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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"
So far it's the best tool I've found. It's lightweight and very fast. I love how easy it is to adjust the exposure and color temps. It's easy to find blown highlights and get rid of them. The downside is getting it to work with my new XSi was a pain. I had to use a hex editor on the executable and convert my CR2 files into DNG files. The extra steps are annoying. I tried out Lightroom, but there's no way I'd pay $300 for that bloated crap. I'm definitely going to check out rawtherapee.
Color management means an image is shown the same on every screen, and as close as possible on paper. You cannot do serious photo work without integrated color management, but unfortunately even Winsh*t still leads Linux by ten years here. It's time the Linux guys moved their efforts to desktop app integration - the server is done - you hear me, guys ? the server is done, move to improving the desktop !
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My wife is a pro-photographer and takes like, 500+ images per job, and, we had the $3000 dual G5 Mac and Aperature and Aperature yakked and we lost a year of work because Aperature's doesn't generate unique filenames for its images across subdirectories and when you export it overlays them...
Since then, she's switched to a WinPC and Lightroom, and Lightroom is both stable for her, and reliable and does more and she will never touch a Mac again. The moral of the story is that Adobe Lightroom is the real target, not Aperature... even the feature sets of Lightroom have her not missing her Mac...
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The golden ratio is certainly important, but no, automatically cropping everything to it is a bad idea.
This guy's the limit!
I didn't realize GIMP handled RAW (NEF and suchlike) formats and allowed adjusting of whitepoints, etc. I thought it was purely a raster image editor/tweaker.
Glad we could set you straight on that. I love the RAW tools in GIMP, they simplify my workflow significantly.
I do all my photoprocessing on Ubuntu.
-I use gthumb for organization and importing from the camera (way better than f-spot, which I've never liked)
-I use ufraw with the GIMP plugin to process raw files
-I use GIMP for further processing
-I use Hugin and its associated tools for panoramas
That's all I need, and I sell photos every week, however, I'll be looking into some of the tools mentioned in the article.
I've fought this same battle for a few years. Originally I used Canons software to process RAWs, it was terrible and I needed an alternative.
I tried Pixmatic Raw Shooter when it was free and that worked ok for me, and ran in Wine with minimal issues.
I switched to Picasa when it became available for Linux and supported RAW. It had much better album management, but looking back, the photos it produced looked terrible.
Eventually I switched to Capture One's software. I had to pay money for it, but it worked and it worked pretty well.
Recently I'd been getting fed up with them, their website is terrible to try to get updates from and there's not really a good way to manage albums of photos.
I gave the Aperture demo a shot as I'd just recently gotten a Macbook Pro. I found it very hard to use. Stuff just wasn't intuitive, the interface was cluttered and confusing.
Somewhere along the line I'd tried Lightroom v1 and thought it was very good. I was going to purchase it when it came out officially. I stalled when it came out and waited too long and missed it at the $99 launch pricing. I never did end up buying it and went back to Capture One.
Recently Adobe started up the Lightroom 2 Beta, I'm in the extended beta which will function until it's officially released and I can say with absolute certainty that I will be purchasing this when it's done. Everything about it is miles better than everything else. The interface is easy to use, and easy to get out of your way when you want to concentrate on what the photo looks like. It's got all the tools I feel I need to make it a one stop shop from import to web/print. I can't say enough good stuff about Lightroom 2 to do it justice. I guess my suggestion is that if you're really serious at all about your photos, stop screwing around with trying to find something Open Source and get Lightroom.
Of course YMMV, and that's why there's a demo/beta. Good luck, and good shooting!
Dude, RawShooter sucks horribly by comparison to Lightroom. I tried the last free version of RawShooter and it put me off so badly I almost didn't try Lightroom thinking it would be a slightly upgraded version. It was like night and day, the workflow in Lightroom just makes sense and doing slightly more complicated than simple conversion is a breeze. There's a guy out there that edited 2,000 wedding photos in three hours using Lightroom and a custom macro package, try doing that in RawShooter!
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I've been playing with Linux software and not had any success in getting Canon 1ds, not mark II or mark III, *.tif file recognized. Each program that claim raw support only loads up the tiny jpeg thumbnail in the *.tif, not the raw data itself. Has anyone found a solution for this?