Pictures of Ubuntu: Linux's best photo shots at Windows and Mac

When it comes to photo applications it seems Windows and Mac have things nailed down, with plenty of individual applications and several packages packed with tons of features. In this second look at how media and storage applications for Linux, and particularly Ubuntu, compare, I found the Gnome camp has plenty of options too …

[iamapizza]

Smiley face

What a timely article - I'm attempting to transition from Win7 to Ubuntu 10.04 and one of the main things I need is a Lightroom equivalent. Tried RawTherapee, Lightzone and Bibble - all of them fall short of the glory that is Lightroom, I suppose it'll just take some getting used to.

Are you sure Lightzone is free, though? It wasn't immediately obvious on the lightzone website, but I could go look again.

Also, your screenshots are way too small. You should consider allowing us to click on it to see a larger version. Look for lightbox. It's nice.

[paulc]

de-Monofying Gnome...

anything that helps is a bonus...

Mono is a ticking time bomb being lovingly cared for by that "usefull idiot" Miguel De'Icaza

[Alan Watson]

Not just for linux

RawTherapee is cross-platform - I also run it on an old Windows XP box.

It's free, but if you use it do make a donation to the developer (who I have no connection to).

[viet 1]

Partial review

I hate to put it bluntly, but The Gimp, which I use and like, is no way near Photoshop for picture editing. Don't misunderstand me : I use it a lot, but it comes very far down my post processing path, in fact as the last tool before uploading to the web, because The Gimp is still limited to 8 bits, and not so good for archiving pictures without losing an enormous quantity of colour information. This said, for converting a 16 bits colour managed image into something optimized for the web, it's a treat.

The reviewer also forgot a fantastic combo found with KDE 4 : digikam and showfoto. It's really all you wish a raw software to be for filing, geotagging, archiving and uploading your pictures. From raw to web or print in a couple of minutes. It does correct chromatic aberrations, geometric aberrations, allow finely tuned perspective corrections and levelling. Truly a thing of beauty. The list of raw supported cameras is about the one of dcraw. And icing on the cake, it's of course colour managed and full 16bits. The digikam package also includes everything you should need to work on DNG raws that are now the de facto standard for high quality archival of raw images.

This is not photoshop for now (it might become when Krita is finally useable), but for conscious amateurs worry of degrading their files, it's got all you need and more.

[Grifter]

Hmm?

>The Gimp is still limited to 8 bits, and not so

>good for archiving pictures without losing an

>enormous quantity of colour information.

Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly does this mean? Last time I used gimp, which admittedly was almost a decade ago, gimp used 24bit depth with 8bit alpha. I must be misunderstanding something, but what? Please enlighten me.

[J 3]

@ Grifter

24 = 8 x 3

[Don Mitchell]

8 bits

He means 8 bits per channel (24 bit images are 8 bits each for red, green and blue). Photoshop lets you work with 16 or 32 bits per channel.

[Glesga Snapper]

Same thing.

He is talking about the per channel bit depth; 8bit/chan = 24bit overall.

The 8bit alpha is an additional channel, used for masks and stuff.

[John Miles]

re: gimp used 24bit depth with 8bit alpha.

24bit depth which would be 8 bits per channel - RAW files are often 16 bits per channel (48 bit) - though usually only effective 12 bits per channel. While the eye can't see the difference the extra colour depth allows more tweaking during post processing to do such things as bring out details in shadows

[Lou Gosselin]

@Grifter

Some raw formats may support more than 8 bits per channel.

Scenes with very wide lighting ranges will suffer from dynamic compression when being converted to 8 bits.

Lets say a camera supports 10bit per channel.

Each channel can take a value of 0 through 1023 per pixel.

If all the pixels in the photo are within a small range of intensities, say 500 - 700, then they can be encoded in 8 bits without loss of information.

On the other hand, some images have a wide range of intensities, say 200 - 1000.

The conversion to 8 bit either requires range compression:

8bit value = 255 * (10bit value - 200) / (1000-200)

Or it requires the range to be cropped by clipping values to produce a range of 0-255.

Most software/formats don't do any of this and simply treat all bytes as identical regardless of the relative intensities from the source images, which is why cameras have "raw" formats in the first place.

Apparently gimp is limited to 8bits per channel.

[Bob Merkin]

8x3=24

8bits/channel x 3 channels (RGB) = 24 bit color. He was talking about bits/channel. Better to have 36 or 48 bit color (12 or 16 bit/channel, respectively).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hmm?

They mean 16 bits per channel. There was a fork of The Gimp used in film post-production which had such support, but it's apparently not quite there yet in the mainstream version of The Gimp.

[JEDIDIAH]

Pounding nails with the handle end of a jackhammer.

