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"

Comments

Linux alternative to aperture:

[A beautiful mind]

Hi, I'm GlaDoS, how may I help with your photo proooooocess-ss-ing needs?

It's too bad Adobe got their hands on RawShooter

[DanWS6]

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.

Here's a Summary!

[Kamineko]

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.

Re:Here's a Summary!

[E IS mC(Square)]

The discussion is not about specific photo editing tools, its about managing workflow (organizing, tagging, editing raw as well as compressed pictures). Author did mention GIMP, and intends to use it as part of his workflow.

As far as GIMP interface is concerned, let's just say its different than, er, Photoshop. It has been discussed and beaten to death already anyways, and offtopic here.

Re:Here's a Summary!

[Anonymous Coward]

The GIMP is disqualified for not being like Aperture at all, but like Photoshop.

Aperture and its Adobe competition, Lightroom, are metadata-based editors with very powerful RAW processing engines. They draw upon the power of metadata for everything from nondestructive editing (pixels are not touched until export) to project organization (through EXIF data and IPTC keywords).

They also both use a streamlined, task oriented interface, instead of the random collection of tools that is GIMP or Photoshop. Some "power user tips" that take a long sequence of steps in GIMP or Photoshop have been intelligently condensed into single sliders in Aperture and Lightroom, for easier use by everyone.

GIMP is still basically a destructive pixel pusher, like Photoshop. I don't think it has any RAW capability unless you tie it to dcraw. Therefore GIMP does not play in this sandbox.

Someone once said that the failure of Open Source office suites was their slavish imitation of Microsoft Office, and that what was really needed was a fresh new approach. The same could be said of why GIMP fails against Photoshop. The fresh new approach is being provided by Adobe and Apple's metadata-based image editors.

Re:Here's a Summary!

[Em Adespoton]

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.

This is the whole reason Aperture exists and people don't just use Photoshop (which incidentally does all of that too) for RAW processing.

Re:Here's a Summary!

[beh]

But that's part of the shortfall...

Lightroom and Aperture are so good BECAUSE they are integrated.

There is nothing really in Lightroom that you can't do with Photoshop - but the way it's integrated and how it's able to work with / organise large collections of photos makes Lightroom one of the most run Apps on my Mac.

As long as Linux doesn't offer a good competitor to Lightroom / Aperture, I will keep doing my photography stuff on the Mac...

Re:Here's a Summary!

[Sparr0]

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.

Re:Here's a Summary!

[Fred_A]

There's also digikam which does a *lot* of things including management, basic editing and raw processing (although I do that last bit in Bibble). It's Qt but will run fine on a Gnome desktop.

Re:Here's a Summary!

[harry666t]

> Qtpfsgui

Holy crap, how does one spell that? o_0

How did the author come up with this name? Did he smashed the keyboard with an enraged basement cat or what? Or is it "Cthulhu" reversed and triple-ROT13'd?...

Re:Here's a Summary!

[Draek]

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

Huh? out-of-the-box it can't, but you just click on Preferences > File Browser, uncheck Show only RAW files, and there ya go. Can't understand why "doesn't run on MacOSX" would be a con in an article about *Linux* alternatives to Aperture either, but oh well.

Ohh, and about Lightroom, the older (v2.x) versions used to be free (as in $0) on Linux, plus they ran on non-SSE2 CPUs, so Linux users strapped for cash may want to search the 'net for them instead.

Re:Here's a Summary!

[Goaway]

Well, GIMP doesn't actually support RAW formats, and for good reason. They are both unnecessarily manifold and proprietary.

That's not "good reason". That's just lacking capability.

Even the most basic cameras generally offer support for uncompressed images (usually in some sort of TIFF encapsulation), and if this is what you need, then use it.

You really don't know what raw files are even used for, do you? Very few cameras these days support TIFF, and that's because TIFF has none of the benefits of raw CCD data files, and is even larger than them.

