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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"
Hi, I'm GlaDoS, how may I help with your photo proooooocess-ss-ing needs?
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Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
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.
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 !
This is not a signature.
I have to admit, even though Picasa could probably use more crop aspect ratios, I immediately subconsciously discredited the author when he stated that the golden ratio was a requirement.
I stopped caring when the author said that he crops "all" his photos to the same (non-standard) ratio.
Closed, done. Sorry.
You didn't run a backup for an entire year?
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
Aperture's "library" is just a folder; Use "Show Package contents" from "Get Info" and copy all the originals wherever you want.
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...
Why didn't she just restore from the backups you've been helping her keep?
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
It also allows you to rate your photos which is immensely important when you come back from a shoot with lots of photos. It also allows you to group and stack photos...their thumbnails are literally stacked and you can unstack them and restack them, along with promoting photos within a stack. A file manager is no substitute for a photo manager when you are a photographer.
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.
All the more reason to use time machine it seems. ;)
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 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 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.
Not only that, he also blames the OS for it.
But it's the golden ratio: the most perfect of ratios!
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
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.
Aperture Laboratories is a computer-aided enrichment center to test the Aperture Science Hand-held Portal device.
More information is available in a video.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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.
And how is disappointment with one program (it's spelled Aperture by the way), translates into not liking the OS and the hardware?
This is just silly. If you are using the Mac, then you don't need aperture nor lightroom, since both try to be image database first and image editing software second.
Mac OS's spotlight does everything Aperture does, and if you create regular backups you are fine.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
It's non-standard because no camera sensor or standard print size uses that ratio.
I don't care if he dislikes any Apple products. In fact, he seems to be quite fond of Apple products, since he uses them.
No halfway decent photographer shoehorns absolutely all of his work into ONE nonstandard aspect ratio. Different compositions require different aspect ratios.
The only reason to use one aspect ratio on all of your compositions is that you're simply not good or talented enough to know any better.
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!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
I'll choose Raw The Rapee for 1000. Haw haw.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
Aperture doesn't generate filenames
No, that's retarded. Whenever any system maintains a repository of any kind, you expect it to place its own names on things. Anything other than that is simply unacceptable. You don't buy a product like that to worry about filenames. ... you buy it do to things right..
Secondly, why are you so moronically assuming that I switched because of Aperture? Aperture might keep me from switching back because the hole in the repository design made me lose my faith in Apple, but the real problem was that there are more Photoshop plugins for windows than there are for mac, so she switched.
Why don't you read, instead of assume?
This is my sig.
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
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?