> I hate to put it bluntly, but The Gimp, which I use and like, is no way near Photoshop for picture

> editing. Don't misunderstand me : I use it

Unless you make matte paintings for Hollywood movies, you don't really have much reason to care either.

There is a reason why stuff like Picasa and iPhoto have been created to deal with photo management for the masses. For most people, the idea of using Photoshop or other Adobe

applications is absurd and excessively expensive.

[JMcL]

Actually no..

You say for "most people, the idea of using Photoshop or other Adobe applications is absurd and excessively expensive". While I'd agree with the "excessively expensive" bit, I don't really see why it'd be absurd.

Now back to the point. Since the article is talking about raw processing, it isn't really directed at "most people", rather it's aimed at people who are serious enought about their photography that they're willing to add the additional step of having to process the images from raw. For anything other than the most minor of adjustments, 8 bit colour depth falls flat on its face. DSLRs have a depth of at least 12 bits in general, so you're chucking away over 90% of the tonal information available to you by editing in an 8 bit application (12 bits/channel=4096 levels, 8 bits=256). GEGL will eventually solve these problems, but it's been in gestation for almost a decade.

Gimp also has other limitations compared to even PS Elements (which mostly operates in 16 bit mode now). No adjustment layers for one.

Like another poster I DO actually use GIMP, and it is quite capable, but I typically only use it for stuff bound for the web, but as a serious photography tool - sorry.

[lexxonnet]

What about Digikam?

I'm surprised that this review has left out what's probably the most sophisticated photo management app on Linux - Digikam. Digikam is KDE based, but runs just as happily under gnome, and offers several features that are not present in F-Spot. Definitely worth a look.

[Big-nosed Pengie]

letters and/or numbers

An egregious omission.

[lurker]

Picasa on Linux

There's no need to use Wine to run Picasa on Linux.

Try using a popular search engine and entering 'picasa linux'.

[A J Stiles]

Yes there is

Last time I looked, Picasa for Linux was simply Picasa for Windows wrapped in a customised version of WINE.

[BRYN]

Picassa uses wine

To run under Linux, it is in fact a sloppy port.

You do not need to install Wine to run Picassa. Picassa installs the Wine libraries it needs to run.

[GrahamT]

Picasa for Linux

I believe it has Wine included in the installation. It certainly shows up under the Wine folder on my Ubuntu laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

Digikam?

What about Digikam? Isn't that a photo manager that supports RAW files of various kinds? And maybe the reason for F-Spot getting dropped is the absolutely crazy timestamp corruption, erm, modification that the developers thought was such a great idea. A lot of users were miffed when such second-guessing was finally exposed for what it was.

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the best one

ImageMagick!

Seriously, why use those new-fangled rodents and holy images when you've got a working keyboard and a capable shell?

[aThingOrTwo]

Pixelmator

Pixelmator is built in part using the power of ImageMagick:

http://www.pixelmator.com/specs/

So it is not just for the shell. I think something like Pixelmator would be a good middle ground between powerful functionality and ease of use for Linux. Two brothers did the first version in under 12 months, so it has to be possible.

The GIMP is a bit too daunting for beginners I feel.

[A J Stiles]

Obligatory Bash one-liner

If you have ImageMagick installed, this should work:

$ [ ! -d thumbnails ] && mkdir thumbnails; (echo "<html><head><title>Photos in $PWD</title></head><body>";for F in *.jpg; do T=thumbnails/$(basename $F .jpg)_mini.jpg; convert -resize 200x200 $F $T; echo -e "<a href=\042${F}\042><img src=\042${T}\042 /></a>"; done; echo "</body></html>") > index.html

To use it, cd to the folder where your .jpg images are kept and run the command. Open your web browser, navigate to the folder with the images and open the file "index.html". Click on a thumbnail image to open its larger counterpart.

[Anonymous Coward]

DigiKam?

No mention of DigiKam? It's aimed at the 'professional' user, incorporates both organising and editing tools and is purportedly cross-platform (Win, Mac, Linux). I've never got around to evaluating it myself, but it seems like a pretty serious contender.

[petur]

Picasa indeed

You can even run the latest picasa release, it works perfectly. Nice way to sort your pictures, and the face detection is a fun tool too :)

[zenkaon]

Hugin

A brilliant photo tool that I use all the time in Debian is hugin. It's a photo stitcher for creating panoramic images.

It's great for creating panoramic pictures, I typically scan whatever I'm trying to photo - leaving some overlap between each image. Lets say 10 photos for a 360 view and 10 more going around again giving me a high and low 360 that will give more hight to the panoramic.

