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Linux Alternatives To Apple's Aperture
somethingkindawierd writes "An experiment focusing on open source tools for Ubuntu Linux to compete with Aperture on the Mac. The author didn't think he would find a worthwhile open source solution, but to his surprise he found some formidable raw processing tools. A good read for any Linux fan or photographer looking for capable and inexpensive tools"
F-Spot, The default photo editor that comes with Ubuntu 8.04, was quickly discarded. [FOSS]
Picasa, Really liked the application overall. I crop all my photos to the golden ratio of 1.62:1, so this limitation is unacceptable. [NOT FOSS]
LightZone, very similar to both Aperture and Adobe's Lightroom. Costs $200 and is not open source. No online support forum.
Bibble, very fast and it only costs $130. It does not however have any photo-management capabilities. No tagging, project management, or meta data editing. [NOT FOSS]
Raw Therapee, raw photo processor, free. It does not, however, run on Mac OS X. Does not manage projects. And it does not work with anything but raw photos, so it will not allow for processing jpegs or tiffs
Qtpfsgui, another useful application. HDR tool for Ubuntu Linux, Macintosh, and Windows.
The result:
There isn't an all-in-one package that will do the trick, but by combining Ubuntu's file manager Nautilus for project management, Raw Therapee for raw processing, and the Gimp for non-raw processing, just about everything I do in Aperture can be done on Ubuntu Linux using free and open source solutions.
Aperture's "library" is just a folder; Use "Show Package contents" from "Get Info" and copy all the originals wherever you want.
Why did she get a new computer?
There's a MacOS X version of Lightroom, and it seems to work just fine - I specifically chose it over Aperture after evaluating the trial versions of both last year...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
What, has no-one mentioned digiKam yet?
What a terrible omission from the review.
Take a look, it's really good.
The RAW image is the one straight from the camera (basically a RAW dump of the CCD output).
Photo Management includes more than just folders (a good example is tagging -- I want to find all images tagged "Outdoors" or tagged "Porn" or tagged both "Outdoor" and "Porn"). Of course, like folders, tags are only as good as you make them.
Layne
I forgot to mention that the biggest feature of Aperture or Lightroom is the ability to make non-destructive edits. The original RAW file is left untouched and it is accompanied by a "recipe" that contains all of the changes to your image. You can cycle through your changes or revert back. Plus, it saves HD space by never duplicating the image.
I have never had such a problem with aperture with 600+ images per job (even some 2000+ jobs). My complain with it is that it is too slow.
OTOH, Lightroom + Photoshop work pretty fine on my G4 machine.
As for Open Source, my main complain is that it is not as productive as the Lightroom + Photoshop setup. I do like RAW Studio. I love The Gimp. But they do stand in my way of setting up lots of images.
In a simple math, RAW Studio + Gimp is a work day more than Lightroom + Photoshop. And I'm more used to GIMP's interface than Photoshop's one, as GIMP was one of the first image manipulation programs I ever used (circa 1998).
Screenshots might help - basically it's a file manager with additional sorting, filtering and whatnot designed for organising photos. Here's Lightroom's library view as an example - I've filtered to show only photos I've given three stars or more, and selected one so you can see all the keywords and other metadata assigned to that photo. All searchable, sortable, filterable and so on!
With regard to editing, here's a screenshot from the develop view. All the edits are non-destructive - you can see a history on the left. 'RAW' refers to the image from the camera being in an unprocessed, raw-data-from-image-sensor format, which gives you a bit more latitude in tweaking white balance, contrast, exposure and the like.
(I don't normally shoot 'RAW', but my once-in-a-lifetime shipyard visit coincided with some utterly horrendous weather - getting just the right exposure in unlit, semi-derelict Eastern European industrial buildings at 7am on a cold, dark, wintry morning proved a little tricky at times... ;-] )
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
F-Spot, The default photo editor that comes with Ubuntu 8.04, was quickly discarded. [FOSS]
Maybe change that to [fOSS].
