[HN Gopher] My free-software photography workflow
___________________________________________________________________
My free-software photography workflow
Author : fidelramos
Score : 252 points
Date : 2022-04-04 09:54 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.fidelramos.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.fidelramos.net)
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| RawTheRapee sounds a lot less pleasant than RawTherapee! :P
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I thought "why would someone name anything that?" until I went
| to the website and found that this guy had for some reason
| changed the capitalisation to something much more creepy.
| yazantapuz wrote:
| At first glance I have read it as rawtheRapee too. Was totally
| confused as how on earth they could have choosed that name.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Reminds me of the "analyst-therapist" in "arrested
| development"
| thechao wrote:
| (Analrapist)
|
| "Oh! It's pronounced _uh-nalll-rupist_! "
|
| "I wasn't concerned with its pronunciation."
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I was considering writing it down but the joke works only
| with the correct pronounciation.
| reaperducer wrote:
| http://www.penisland.net
| FredPret wrote:
| "We specialize in wood"
|
| "Once we built a pen so large that we had difficulty
| finding a box it would fit in."
|
| Also, their logo is... suggestive
| sdoering wrote:
| From their FAQ:
|
| > Q: Can I provide my own wood?
|
| > A: In most cases we can handle your wood. We do require
| all shipments to be clean, free of parasites and pass all
| standard customs inspections.
|
| Damn - thanks. Now I will never get this site out of my
| head again.
| fidelramos wrote:
| Blog author here. Would you believe I didn't notice the proper
| capitalization is RawTherapee and not RawTheRapee? I didn't
| think twice about the semantics, now I can't unsee it. Thanks
| for the comment!
| igouy wrote:
| So can you edit your blog post to fix that?
| fidelramos wrote:
| Absolutely, I just uploaded the fix.
| leephillips wrote:
| Thanks for putting together your article. It's useful and
| informative, and a generous effort on your part.
| fidelramos wrote:
| Thank you for your kind words, much appreciated!
| dylan604 wrote:
| I think I've seen this SNL skit of Sean Connery:
|
| I'll take RawTheRapee for $500 Alex.
| gjm11 wrote:
| The section of the TeXbook (the user manual for Knuth's TeX
| typesetting system) that talks about hyphenation has the
| lovely/horrible example of "the-rapists pre-aching on wee-
| knights".
| tripu wrote:
| Very useful, thanks!
| fidelramos wrote:
| Glad you liked it! :)
| 120photo wrote:
| I am going to plug Andy Astbury's YouTube channel here,
| specifically his fantastic RawTherapee tutorials. Where Adobe,
| MS, and other big companies thrive is the amount of high quality
| training and tutorials for inferior software. RawTherapee is an
| amazing piece of software that is hard to use with limited
| learning resources (compared to Adobe or Capture One) but people
| like Andy are fixing some of that.
|
| Edit: Forgot to add a link https://youtu.be/310rCQZe0NI
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Where Adobe, MS, and other big companies thrive is the amount
| of high quality training and tutorials for inferior software.
|
| I'm afraid I don't buy this unfounded muck-slinging.
|
| I know the open-source evangelists live in a rose tinted world
| where open-source automatically equals better.
|
| However I think its only fair and reasonable to admit that it
| is possible to make high quality closed-source software.
|
| Specifically, in terms of Adobe, I think it is deeply unfair
| and unfounded to call it "inferior". There is, for example,
| high-levels of integration between Adobe tools that is simply
| not present in open-source.
|
| Ultimately money talks. December 2021 there were 26 million
| Adobe Creative Suite subscribers and growing. If Adobe was that
| shit, do you really think people would continue paying them ?
|
| I know some people running companies in the design sector
| (larger companies, not one-man band freelancers), Adobe is a
| necessary business expense, they pay it because they want it,
| because time is money, and if their designers get the job done
| better, quicker and more efficiently in Adobe then they will
| pay the subscription. (Oh, and to address your specific point,
| the designers spend exactly zero hours watching training and
| tutorials on the Adobe website).