Pop all 20 images into hugin and let it do it's thing for 30 minutes and out pops a massive 300MB tiff file which has all the photos stitched together nicely in a whopping 10000x3000 (approx) pixel image.

sudo aptitude install hugin autopana-sift-c

You'll need the debain multimedia or medibuntu repositories for autopana-sift-c as it's not GPL but licensed from the university of British Columbia and it's good for non-commercial use

[John H Woods]

Another vote for Hugin

This is amazing - a super piece of software with a lot of options than can still be used in a minute. All I have to do is put my camera on burst mode, and walk in a circle. Then it stitches them together - beautifully. Great for making skydAomes - this one took 10 seconds to photograph, and less than 10 minutes to process it into a 360 panorama: http://i762.photobucket.com/albums/xx263/jhwoods/skydome/BD2_crop_2.jpg.

JHW

(Suggestion - the Ubuntu articles are welcome - but maybe you should consider an 'eyecandy' one - people are usually blown away when they see my GUI - and it's only a few simple steps to create something fantastic - rotating desktop cube with skydome, transition effects, widgets and a nice dock)

[Anonymous Coward]

Another vote for digikam

I've been using digikam for about 6 months - far and away the best program like it for linux - no problem running with gnome. If you have an interest digital photography on linux, give it a try.

Trust me

You'll love it,

It's a way of life.

[vincent himpe]

Illogical

You spend two or three grand on a camera to shoot in raw, and then you are too stingy to shell out another 200 dollar for a top notch program ? Highly illogical...

Even if you buy only a 800$ camera. Get something like Paintshop Pro and Photoalbum ( Now under the corel flag) for 80$.

[Munchausen's proxy]

Consider (some of) the audience

You're willing to spend $200 on computer software when there are still lenses that you haven't bought yet?

[Anonymous Cowardess]

And they sell ...

... Linux versions where?

[Rob Dobs]

Way off base

Who said anything about paying this much for a camera? Article is about photo management programs, not professional editing.

Most of us are using a camera that cost $200, or more likely LESS than $100

Even more to the point, due to economy, I bet most of us bought them a year or two ago.

Sure you make a valid point for the professionals, you are only as good as your weakest tool in the chain when it comes to media reproduction (sound pictures) of any type. However if freeware tools are as good, no reason to waste money.

I imagine not only does the average digital camera user not use RAW format, they probably aren't even aware its there, or what it is.

Try selling RAW to a person in layman terms:

Ok, so you take photos this way (RAW), and they will take more space up on your camera, so you can fit less pictures in there. Then you have to copy them off the camera, and convert them to a new format if you want to share and send them out in email. Oh and they will take more space on your laptop, etc,etc.

Oh,, but they will allow you to have visual elements you can't see, that MAY allow you to lighten up some shadows and make that one picture look better.....Oh and you'll need a software program that cost twice what you paid for your camera to properly edit them....

Ogg faces a somewhat similar problem.... better isn't better if it is not easier as well.

Competing formats have to be no extra steps, just as easy to use, or kiss goodbye to unwashed masses.

[Tim K]

Bah

The real issue is that people are taking too many damn pictures.

[James Dunmore]

shotwell... itself in the foot

So I installed and ran shotwell, it started cataloguing my photos. Great.

Came back an hour or so later, with messages about my home partition behind out of memory. Odd, I thought I had a few gigs free at least..... yup - shotwell copied all my photos (15gigs worth) from my media partition to the root of my home partition, with date named directories.

Looked for settings to change this, couldn't find any......

apt-get uninstalled straight away

Hopefully they will fix this before it's default in 10.10

[J 3]

Yup

I have the same problem with digiKam -- or did it change recently? It insists in copying ALL the photos somewhere else from their original place. At least you CAN customize that. But why can't the program use the original locations? I've never found an explanation for that. It's a problem in my case, since I have an old computer with a bunch of different partitions in three old hard-drives, all of them with little space available.

I keep searching, them.

[J 3]

@James Dunmore

Just found this at the Shotwell website (http://trac.yorba.org/wiki/UsingShotwell0.6), maybe it wasn't an option in the version you used...?

By default, Shotwell stores your photo library in the XDG Pictures directory. The XDG Pictures location is specified as XDG_PICTURES_DIR in ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs. Usually XDG_PICTURES_DIR is ~/Pictures. To change the library location, choose Edit ▸ Preferences and press the Browse button in the Library Location section to select or create a library directory.

[Anomalous Cowturd]

@AC 14:39 Re: Another vote for Digikam

On the bus?

<----- The Central Scrutinizer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wot, no syborg icon ?

Yeah, I do a lot of work on it with my special lens.