(Technically, DNG raw files are TIFFs, but those are not in any way widely supported yet.)

Re:Here's a Summary!

[afidel]

If you don't know why RAW is needed then don't comment on it please. There's nothing like being able to simply reshoot a photo by changing the WB from the raw, adjusting layers in a JPG/TIFF doesn't accomplish anywhere near the same thing. I have a picture of my nephew blowing out his birthday candles that came out very overexposed (sun suddenly came out from behind a cloud), manipulating the JPG output was worthless because it made things too dark while trying to darken the overexposed area, throw the NEF into Lightroom, drop down two EV and adjust some levels and suddenly a white blurry mess becomes an ok shot of my nephew at his birthday.

Re:Here's a Summary!

[fluffman86]

Gimp can support RAW with the DCRAW addon, as well as CMYK with Separate+

Re:Here's a Summary!

[retzkek]

It certainly allows for some creative pronunciations... Cutey-puffs-gooey?

Re:Here's a Summary!

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as GIMP interface is concerned, let's just say its different than, er, Photoshop. It has been discussed and beaten to death already anyways, and offtopic here.

In my opinion, it hasn't been beaten to death enough.

Re:Here's a Summary!

[sootman]

... Qtpfsgui ...

OK, it's been a joke/cliche/truism for years about OSS packages with crappy names, but... damn. I think we have a winner. 6 consonants in a row and two vowels at the end. No one will over beat that. It looks like someone's cat walked over the keyboard just as the owner was clicking 'create new project' on SourceForge.

Linux needs system-wide color management

[ehack]

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 !

Re:Linux needs system-wide color management

[iamwhoiamtoday]

I LIKE IT that less and less features are tied into the command line. It's a lot easier for me to use a computer via GUI then via obscure command line commands. I run Ubuntu on two different computers at home, 3D acceleration, COMPIZ, WINE, all work extremely well. And I didn't have to use the command line to set any of them up. The average person who uses a computer (Example: My Mother) can now use Ubuntu, because the average person depends on a GUI instead of memorization of a bunch of command line commands. Most people don't CARE what Operating System they are using, as long as it is simple, as long as the UI is friendly. Look at OS X. It's rather user friendly. Linux is heading the same way, while Vista.... well, it's Vista. ;)

Re:Linux needs system-wide color management

[fork_daemon]

A line needs to be drawn somewhere..

Us geeks like the CLI even today because we know that the CLI is much more efficint for the kind of task that we do. It is quicker to do many tasks from the CLI than the click>wait app to launch> Click the Tab> Select The Option> Apply> Close. But we need to remember that the population of average user outruns the population of us geeks.

The developers need to continue designing better GUI apps without compromising on the CLI bundle that we still use.

By the way I havent seen any distro that has been dumping any CLI feature in favour of GUI.

Re:Linux needs system-wide color management

[samkass]

Speak for yourself, and don't try to speak for "us geeks". There are a lot of geeks who use the GUI for almost everything. Yes, I like to have tcsh available on my MacOS Terminal (I know some prefer bash), but the idea that preferring a GUI costs me geek cred (finally!) died over a decade ago.

Re:Linux needs system-wide color management

[PitaBred]

You aren't much of a geek, then. Preferring the GUI for CERTAIN TASKS is a good thing. But the GUI is simply not the best interface for everything. There are some things that are much better done with the CLI, which is what I think the GPP was getting at. Don't stop development of the command-line interface and tools simply because we want to appeal to grandmas and other people scared of the command line.

What a tool

[jonnythan]

I stopped caring when the author said that he crops "all" his photos to the same (non-standard) ratio.

Closed, done. Sorry.

Re:Aperature not as good Lightroom

[Selfbain]

You didn't run a backup for an entire year?

Re:Aperature not as good Lightroom

[An anonymous Frank]

Aperture's "library" is just a folder; Use "Show Package contents" from "Get Info" and copy all the originals wherever you want.

Re:Golden ratio?