| jknecht wrote:
| I will also add that, for photographers, there is bundle from
| Adobe that I consider to be a tremendous value. For about
| $10/month (where I live, it's easy to spend more than that on
| a single drink in a bar), I get access to both LightRoom and
| Photoshop. I've tried open source alternatives, and they are
| good, but none of them are necessarily better than the Adobe
| product.
|
| I hate the fact that I am paying for yet another
| subscription, but in this case, over the course of 5 years, I
| am just barely paying the retail price of the old CD-based
| product. So (a) I don't feel like I'm being fleeced, and (b)
| I get to spread the payments out without really paying more.
|
| Every time I've tried moving into the world of FOSS
| photography, I've wasted dozens of hours trying to figure out
| how to do relatively simple things, modifying and tweaking
| configurations, or completely removing and reinstalling
| because an update broke something that should have never
| broken. I work in software, so I'm not exactly a dummy on
| this stuff; and I know that sometimes that's just part of the
| deal - especially in a world where you get what you pay for.
|
| In the end, I had to decide whether I wanted my hobby time to
| be focused on working with my photos or working with my
| software. And that is why I happily pay.
| bpye wrote:
| I've tried open source photo editing before, and honestly,
| the editing experience is pretty good. I've always
| struggled to match Lightroom for library management
| however, even if Lightroom doesn't deal with my network
| drive properly (it _always_ thinks it 's out of sync). And
| so, like you, I've always ended up going back to Adobe's
| photography plan.
|
| I would really love to use open source tools instead, the
| network drive bug is very annoying and not being able to
| run on Linux is pretty unfortunate. The overall process
| just ends up being quicker with Lightroom than Darktable or
| RawTherapee though :(
| igouy wrote:
| > whether I wanted my hobby time to be focused on working
| with my photos or working with my software.
|
| Exactly.
|
| I aggressively delete most images as-soon-as they are on
| the file system. (Is this image worth my time?) So less of
| an image management problem.
|
| I use ~5% of what RawTherapee provides, because I no longer
| struggle to make OK pictures from flawed images. Instead I
| make pictures I like from OK images.
| 120photo wrote:
| 1) > (Oh, and to address your specific point, the designers
| spend exactly zero hours watching training and tutorials on
| the Adobe website).
|
| Yes, most of the time when you know your tools you will not
| spend much time going through training material, but if you
| needed to there are plenty of options and not just from
| Adobe. If you want to learn and get started there are plenty
| more options.
|
| 2) > I know the open-source evangelists live in a rose tinted
| world where open-source automatically equals better.
|
| I don't recall stating that OSS = better, but in many cases
| it is. RawTherapee may not be as easy to use compared to
| Lightroom of Capture One but if used properly you can achieve
| superior results. One closed source RAW processor I can think
| of that lacks much training material but achieves great
| results in Raw Photo Processor (better than LR of RT in many
| ways). GIMP is great but until they can implement Adjustment
| layers it will never be a good alternative to Photoshop. IMO
| PhotoLine is much better than Photoshop in many ways, but
| also lack much training material or a large budget (being
| developed by two brothers in Germany). I can keep going.
|
| I should add to my original comment that the amount of
| training and getting a product out for users to use is major
| for a company to succeed. Adobe and Microsoft have done a
| great job at getting their products in front of students and
| making sure they are comfortable with their products before
| going into the working world.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| > GIMP is great but until they can implement Adjustment
| layers it will never be a good alternative to Photoshop.
|
| GIMP is not great _until_ it has adjustment layers.
|
| In the meantime, nobody on a budget should be using
| Photoshop when Affinity Photo is so inexpensive (and
| significantly better than Photoshop in a couple of
| important ways).
| 120photo wrote:
| Affinity is great but there is also not as much training
| as PS, but for the price it is worth having. One thing
| that Affinity and PhotoLine can do that PS can't is make
| curves adjustments in the Lab color space without having
| to change the entire document from RGB to Lab. I am sure
| there are plenty of other things XYZ apps do better than
| PS, but I will say this again, PS has so much training
| and tutorials out there which save you time.
|
| To be fair to GIMP, I used PS back to when adjustment
| layers were not a thing. The work that team does is
| amazing and I give them props (though I still would love
| to see adjustment layers).