It looks just like a telefunkun U47

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternative platforms

" In the Windows and Mac world, freebie photo apps - like Google's Picasa or Apple's iPhoto"

We notice that (unlike Apple) Microsoft themselves have not made such an application - except "MS Paint"...

Actually, that's probably a good thing, I can only imagine how awful it would be...

[aThingOrTwo]

Windows Live Photo Gallery

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-photo-gallery

They have and it's not awful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Phoyo app..

> We notice that (unlike Apple) Microsoft themselves have not made such an application - except

> "MS Paint"...

Oh, they did. It's called Photo Manager. Dig around, it comes with Office 2003/2007.

And yes, you're right, it's awful.

Prior to that, they also have Photo Editor, which is even more awful. Crashes due to a filter being of newer version than the app, frequent memory issues.

Best stay away.

[Derek Bradshaw]

I am sure the article says Gnome and not KDE

"In this second look at how media and storage applications for Linux, and particularly Ubuntu, compare, I found the Gnome camp has plenty of options too - you just need to be picky."

I knew it did. I have been unable to locate a Gnome version of DigiKam... Please stop mentioning it.

:-D

[Anonymous Coward]

But... but...

It works with Gnome.

*However* --- installing it results in installing a lot of KDE dependencies, albeit not the complete desktop. Unless you really object to that, there is no reason to stop mentioning it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I am sure the article says Gnome and not KDE

"I have been unable to locate a Gnome version of DigiKam... "

Digikam works on GNOME as well, although it depends on various libraries that are probably already available (if not already installed) for your distribution. On the Free Software desktop you are allowed to pick and mix applications, you know. ;-)

[Big-nosed Pengie]

Red herring

Who cares? It works perfectly well within a Gnome environment, even if it's running the KDE libraries.

[mikebartnz]

@Derek Bradshaw

While you won't find a Gnome version of DigiKam it will still run in Gnome just like Gnome apps will run in KDE so DigiKam, DigiKam, DigiKam, DigiKam.

[mfraz]

Picasa?

If this is an article about Gnome apps only,then why is Picasa mentioned?

I would also like to add my vote to DigiKam.

[steogede]

@Derek Bradshaw

> "... the Gnome camp..."

Are Bibble, LightZone, Picasa and RawTherapee GNOME apps now?

[McBread]

Lightroom

A couple of years ago I finally made the switched from Windows + rarely used Linux dualboot, to Linux + rarely used Windows dualboot, due to better TV card support . However, I'm now planning on getting a second desktop to run both OSes in parallel.

Why? Because there really is no substitute for Lightroom. Well, except Apature on a Mac. And there was an attempt at an open-source equivalent, blueMarine, but it appears to have died already. The current linux options aren't bad software per se, they just can't match the high standards set by Lightroom.

[Anonymous Coward]

May I suggest...

May I suggest that you seriously look at VMware, rather than the hassle of dual booting? I run linux on my Vista workstation under VMware workstation, without problem. While my server runs centos and vmware server with win 2003 server (and various other VMs) on top. General performance is a little degraded, but graphics performance is fine these days (although not for CAD or games!) Also, most vmware software is free these days.

[JEDIDIAH]

Not everything is freebies on Linux.

> Why? Because there really is no substitute for Lightroom

No. You've just not looked very hard.

The subject of commercial software on Linux is something that El Reg should take up sometime.

[Paul Docherty]

So what is it then?

Rather than just insulting the commenter, why not tell us what the alternative/substitutes are?

I very much agree with McBread - Lightroom is lightyears ahead of any Linux-based solution I've tried so far. The killer feature isn't the RAW converter (which is pretty good), or the speed exporting (which is very good), but the workflow / UI combination. I frequently deal with thousands of RAW files per batch, so speed/quality of processing is key. The negotiable factor is price. I'd pay £££ to get a quality linux-based solution.

[Martin Owens]

Commercial

Most software on Ubuntu is commercial, nothing about it is a charity you know. It's just so far investment has been made with time instead of money.

God I hate it when people conflate commercial with proprietary. It makes my job as a _paid_ foss developer harder.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, no.

If you haven't looked very hard, or don't actually know what you're doing, then it seems like there are replacements to run on Linux.

Sadly, there's nothing anywhere close to Aperture or Lightroom running natively on Linux. There's Bibble, which is bugged to fuck, and less well-supported than most free software, and there's UFRaw/Raw Therapee which are very basic (but pretty decent at what they do, since they use dcraw, which does a good job demosaicing- certainly compared to Bibble).

Once you've tried to get a working ArgyllCMS running too, and drivers for your colour probe of choice, and got your monitor set up, you're lumbered either with having not enough features (ufraw/RT 2.xx) or having all the cool wavelet sharpening/NR/LCE, but being mostly lumbered with bits per channel* in GIMP.

