title: Reading RAW image files as GDI+ bitmaps
body: <p>Is there a good way to read RAW image files (especially Canon CR2 and Adobe DNG files) as GDI+ bitmaps that is reasonably fast?</p>
  
  <p>I found an example running under WPF that would read an image using any installed image codec and then display it in an image control. And I modified this example to create a GDI+ bitmap by writing the WPF image to a MemoryStream and creating the Bitmap from that. But this process is slow! Horribly slow! Opening a simple image takes around 10 seconds on my computer. This solution also requires references to the WPF assemblies and that doesn't feel right, especially not since I would like to run the code in an ASP.NET project. </p>
  
  <p>There are programs that will do batch conversions of the images, but I would prefer converting the images dynamically when requested. </p>
  
  <p>So, any suggestions? </p>