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| > One thing that Affinity and PhotoLine can do that PS
| can't is make curves adjustments in the Lab color space
| without having to change the entire document from RGB to
| Lab.
|
| Yeah, this is super-useful. Also the layer blend curves
| are amazingly useful, particularly combined with live
| filter layers. And it can do LUT inference (e.g. from
| HALD CLUT images). I use that all the time.
|
| > To be fair to GIMP, I used PS back to when adjustment
| layers were not a thing.
|
| So did I, but GIMP has existed for almost as long as
| adjustment layers in PS! And for all that time they've
| refused to prioritise something that IMO is
| transformative in photoshop; it's the basis of non-
| destructive editing.
| atestu wrote:
| Link: https://www.youtube.com/c/AndyAstbury
| jmmv wrote:
| Thanks for the article.
|
| Any thoughts on how to deal with DNG files?
|
| A few years ago, I bought into Apple's "DNG promise" and
| converted all my raw photos into lossless DNGs AND my JPEGs into
| lossy DNGs. Silly me. I now feel trapped into Lightroom, which I
| pay for out of inertia and wouldn't like to any longer... and I
| feel that such conversion was a huge mistake.
|
| The reason I ask is because I've found support for DNG files to
| be lacking in many cases, and when I researched this recently,
| the answers didn't seem better than years ago. The article
| doesn't talk about this at all. So I'd love to be proven wrong :)
| Zak wrote:
| DNG is supported by most open source RAW developers, e.g.
| Darktable. I'm assuming you've had some issue more subtle than
| inability to find a program roughly equivalent to Lightroom
| that has general support for the format, but you may need to
| elaborate if you want useful responses.
| jmmv wrote:
| To be honest, I haven't yet put any serious effort into
| figuring out how to abandon Lightroom. At most... I just did
| a few searches for a couple of programs I already knew about
| and looked at whether they supported DNG. Most comments I
| found online sounded negative (but again, my research was too
| superficial). I didn't even know Darktable existed for
| example!
|
| I am a very light Lightroom user. I have thousands of
| pictures, but mostly use Lightroom to categorize them and do
| some trivial edits here and there. The pictures are already
| organized in a tree structure with sidecar XMP (?) metadata
| files, so I don't think the LR catalog has a ton of
| information I care about anyway?
|
| I'd be nice to have a pure file-system based catalog that
| separates edits from originals in some way, and that keeps
| photo metadata attached to the photos themselves.
|
| But I guess my question remains: is it a good idea to
| continue "investing" into DNG by converting new photos into
| it, or is it better to "stop the bleeding"? Because from what
| I have read before, this format didn't seem too well-
| supported outside of Adobe apps...
| Zak wrote:
| Darktable and RawTherapee are fairly Lightroom-like (but
| different enough that you shouldn't be surprised when
| things are, well, different), but Filmulator might actually
| be the best fit for your preferences.
|
| Regardless, the best way to get an answer to your question
| about DNG is probably to try some of these programs with
| your files and see if you encounter any problems. DNG is
| typically _better_ supported than camera-specific raw
| formats.
| npteljes wrote:
| I'd say to keep adding to your DNG collection as is,
| because if you switch and you need to convert, 1-2% extra
| images won't hurt. RawTherapee is also a RAW image
| processing software that can help, instead of Darkroom, or
| maybe just to convert your DNGs to whatever other raw
| format Darkroom likes.