[dsginter]

I immediately subconsciously discredited the author when he stated that the golden ratio was a requirement.

Apparently, your subconscious also posted this to slashdot.

Re:Aperature not as good Lightroom

[carou]

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?

Re:Golden ratio?

[gEvil (beta)]

The golden ratio is certainly important, but no, automatically cropping everything to it is a bad idea.

digiKam?

[Anonymous Coward]

What, has no-one mentioned digiKam yet?
What a terrible omission from the review.

Take a look, it's really good.

Re:digiKam?

[MMC Monster]

Totally agree.

I prefer Digikam to iPhoto for many reasons. The most important to me is that I can keep a folder organization that makes logical sense on disc and have it reflected in digikam.

One thing it gets right that other photo managers get wrong: Selecting photos and moving them to another photo will bring up a small dialog asking if you want to copy or move the files. Stupid and irrelevant for /.'ers, but great for those that forget that holding down the shift or control keys are how this is generally done in other applications (like my dad, who constantly screws up his iPhoto folders by copying when he thinks he is moving, or vice versa).

One slight gripe: It follows the KDE standard of a single click opening a photo instead of selecting it (easily changed by installing kcontrol in ubuntu and changing the mouse property).

Re:digiKam?

[MMC Monster]

Actually, no.

You point digikam to the root folder of your photos. It will create a single file there consisting of it's database.

No importing of folders necessary. :-)

Maybe you had it confused with f-spot?

Give it a try. You'll really love it and never go back. :-)

Re:digiKam?

[MMC Monster]

To clarify. If you move a photo in digikam to another folder, it will move that file to the corresponding folder on the disk (just as you would expect it to).

The purpose of the database file is (I believe) just to keep track of thumbnail images it creates.

I'm not sure about RAW file support. According to this web page ( http://www.digikam.org/drupal/node/344 ), RAW is supported with a standard plugin.

Re:huh?

[SQLGuru]

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

Re:huh?

[blankaBrew]

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.

Re:huh?

[blankaBrew]

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.

Re:huh?

[brassman]

"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.

Raw Therapee can handle JPEG/TIFF

[smably]

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.

Re:Aperature not as good Lightroom

[remmelt]

Not only that, he also blames the OS for it.

Square peg, round hole

[kwalker]

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:

1. gthumb-import (Which uses gphoto) to talk to the camera and bring in the RAW files. It even imports the .mov or .avi files for videos shot from the camera.
2. gthumb for photo organization. You can do some basic photo manips (Rotation) right from here, as well as tagging, categorization, and creating collections.
3. gimp (with ufraw-gimp to decode the RAW structure and doing some initial tricks like exposure-compensation and white balance) for more advanced photo manipulation, cropping, rotation (For anything other than 90-degree-increment rotations), perspective correction, red-eye removal, HDR, de-noising (Using GREYCstoration-gimp), workflow-automation (It's scriptable in Perl, Python, and others) and finishing after running through other programs like...
4. hugin for panoramic creation. Photo-stitching is pretty easy. It helps with reference-point creation, FOV calculation, and final panorama "projection" (rectliniar, square, wrap-around, etc).

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.

Re:huh?

[VGPowerlord]

Aperture Laboratories is a computer-aided enrichment center to test the Aperture Science Hand-held Portal device.

More information is available in a video.

Digikam works great for a JPEG workflow

[BigJim.fr]

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.

Re:It's too bad Adobe got their hands on RawShoote

[afidel]

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!

Re:It's too bad Adobe got their hands on RawShoote

[roguetrick]

I'll choose Raw The Rapee for 1000. Haw haw.

He is confused

[skeeto]

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,

• F-spot
• Picasa - proprietary
• LightZone - proprietary
• Bibble - proprietary
• Raw Therapee - proprietary
• Qtpfsgui

He stated a criteria ("open-source"), then 4 out of 6 had nothing to do with that criteria. Nice work on consistency there, pal.