Even if you adjust curves and dynamic range, and sort out your shadow/highlight detail and import from UFRaw into GIMP, the results will never be nearly as good as a skilled Lightroom/Aperture could get in a much shorter time.

As someone who has been using Linux since before there were distros, who has supported it for a living, and who makes a little on the side from photography, or training people in digital photography- it pains me that the above is true, but it is. You can only think that the Linux alternatives are viable if you haven't really learned enough to understand the limitations yet.

* Yes, I know that there's GEGL, but that's not ready for prime time yet.

[Indian-Art]

Google Picasa works very well on Ubuntu

Although I find Picasa simple, easy and fun, I'm still looking forward to Shotwell.

Its good to have Options.

[Dazed and Confused]

I hate to say but

for XP M$ had some useful tools, the slide show option, the view a folder as filmstrip option and you could download some phototools from their website to do things like resize sets of images or all the ones in a folder.

W7 is a massive step backwards for photos.

Just to look at pictures on Linux I still like gqview.

(PS 24bit colour is also known as 8bit colour depth, 8 for red, 8 for green and 8 for blue. 24bits for each would be nice for things that vary gently, like the sky or black stream trains)

[John Sanders]

Irfanview works like a charm

In Linux using current wine. Irfanview is an image viewer with some extra abilities like quality resizing, little painting, optimized saves for the web etc.

It is simple, fast and quite complete.

I know it is a bit weird to run irfanview on Linux, but I find it to be a much more competent image viewer than what it is provided on Ubuntu.

[Jethro Q. Bunn Whackett Buzzard Stubble and Boot Walrustitty]

Just accept

that Digikam is the dog's nuts regardless that it is built on kde.

Surely, with all the interoperability that these two desktops have they should put the best app out there....and the best app is Digikam.

Just accept :)

[Old Marcus]

Yeah, but...

Digikam requires KDE and the kitchen sink to be installed in a GNOME environment. I don't want all the extra software that I don't need. If it only required Qt, then I'd go for it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure

If you like slow, badly-written software, and you're a happy snapper who puts platform above decent pictures.

[Old Marcus]

Um...

The pictures should come out the same regardless of the software they go through.

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet another vote for...

Digikam! I did a brief look on You Tube here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWd2Vl9OLwM

[Cunningly Linguistic]

Sorry

but I don't see anything here that would come close to enticing me away from the Adobe stable on either Win7x64 or OS/X.

@Grifter - 24 bit is actually only 8 bit x 3, i.e. RGB, whereas 16 per colour equates to 48 bit in marketing speak and let's not forget that latest variants of PS will handle 32bit per colour.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs it?

8 bit is still fine for what I'm doing. Once the image has been tuned through RAW conversion or used for HDR, I'm happy to work in 8 bit. I've yet to come across a web site that sells posters or wall art that takes other than Jpeg, or a magazine/book submission house that wanted other than 8 bit Tiff.

If you still want 16 bit, I've read it is coming in the next full release of Gimp soon, so that's a non-argument really.

With free support tutorial series like, "Meet the Gimp," who needs PS? The one thing that drove me away from PS was that every time I updated my camera body over the last few years, I needed to upgrade my PS version 'cause my camera RAW format wasn't supported, and wouldn't be supported.

That is one of the main problems with software and MS; whenever there is a major version change, all the other software had to be (realistically) upgraded as well and that means more money. Now that Microsoft are sounding the death knell of XP and are returning to a new OS version every couple of years, people are going to find their wallets emptied again by the cost of all the upgrades.

I was in a group of magazine readers picked for a challenge a while ago and the editor was with us. I asked why the magazine didn't run any tutorials for Gimp, or even acknowledge its existence. I never really got an answer; but it didn't take much working out. If they ran articles on free systems, Adobe would likely pull their advertising. So the reader never gets to know about the great stuff that's out there.

No thank you; I'll happily stick with, and support, open source because it keeps me running and I can spend my money on better lenses and get a better image right in the camera when I push the shutter button ... something that doesn't need as much PS as it used to :-)

I'm doing a talk in my camera club in September; part of it is to show people what is out there, for free.

[Chemist]

Re : Who needs it?

Agree. I upgraded my Canon 300D to a very new 18 megapixel 550D in early May and within a couple of days I had gathered enough updated software to process RAW images.

I have in the past processed RAW images to 16 bit/channel tiff but generally if the exposure is good then there is just a lot of empty 'space' round the histogram.

[viet 1]

It's all about the future.

"8 bit is still fine for what I'm doing. Once the image has been tuned through RAW conversion or used for HDR, I'm happy to work in 8 bit. I've yet to come across a web site that sells posters or wall art that takes other than Jpeg, or a magazine/book submission house that wanted other than 8 bit Tiff."