| mod50ack wrote:
| DNG is an open format. RawTherapee reads DNGs natively.
| Fwirt wrote:
| One interesting thing to note about open-source vs commercial
| software when it comes to RAW conversion is that commercial
| offerings like Adobe CS, CaptureOne and Affinity Photo sometimes
| have a relationship with camera manufacturers to get access to
| their proprietary demosaicing algorithm for their camera's
| sensors. These algorithms are also embedded in the camera
| firmware and are responsible for converting the RAW sensor data
| into something resembling an image. Thus, when you view a RAW
| file in the camera (or a JPEG straight off the camera), or in a
| commercial offering, you're getting an image that looks more like
| what the manufacturer of the camera intended. Likely that's what
| they used in-house when developing the camera software. So
| whether or not you trust the camera company to do the best job of
| demosaicing their own sensor is up to you, but if you use open-
| source software you're still going to get great images, but
| they're never going to look exactly like the JPEGs you get off
| the camera. If you're a professional this probably doesn't
| matter, but for an amateur who just wants to shoot RAW to take
| great lossless photos and be able to do some tweaking in post-
| processing it can be frustrating.
|
| For Canon at least, their in-house raw converter/photo editor is
| available for free (Canon Digital Photo Professional) and while
| its features are definitely not quite as good as either free or
| commercial offerings, its features are (for a total amateur like
| me) "good enough", and it will produce images that are identical
| to what comes off the camera. Plus you can save some of the raw
| processing steps that you did to a profile that you can load onto
| the camera and use in the field, so if you're shooting to JPEG
| you can bake in some of that processing ahead of time.
| throwanem wrote:
| > if you use open-source software you're still going to get
| great images
|
| Not necessarily. My D500's raws look OK in Darktable, but my
| D850's were awful last time I tried it, noisy and with patches
| of weird color casts.
|
| I didn't try very hard to fix it, because I like Lightroom's
| functionality and UI a lot better anyway. Maybe they've
| successfully reverse-engineered the format by now, and I
| respect their work immensely no matter that it doesn't work for
| me, but especially with relatively new or relatively high-end
| cameras there is no guarantee of good FOSS support for raw
| formats.
| fleddr wrote:
| "So whether or not you trust the camera company to do the best
| job of demosaicing their own sensor is up to you, but if you
| use open-source software you're still going to get great
| images, but they're never going to look exactly like the JPEGs
| you get off the camera. If you're a professional this probably
| doesn't matter, but for an amateur who just wants to shoot RAW
| to take great lossless photos and be able to do some tweaking
| in post-processing it can be frustrating."
|
| I don't really see the distinction between amateurs and
| professionals here. I think both want the RAW starting point
| (after import) to look the way it was rendered in-camera.
|
| I think it's a myth that professionals "want" a bland starting
| point and customize everything. The ideal workflow is that your
| RAW looks the same as in-camera, and then you use the power of
| RAW to customize. That's quite different from having a neutral
| RAW and trying to reconstruct everything.
| Fwirt wrote:
| I meant that a professional likely has an end goal in mind
| for developing an exposure and can use any software to obtain
| the result they want, whereas an amateur is likely more
| reliant on the software to provide sane defaults that look
| good enough. I don't think professionals necessarily want a
| bland starting point, but they probably end up straying so
| far from the default settings anyway that having a different
| starting point is less of a hindrance to them.
|
| Aside from that, the default settings and processing that the
| manufacturer applies may be undesirable for someone pursuing
| a more realistic and less "filtered for focus groups" result.
| All photography is illusion, but some want more control over
| the illusion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMMogOoWEbI
| notyourday wrote:
| > One interesting thing to note about open-source vs commercial
| software when it comes to RAW conversion is that commercial
| offerings like Adobe CS, CaptureOne and Affinity Photo
| sometimes have a relationship with camera manufacturers to get
| access to their proprietary demosaicing algorithm for their
| camera's sensors.
