be no black console window while GRIP is running. You would not lose any information by doing that because a log file is created on every run.
- You may also wish to alter the -Xms (starting memory) and -Xmx (maximum memory) settings to suit the amount of RAM in your system. By default GRIP will start off using 768 Mbytes and may expand to take up to 1 Gbyte if you open several images at once. It is probably best not to let it try to take all of your RAM. The "About" option on the help menu will show you how much memory GRIP is using at any time.
Important: If your machine has less than 1Gbyte of RAM you really should edit run.bat so that -Xms and -Xmx values fit inside your memory with some to spare. Otherwise the JVM will use all the memory we say it can have but unfortunately some of that will be on disc. In that case when GRIP runs a lot of processing time will be wasted swapping image data back and forth between RAM and disc, and performance will be really slow. - The class files have been compiled in a Windows JDK but they are intended to be platform-independent. If they do not work on your platform please let me know.
- GRIP uses a package called jrawio, from Tidal Wave, which conforms to the JAI specification and enables RAW files in the formats of the major camera makers to be read. The JAR file for jrawio is included in the download from this page so that such files can be processed.
Upgrade only
If you have downloaded a previous version of GRIP, you do not need to download the 3rd party jar files again, you can simply download the new version of the single file GRIP.jar here (520 kbytes).
Directory structure
This diagram shows how the GRIP directory should look for running the application.
With the files arranged as shown above, the commands to launch GRIP (as in the file run.bat) are:
set classpath=grip.jar;jai_imageio.jar;clibwrapper_jiio.jar;jrawio-1.0.RC5.jar
start java -Xms768m -Xmx1024m net.grelf.grip.GRIP
On platforms other than Windows the first of those two lines should be modified so that semicolons (;) become colons (:).
64-bit systems
GRIP does work in 64-bit systems but it may at first appear not to do so. I have recently (Oct 2010) moved onto 64-bit Windows 7 and installed 64-bit Java. On this new platform GRIP kept failing with "Out of memory" errors. That can be corrected, as described on my trouble-shooting page.
Help files and API
If you want to access the help files and the programmer's (API) reference ensure you unzip the other downloads as shown in the diagram. Here are the help files:
Download the help files here (2.2 Mbytes)
The API documentation files are available from my programmer's download page.
Copyright
If you download my software it is yours to do with as you wish but I own the copyright of all of its Java source code. GRIP, being written in Java, is dependent upon Sun's Java library. Sun is in the process of making its library "open source". It will be subject to the General Public Licence (GPL) but with an important exclusion clause which ensures that works dependent upon it do not have to be distributed with GPL. Click here for more information about this (from Oracle who took over Sun Microsystems).
When discussing with others GRIP or your results from it, please mention www.grelf.net.