Absolutely true for current technologies and resolutions, but consider the evolutions of the display medium. Until recently, we had paper with a contrast of 1:50 at best and inks covering maybe 25% of the srgb gamut. The contrast on paper is almost a given, but already ink makers are making incredible progress in colours rendition. The situation of displays is even wilder. 1st lcds had poor gamut and poor contrast, and 6bits/channel colours. Today, high end lcds cover AdobeRGB gamut with contrast of 1:5000. Technology previews exist with contrast in excess of 1:30.000. Real life contrast (outside the basement ;-) ) is over 1:150.000, so there's room to improve toward 'real life' imaging.

How the pictures we carefully edit today are going to perform tomorrow ? What technologies not currently available will we have to re-edit them in the future ? I can't answer that, but I'm not axing now my files of informations captured by my sensor just to archive in today's good enough containers.

"If you still want 16 bit, I've read it is coming in the next full release of Gimp soon, so that's a non-argument really."

It is because I'm taking my pictures today, and 16 bits Gimp is supposed to come "real soon now" since an awfully long time. They're still building the foundations, and they better be solid, because they've been stuck at this point for *YEARS*.

[Chemist]

Re : It's all about the future.

That's why I archive the RAW files - that's as future-proof as you can get.

[viet 1]

Future proof...

More than 90% of the burden to have a working gpl raw decoder is weighting solely on the shoulders of a single man, Dave Coffin.

That's not future-proof in my books.

[Chemist]

Re : Future proof

Open source - I know I've got a copy. That's as future-proof as I want.

Great guy

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh.

You may as well throw away spatial resolution as colour resolution. You simply don't know what you're doing.

Digital lacks the latitude and dynamic range that film has. To get equally good results, you need to expand certain parts of the colourspace to get decent dynamic range sometimes. If you do that with a fraction of the colour resolution, then you get banding.

That's before we even consider stuff like black body calculations, and hell the fun of highlight/shadow detail recovery.

[Curmudgeonly Old Fool]

@Derek Bradshaw - Another vote for Digikam

There isn't a specific version of Digikam for Gnome but if you are using Ubuntu you can install it to the Gnome environment from the standard repositories. The necessary KDE libraries that it needs to run are installed along with Digikam.

I add my vote for Digikam and, yes, I do use it under Gnome.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux versus Mac/Windows...

Sorry, but I fail to understand why this article totally ignores anything KDE. Sorry Ubuntu/Gnome fanboys, but ignoring KDE and KDE applications like DigiKam is really silly. Glad to see a few responses trying to put that right. Use the best (Linux) tool for the job! Although I use Mandriva/KDE as my desktop, I also install the Gnome libraries. who cares, it is still Linux based and all my applications just works! Best of both worlds!

ps. So now I have donned my flame proof undies ;-)

[zenkaon]

KDE Vs Gnome flame war

sigh - any excuse to relight the tinder box that is the KDE Vs gnome flame war.

My opinion is that KDE3 Digikam rocks, anything KDE4 is tainted, and that's why the momentum is now solidly with gnome until they fsck it all up with gnome shell. I tried Digikam (KDE4) on the latest ubuntu and it was so so so slow and full of bloat. KDE4 Digikam reminds me of the disaster that happened to amarok.

I've never liked f-spot and am personally happy using gthumb for my photos. I don't need anything to manage them for me, I'll design my own directory schema thank you very much

[Mark Greenwood]

Digikam...

DIgikam is light years ahead of everything else on Linux, but it's still light years behind Lightroom in terms of useability. Lightroom opens my RAW images and gets the colours more or less spot on. Changes to settings are reflected in the image in a flash. Digikam opens my RAW images in about 2 minutes per image, gets the colours completely wrong, and then many settings have to be applied using a 'Try' button which takes a very long time. And that's without enabling colour management, which slows everything down even more. And where's the non-destructive editing?

That's not to say I'd rather use any of the other apps on Linux. In terms of speed Picasa is way out in front, but that laughs at my RAW files. I like Digikam - it's certainly the best photo manager for Linux. But to regard it as an alternative to Lightroom is to demonstrate that you prefer sitting in front of a computer watching progress bars to actually taking photos.

[viet 1]

Comparison is not reason.

"DIgikam is light years ahead of everything else on Linux, but it's still light years behind Lightroom in terms of useability."

Agreed.

"Lightroom opens my RAW images and gets the colours more or less spot on." ... "Digikam opens my RAW images in about 2 minutes per image, gets the colours completely wrong, and then many settings have to be applied using a 'Try' button which takes a very long time."