|
| This is absolutely true even for Nikons and Canons of the
| world.
|
| I'm always baffled about the obsession with open source for
| photo editing workflows on a desktop. From "I just want to get
| stuff done" OSS is just junk. It is a better junk than it was
| before, but it is still junk. And why would not it be? It is
| all about optimizing for the experience and there's not a
| single piece of open source software that is optimized for
| user's experience. Why on earth do we think this -- a fairly
| complex type of software -- would be any different if we cannot
| get _themes_ in GNOME work consistently?
| uuyi wrote:
| After battling with Linux on the desktop periodically for a
| couple of decades I came to the same conclusion. All the
| boring problems like consistency and stability are never
| solved. Only new problems written. I gave up and went to Mac.
| It's not perfect but it's less imperfect.
|
| However I will say that Lightroom is horrible and I hate it.
| Only because of the memory gobbling and the persistent cost
| until I'm dead.
|
| As I'm not a professional I settled on Apple Photos and
| Pixelmator Pro for when I bend Photos too far. This is good
| enough and doesn't come with the persistent cost issues
| associated with subscriptions and paying for lots of RAM.
| Also works entirely offline or online if you need it to.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I have a similar workflow but with darktable. Rawtherapee has an
| easier interface but last time I checked it didn't have local
| adjustments which I need sometimes.
|
| Once you understand the UI, digikam is fantastic.
| Jiejeing wrote:
| This is very interesting, my own workflow is with shotwell +
| darktable but shotwell is a bit too limited for my usage.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Syncthing is really underrated. Clever, cute little bit of
| software.
|
| Darktable is a bad user experience on the Mac but it's definitely
| capable of good results, as is Rawtherapee.
|
| But I generally don't use open source stuff for photography; I
| have sunk expense in Mac software and I'll use that until it
| breaks.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| I prefer Darktable over Rawtherapee, but both are great open-
| source RAW development programs. LR is obviously more fully
| featured but for amateur or semi-pro they are more than
| acceptable.
| Derbasti wrote:
| There's a lot of mud-flinging in this thread about the
| superiority of this software or that.
|
| Frankly, this is all BS. All of these softwares are capable of
| producing professional results. The difference is made by the
| _user_ , not the software. Learn one of them; any one of them.
| Learn it well. The individual choice in the end is just a
| preference, but does not determine quality. You do. Thankfully.
|
| (That's a bit like modern cameras. They are all great. They are
| all capable of professional results. The individual choice in
| the end doesn't matter.)
| KarlKode wrote:
| Well to take your argument and show its downfall you can
| argue that you can achieve the same result with a hex editor.
| The difference between the tools is how you get to the
| result. You're right that the capabilities of the user are
| usually the more limiting factor but allowing the user to
| achieve a certain output in an intuitive way can be
| magnitudes more complicated that developing the required
| (technical) feature-set.
| vaidhy wrote:
| It is the other way, IMHO. As an amateur, my photos are not
| pixel perfect. I depend a lot of Topaz to sharpen the image and
| remove noise. My LR is mostly around adjusting the basic
| parameters which I can do in Darktable/RawTherapee. However,
| the new masking capabilities in LR has been a big boon where I
| can easily select the subject/sky and make adjustments.
|
| I expect that the professionals take better pictures straight
| out of camera and need less adjustments while the dabblers like
| me need more post processing help. Now, I am struck on a loop
| with Topaz and LR and cannot switch out of windows (or mac).
| mguerville wrote:
| Capture One has free versions that have missing features but
| offer good masking, I used to pay for LR and switched to C1
| with minimal impact (the healing brush isn't as good)
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _LR is obviously more fully featured_
|
| IIRC there have been a few times when CS researchers working on
| image algorithms published their findings with a Darktable
| implementation first.