It's open source, for sure, but since F-Spot is built on mono, a port of Microsoft .NET, it probably contains Microsoft intellectual property, the licensing of which may be dependent on which distro (e.g. SUSE) you're running, so 'Free' is debatable.
It could be a patent trap ... or not. That uncertainty is certainly disconcerting.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"RAW" photos are a lossless capture, which means they are larger files (bad) but with few of the artifacts produced by JPEG compression, and thus your editing options are greatly increased (good).
The exact details of the format depend on the make and even the model of camera you're using; a low-end "point and shoot" camera seldom provides RAW output (see recent Slashdot article on FOSS firmware that adds RAW support to higher-end Canon P&S cameras, however).
A modern digital camera will also add a nice chunk of metadata to each image, giving the details of its exposure. The main difference between a FILL manager and a PHOTO manager is the latter's awareness of, and ability to use, this metadata in a "workflow."
By "workflow" we mean the situation where a professional photographer will routinely generate thousands of images at a wedding, and will want to pick through them to find images worth further refinement, apply a set of transforms (crop, tweak the exposure, sharpen 0.02%, yada yada) to them in large batches, but SELECTIVELY, to produce a finished body of quality work.
Managing those images only with a file manager would be nightmarish; being able to select just the images that were shot with Lens A to apply a certain transform means you can automate the process, go have pizza while the mass of bits gets twiddled, then come back and get creative with the results.
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
I don't know why the author thinks that Raw Therapee can't process JPEGs or TIFFs. Just go into the preferences screen, uncheck "Show only RAW files", and you're set.
Also missing from the comparison: Rawstudio and UFRaw.
If you're interested in RAW processing on Linux, there's an excellent blog called Linux Photography about this very subject.
I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less.
Since the author of the blog post is asking for an Aperture clone for Linux, the answer will pretty much always be "no". If the author were to ask "Can I do my photo processing, from importing RAW files to storing the finished picture and printing?" the answer is yes.
Here's how I do it:
Just save all projects in .xcf or .xcf.bz2 and export finished product to .png.
One last thing, for all the haters who whine about ONLY having 16.8 million colors to work with, even without your help GIMP is integrating GEGL which will bring 16bit integer and 32bit floating point per component.
... And so it comes to this.
I have used many Linux image browsers and editors along with a stable of home grown bash scripts. Even though I still use my scripts out of habit, I must say that Digikam can replace most of them and provide a seamless JPEG workflow in a state of the art environment. There are still some small things I would appreciate, such as a better curves dialog, but overall I have been a very happy user. Some tools such as the crop tool with framing aids are the best I have ever seen, and overall I have seen my photo editing time almost halved by using Digikam. It is not a general graphics editor - for retouching you still need something else, but for the basic editing (everything that touches the whole image) it fills the need perfectly. And it is the best IPTC tagger I have used so far.
Aperture doesn't generate filenames. It uses the filenames generated by your camera. I'm guessing you have your camera set to restart the numbering for each memory card. I'm not sure exactly what you did to delete your files but don't blame Aperture for your mistake, it will only do what you tell it to and will prompt you if you want to replace a file with another of the same name.
I'm betting that you still don't have a backup. When you lose files next time are you going to blame Lightroom and the PC and switch to Linux? Seems like a lot of work when you could just admit to yourself that you screwed up and change the way you work to include a backup.
This experiment focuses mainly on Aperture and what tools, if any, exist for Ubuntu to replace my Aperture workflow with something cross-platform and open-source that I can use on Mac OS X and Ubuntu.
And then what he looks at,
He stated a criteria ("open-source"), then 4 out of 6 had nothing to do with that criteria. Nice work on consistency there, pal.
But I'm a bit surprised to see that no one has mentioned BlueMarine.
Granted, I'm just beginning to examine how such applications address me needs (not sure if they do, yet... Adobe Bridge seems to be all I need), but I do like the way that BlueMarine works.
Any thoughts?
#SickNotWeak