As of colours, LR comes packaged with many cameras ICM by default. Digikam expects you supply your own camera ICM. Either you're lucky to find a good one floating on internet, either you need to build one yourself with Argyll. Don't blame on Digikam what results from commercial bonds between Apple and camera manufacturers. It's a sad state of affairs cameras are not provided with accurate ICM like they used to be.

Speed : agreed, digikam is slow, and the preview button is annoying. Hope this will be addressed soon.

"And that's without enabling colour management, which slows everything down even more"

C'mon, is your computer still steam powered ? I've got a 2007 AMD X2-64 3800+, and there's no measurable difference induced by colour management.

"And where's the non-destructive editing?"

In next release along with face detection for auto-tagging of persons. Or so says the roadmap. No excuse, I know. I hope they really make it work.

"to regard it as an alternative to Lightroom is to demonstrate that you prefer sitting in front of a computer watching progress bars to actually taking photos."

Allow at least some of us to have principles we stand for. All my personal used softwares are GPL or free licensed. Until Apple changes a couple of policies, I won't have any at home. But then again, I'm not a professional, just a conscious amateur. I take around 10 - 20 pics a day, and I work on 1 or 2 at best, which I consider 'good enough'. Others are archived as is.

For a pro, LR is certainly the way to go. For others, it depends on the load.

[vincent himpe]

My principles

say that lightroom is Adobe... not Apple ...

And as far as principles go mine is:: use the best tool for the job at hand.

[Mark Greenwood]

It's not about principles

For the record, I agree with your principle of using GPL wherever possible. It's something I try to adhere to myself. But the creative process involved in this kind of photo editing requires small adjustments, made incrementally - at least for me it does - adjust,look,adjust,look, repeat until happy. If every adjustment takes 60 seconds or more I lose the flow. I need the preview to keep up with my slider adjustments - that way I can see what it's doing and more importantly judge exactly when it's done enough. It's not that I think Lightroom is "the only way to go", it's just that I find the GPL alternatives simply don't allow me to do the job I need to do.

All that said, following this article I looked at RawTherapee last night. The new version looks very good, very good indeed. And it's blisteringly fast. I think I'll start using that.

[Rob Dobs]

Do Your HOMEWORK!!

F-Spot, Picasa, DigiKam, and maybe future releases of Spotwell seem to fit the bill of intended for mass use. GIMP does not really belong in this discussion, other than a mention. Most people just want to have a digital photo album and maybe remove some red eye. FSpot seems GREAT at this job.

Really this 2nd Ubuntu article seems MUCH weaker than the first. I know its summer and all but where is the journalistic inquiry?

Missing are:

inclusion of Digikam (any discussion on this topic would result in that keyword showing up and to omit it is an oversight).

comparison of how the programs actually manage your photo files. For a article on photo managers for Ubuntu, I am still left not know how any of these programs actually manage my photos. Some of them like F-Spot, import them all into a new chronological directory. FSpot also seems to make two copies of a photo when you you remove red-eye, one changed, one original. Where are these files stored? If I import my photos into all of these programs, where on the drive will I find them? What directory should be backed up?

Photo management: how do you view and browse through the photo album?

F-Spot has a time-slider, used for browsing through the photos. For a typical family that gets out the camera on vacations or birthdays and holidays, this makes it pretty easy to browse through your photos.

More Screen shots of the various menus, photo album managers, picture editing pages etc, would be useful no?

Complaints aside, I am really glad you are doing these articles, and look forward to the next. Good Work!

[Bob Gateaux]

Why have to be Linux?

Article misleads us as if customer must have Linux to do pictures.

We can use the free software on Windows without our needs of Linux.

On most Windows we will already have installed the folder called "Accessories". If not then it can be got on the CD as custom option to tick checkbox on in installers.

Once we have Accessories we can use applicaiton called "mspaint.exe" which can be found on the hard disks and also on the Start Menu in Accessories (All Programs). Here we then have the free software for editing our files.

If we have no need for edit then many won't realise simple way of dragging picture to Internet Explorer 8 (which also has come free of charges) in order to examine it closely.

My camera comes with installer for Windows to let it transfer the images and use option tool for the viewing but I don't need it as I have the aboves.

[heyrick]

@ Bob Gateaux

"If we have no need for edit then many won't realise simple way of dragging picture to Internet Explorer 8 (which also has come free of charges) in order to examine it closely."

WTF are you doing using IE8 to look at a picture? Can't you just right-click it and choose "Preview"?

[Damon Lynch]

Why Lightroom?

Bibble Pro works very well indeed, and for some years now has had features built-in (like one click lens correction) that Adobe is beginning to catch up on. Furthermore, Bibble is much faster, and it's much cheaper to use year in year out (no need to send money to Adobe every 1.5 years).