| moolcool wrote:
| I can't speak to lightroom, but I found that CaptureOne
| renders Sony RAWs much better out-of-the-box than either
| Darktable or RawTherapee.
| paulmd wrote:
| Yes. "Open-source workflow" means you're leaving quality on
| the table.
|
| This is one place where there's just no replacement to
| hiring engineers to sit down and work on the product for a
| few years. The open-source stuff is nowhere close to
| CaptureOne or Lightroom in terms of quality of RAW
| conversion or the quality of the image processing.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I found CaptureOne to beat out all of Adobes stuff by
| quite a bit as well
| paulmd wrote:
| I haven't used it but I hear very very good things.
|
| Does CaptureOne support a "RAW+sidecar metadata" format?
| It is important to me that the raws not be modified (i.e.
| metadata not written directly to them) and that the
| metadata be a per-file sidecar and not just a single
| giant catalog file. Lightroom seems to support this
| workflow but others didn't seem to (or at least didn't
| explicitly state they did).
|
| That would be the ideal workflow for me in terms of
| generating useful catalogs and making backups smooth.
| Melatonic wrote:
| It definitely does yes and that is the default.
| CaptureOne is basically the highest tier of the
| proprietary photo editing apps out there. You do not need
| one of their very expensive medium format cameras to use
| it
| moolcool wrote:
| > You do not need one of their very expensive medium
| format cameras to use it
|
| Not only that, but they also have an extensive collection
| of camera profiles and lens corrections for pretty much
| every vendor. Their support for Sony and Fuji are
| particularly great.
| fidelramos wrote:
| OP here.
|
| > "Open-source workflow" means you're leaving quality on
| the table.
|
| That is true, but my choice of software is not uni-
| dimensional, I also care about trusting the software I
| run in my computer and their maintainability in the long
| term, to highlight two other important dimensions for me.
| When considering all this together I have little choice
| but to use free software exclusively.
|
| Of course different people will assign different weights
| to each dimension, and that is completely fine, but let's
| not oversimplify the decision to just "quality".
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Same here. However, I'd argue that Lightroom is probably easier
| to use but Darktable at this point has much more features and
| depending on how skilled you are at using it also gives you
| more fine-grained control and more options to do the same
| things that Lightroom does.
|
| Using Darktable has gotten easier over time. But it definitely
| has some things that are probably not that intuitive for new
| users. The lack of features and opinionated nature of Lightroom
| might be considered a feature for some but I don't think there
| is anything specific that it does that doesn't have at least
| several alternatives in Darktable at this point. We can haggle
| about the quality of the algorithms on either side of course.
| I'm pretty happy with what Darktable does here and it seems it
| has developers that are really obsessive on this front. Check
| e.g. lead developer Aurelian Pierre's youtube channel for some
| in depth discussion of what Darktable does and why it works the
| way it works.
|
| The transition to the so-called the scene referred work flow in
| Darktable in recent years has made my workflow a lot simpler.
| But it is also something that has a bit of a learning curve.
|
| Scene referred means that instead of applying some one size
| fits all curve based on your camera model, it actually looks at
| your photo and applies the exposure and filmic modules which
| together will try to fit the curve for each photo using some
| heuristics and nice algorithms. The result is typically pretty
| good out of the box and any further tweaks tend to be
| straightforward.
|
| A typical workflow for me in Darktable works like so:
|
| - import photos and move them to the right place. I'm not big
| on tagging, so I tend to skip that.
|
| - apply some initial star ratings in the lighttable section so
| I can focus on the ones I like the most.
|
| - after initial screening, anything below 2 stars gets hidden
| and I start editing.
|
| - I open the photos for editing one by one and let Darktable
| apply its defaults (and my overrides). For example, my Fuji
| requires +1.25 stops exposure correction as it tends to
| underexpose to avoid blowing highlights and I have a preset for
| this that auto applies. Auto applied settings and copy pasting
| parts of a history stack or applying them as styles is one of
| many workflow enhancements that allow you to be productive in
| Darktable. Worth reading up on if you have a lot of photos to
| process.
