I recently upgraded from Wheezy to Jessie and this seems to have screwed up ufraw...

Previously (with Wheezy) I would open raw images with ufraw, fiddle around a bit and then process the image in GIMP.

Nowadays, when I open the raw images, it has a huge number of red (and sometimes blue) pixels - way, way more than I would have under Wheezy.

I can, of course, pump up the denoise filter to get rid of the majority of the red pixels. However, I'd rather go back to the way it was under Wheezy where there were virtually NO red pixels.

I have no idea what settings (if any) changed with the upgrade from Wheezy to Jessie and fiddling around with the various settings in ufraw (in Jessie) has not helped.

Can anyone suggest a way forward?

Is gimp-ufraw and colord-data installed? The colord-data has the AdobeRGB1998.icc that has something to do with colors. I've never really looked at ufraw type stuff before. You might try dark table and see if it has the same or similar issue.

Hey, thanks for the response.

Both gimp-ufraw and colord-data are installed and up to date, but I completely forgot to try darktable! Great suggestion. Thanks a lot.

for denoising i use Gmic
( from the terminal) but there is a gimp plugin

there are other options Gmic basically replaces imagemagick

as to red and blue pixels ( green will also be in there )

is this on ALL cameras or just ONE camera ?

I don't know if this will help, and I don't use ufraw that much, but lately I've found that I have to regularly remove ~/.config/ufrawrc so that it will reset everything to defaults. Otherwise, it starts up with often inappropriate settings (from the previous raw file, I suppose). I guess I just never noticed it before, because I don't think the behavior changed, but perhaps it did.

Maybe you need to change something in gimp. Like the color profile.

Edit -> Preferences -> Color Management... RGB Profile -> select color profile from disk.
Filesystem -> /usr/share/color/icc/colord/AdobeRGB1998.icc

i use ufraw a lot and from experience i can say that ljb643's suggestion is worth checking.
apart from that, are you sure this happens with the very same raw photos that were ok earlier?
maybe you could provide us with one example raw file.

ondoho, thanks for the response. I had some success with Shadow_7's answer, using Darktable and haven't had time to investigate the other suggestions yet. However, I can definitely verify that it does happen with the exact same raw pix that were ok before. In fact, the reason why I posted the question is because I wanted to use a photo that I had previously posted to FB as wallpaper for my pc. Because the dimensions were different, I wanted to reprocess it with ufraw and Gimp and that's when I first encountered the "hot spot" problem.

Anyhoo, I'll try the suggestions given above and see what works.