[James Hughes 1]

8 vs 16 bit/channel and other stuff

Many many years ago I was one of the engineers working on a Windows package called Satori - we were taking on Adobe in the Paint area. Although (we thought) we had better UI, better memory requirements (it was resolution independent and used way less memory that Photoshop), better paint features, 16 bit processing (took a week to modify the code to work in 16 bit...how long for the GIMP? C++ and colours implemented as classes, so just needed to add a 16 bit colour class and some file handling for the 16 bit formats). I even wrote an article for some broadcast magazine on the benefits of 16 bit processing before it was a twinkle in Adobe's eyes.

We failed because we couldn't persuade Adobe users to change, although the package itself was used on various Hollywood movies for matte painting, was faster, had better paint and vectors tools, better layer management. It was missing some features that Photoshop had, but the ones it did have were way better. Linux apps have the same problem - an entrenched user base with attitudes that are very difficult to change.

Which reminds me - must try Satori under Wine -should work...and I still have all the source code - I wonder if I could port it to Linux.....

[Chemist]

Re : 8 vs 16 bit/channel and other stuff →

It's not difficult to generate 16 bit/channel using dcraw or ufraw, alter the exposure if necessary and then set levels and save as 8 bit/channel. For most purposes it seems overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't if you have decent tools

..as it often becomes apparent that as you start adjusting things, that you could get more range, or more detail. Using the convert and edit workflow means going back to the start. Also, editing 8 bit colour gives horrid bandy skies.

[Jamie Kitson]

Lightzone for Linux Isn't Free

It's £73.47.

https://www.lightcrafts.com/store/lightzone-store/

[Anonymous Coward]

Avoid Bibble

It is buggy and support is horrible.

Since the (two years late) 5.0, it has become less and less reliable. The 5.1 series segfaults and bombs out on a lot of machines trying to open requesters (had it happen on 32 and 64 bit linux).

The highlight clipping on Canon waws is dreadful (Raw Therapee produces better images), the heal/clone stuff is totally screwed (you get random image corruption).

The lens correction feature rarely manages to select the right lens from a list- even when it is supported. This is amazingly basic, but has been broken since 5.xx. That's before we even get on to the catalogue management- one of the most important things about professional grade digital workflow. Bibble's tendency to fall over while importing, corrupt its own database, lose edits and whatever else isn't something that I would accept from free software, much less something that I paid this much for.

It's horrible. It has been unworkable and broken for months- you have to go back to before they added cloning and healing (which are really basic features to be missing) to find a version that's stable on linux.

Personally, I got fed up. Most things are possible on Bibble, if you're prepared to use a tonne of workoutrounds and cludges, and package up some skanky old plugin to compensate for basic features that are missing (e.g. local contrast enhancement). When 5.1x came out, and it started crashing like a mofo on my Linux boxes, I gave up and bought Lightroom 3.

Yeah, so I can no longer process in Linux. However, it's a damn sight quicker to boot into windows, and get good results in a few minutes with no crashes with lightroom, than wrestle for ages will the buggy and unreliable mess that is Bibble 5.

It's a shame, Bibble 4 was a lot more reliable- but obviously don't support modern cameras.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

Why is it that Linux developers seem to give the strangest names for their software. Yeah, I'm looking for image software for Linux so the name Gimp makes all the sense in the world.

And it's all like that!

[Peter Gathercole]

GIMP makes perfect sense.

It is an acronym, and stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program. I agree it's not very intuitive, but I'm not sure that I would immediately identify Lightbox as an image manipulation program. I associate lightboxes with tracing and copying, and also viewing X-rays, although I do know that you can use them with positive image (slide) photographic film.

The reason why they go for strange names is mainly because most of the good and obvious names have already been trademarked. If you are a FOSS developer, especially if you are doing it in your own time, the last thing you need is a CEASE AND DESIST notice from a lawyer. It is also popular to either put an acronym in, especially if it is self-referential (like GNU itself), or a G or K to illustrate whether it is built primarily for a GNU or KDE environment. X used to be popular to indicate an X-Windows program. Sorry for that. I guess it's a geek thing.

The ones I cannot really get my head around are things like AmaroK, or Brasero, Audacity (OK this one is probably some form of pun), or even Evolution which look rather random, but I suspect that you will see instances of this in free/shareware on any platform.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fanboi alert!

While trying to find a cure for the repeated catalogue-related crashes that I am getting from Bibble, I just visited their horrid fanboi-infested forum.

Brace yourselves for tonnes of fanboi drivel that makes Jobs fans look well-informed and grounded in reality. Someone posted a url for this story comments page there.

"Cheers"