Darktable 05/05/2010
 
A followup for the previous post about Linux and photography.
I still didn't find the perfect image editor for Linux (I think it simply doesn't exist - yet), but I discovered a new and relatively unknown RAW developer which simply left me WOW!
I'm speaking about Darktable.
It's interface ressembles a lot to Lightroom (it uses cataloging, and the panels are placed the same way), and the customizability of the tools simply blew me away. Just take a look at the Color Zones tool. It's one of the most intuitive and userfriendly - and in the meantime the most complex color equalizer I've seen. I also liked the sliders: they aren't really sliders, just draggable rectangles - but very easy to use. You have to try it. The navigation through the catalogue is a surprize, too.
It's got color managed workflow, customizable demosaicing, lens corrections, batch processing, metadata and keyword manager and everything you need.
The icing on the cake is that it's expandable with really flexible plugins and - of course - it's completely opensource.
Now the bad part: while it's stuffed with shiny controls, the plain and basic adjustments are hard to find: I'd like to have a tool with brightness, contrast, saturation, vibrance a.s.o. The crop and straighten tools could be much better. A nice local contrast tool would be nice, too. And it's sloooowww on my laptop (maybe it's better on newer computers).
I tested it only on a few images so I can't tell how does it fit on a professional workflow and how does it handle images from different cameras, but my first impressions are more than positive. Nice work, guys!

P.S. Back to Bibble: cookin' a new plugin: Blacky. Check out the beta version in the Bibble5 forums.
1 Comment
 
 
This is a question I ask myself often: what are the choices of a photographer using Linux?
I'm an amateur photographer, and I don't make lot of pictures; I shoot mostly JPEG and sometimes RAW; and I never print my pictures.
I need a simple cataloging application to manage my personal photos. Gnome and KDE come with their own software, F-Spot and DigiKam. I heard that DigiKam is more complete with more options, but I use Gnome. So I stayed with a proprietary - but cross-platform application, Picasa. It just works well for me, I was using it for many years under Windows (before it was bought by Google).
For RAW development I don't really need cataloging, but I like to be able to work with all my photos in the same time. And I like to have all the basic editing options in the software. Fortunately there are several great programs for this; I'm using Bibble5, and RawTherapee is also a great choice (waiting for version 3). UFRaw is a good alternative to ACR, and there are other excelent RAW developers, too.
Now here's the problem: what to use for photo/image editing? Generally there are a lots of programs to do anything in Linux (at least 5-6 great video editors, and more to come), but in this field the only possibility is Gimp. And it doesn't even compare with an old Photoshop yet. I'm really missing the adjustment layers, layer effects and easily adjustable brushes, it supports only 8bpp RGB, etc. And next version will be released next year. Alternatives? Cinepaint (it's even more basic), Pixel (expensive vapourware) or TuxPaint (for kids under 5). Photoshop with Wine? Why didn't anybody else try to write a good photo editor? Finally Gimp is useable, but why aren't there any alternatives? And none of the good commercial applications are ported to Linux...
So, what's your suggestion? What are you using? Any good ideas? Write your answer in the comments!
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