DigiKam – YLovePhoto

Linux is RAW

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 20:36:10 +0000

Even if you adopted Linux as your Operating System of choice, you should not be a photographer limited in his or her choices. As a matter of fact, even if you do not know it, Linux is offering a wide range of “serious photography” options. It is quite obvious from the posts you can read on the excellent Scribbles and Snaps blog of Dmitri Popov, starting with a long list of articles all tending to issues around the use of DigiKam, one of the best tools for the digital photographer on Linux (but it is also usable on some other Operating systems too, by the way).

DigiKam RAW import

But Digikam is not the only tool in Linux photographers life… Particularly, if you are looking for software programs to handle the RAW files from your digital photo camera, the choice is still quite large and diverse enough to have you fooling around for quite some time:

Everything for the Linux photographer

Yves Roumazeilles — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 22:00:00 +0000

digiKam special!

This nice software program has earned its own sub-list of links because of its own quality:

Additionally, some users may want to also have Digikam running on Windows (even if Linux is a better host for such a program). In this case, you would be well inspired to go and visit “Amarok and Digikam on Windows.”

Once again! More links, more sites, more web pages to serve the needs of the photographers using GNU/Linux. As we noticed, most of the Linux-based photographers seem to be speaking English (and nothing else).

Premium ideas for premium Linux photographers

Yves Roumazeilles — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:09:52 +0000

If you are simultaneously a digital photographer and a Linux user, you certainly are in search of maximum quality and flexibility, even if this may cost of little more effort. But why not try and make it easier with some ideas and resources I collected for you here?

Worth mentioning too:

F-Spot, full-featured to handle a photo library.
Shotwell, lighter and faster.
gThumb, simpler, somewhat slow, but operates without requiring to import images.

This is clearly true that the lack of a full Raw development solution at the level of performance of something like Lightroom (or whatever pro picture development offer) under Linux is hampering our photographic activity on this platform. It’s true that many crude utilities exist, like DCRaw (and its natural complements). Somebody would easily remember the name of RawTherapee, which is providing a quality-oriented solution under rapid development.

You will also easily find amateur people definitely convinced by Lightzone (previously mentionned in Roumazeilles.net). But for Lightzone, you’d better have very powerful computer, big CPU large memory, to reach a satisfying level of comfort.

Often more snappy and available on Windows and Max as well as for Linux (it’s 50% cheaper on Linux), here is Bibble 5 Pro which has the notable advantage of providing a full solution totally operational from the management of a photo library to an end-to-end Raw development workflow.

Another tool worth writing about here is DigiKam. It targets Photoshop-level of features (of course, it’s less extensive but full of ambition) from inside KDE.

DigiKam:

Clearly, DigiKam has progressed a lot since it version 1.0 (at the time of this writing, it’s up to v1.4) and nobody can neglect it anymore. Its importance on the market is reflected in the kind of issues reported by useful posts like those I could collect here:

DigiKam is no longer a kid’s toy.

Last but not least, I’d like to mention one more resource, since we have to admit that it is not yet possible to fully ignore the presence of Windows when you swithc to Linux: How To Use Photoshop Plugins On Linux could be useful reading for the Linux photographer.