|
| - I tweak the exposure defaults manually to set the gray point.
| The nice thing with this is that filmic adjusts black and white
| points accordingly. You can think of this as an intelligent way
| to set the brightness.
|
| - tweak filmic parameters if still needed (quite often this is
| not needed). I do typically apply some contrast but not a lot.
| This is also the place to deal with highlight recovery if that
| is needed.
|
| - Crop & rotate as needed. You can do this at any point of
| course but I like to get this out of the way early.
|
| - decide if I want lens correction and local contrast modules
| turned on. Not every photo needs this. Lens correction is nice
| for wide angle photos. Local contrast can be nice but I try not
| to over use it.
|
| - Deal with any color issues and saturation as needed. There
| are various modules for this, including a few recent additions
| that work well with the scene referred work flow. Mostly
| Darktable does the right things here and I don't actually need
| to do a lot here. But I do like the new perceptive saturation
| slider in the color balance module.
|
| - Apply other modules as needed; I tend to be conservative with
| this. For example noise reduction is sometimes nice and
| profiled noise reduction does a good job out of the box but
| sometimes when noise is really a problem there are alternative
| strategies to explore.
|
| - export everything with 2 stars or more as jpg & upload it
| some place for publishing
| test1235 wrote:
| Can you use darktable without the import step?
|
| The place where I store my RAW files is not where I work on
| them - I'll typically copy them from a memory card to my
| machine, do whatever processing, then shift them away to
| storage, so I find the whole idea of a 'library' unecessary.
| dantondwa wrote:
| Yep, I work exactly in the same way with Darktable and I
| really enjoy it. Once you get it, it's quite straight forward
| and I'm really happy with the results!
| corndoge wrote:
| Never heard of rawtherapee, looks dope. Like others I use
| Darktable, which is especially awesome because it allows me to
| directly export to a new album on my Piwigo server. If you
| publish photos Piwigo is awesome too.
| jrapdx3 wrote:
| It was film in the old days, but all digital since early 2000's.
| I've always preferred open source software which has really come
| a _long_ way since GIMP and friends were in their infancy. My
| workflow has evolved over the years to suit my uses of
| photography. Mostly photos are raw material and highly
| manipulated for artistic purposes.
|
| For my purposes jpegs have usually been good enough so I seldom
| need to do raw processing. For those times I have Darktable and
| RawTherapee installed, both are incredible programs that have
| worked well for me.
|
| GIMP continues to be a primary tool. It's not perfect but it does
| many things extremely well. For example, making color separations
| for CMYK printing is pretty easy and straightforward. GIMP also
| allows effective image manipulation, particularly when plugins
| are added: gmic, cyan, resynthesizer, autosave.
|
| Workflow also relies on other FOSS programs such as Scribus (for
| printing positives) and occasionally inkscape, krita, paint.net
| for certain image effects. Yes, it takes time and effort to work
| out components of a custom workflow.
|
| I have no doubt proprietary programs offer greater levels of
| convenience (for "standard" workflow) at significant monetary
| cost. Like everything else tradeoffs are implicit, one approach
| isn't absolutely "better" than the other.
| fleddr wrote:
| Since you cannot really re-take photos and the author has decades
| of photos, I'd be more paranoid about backups and extend it with
| one low tech option.
|
| Sync mechanisms can go wrong. Somebody might hack into your cloud
| storage account and wipe it out. The odds may be small, but you'd
| be absolutely heart broken if your lifelong portfolio is gone.
|
| So what I do is that once a year, I manually back up everything
| on a USB disc. On two actually, the second disc I bring to
| another location. Once backed up, I never have them connected.
| They just sit in storage.
|
| Since this manual backup is so infrequent, it's not a huge pain.
| Should full disaster strike and all hot backups fail, at worst I
| lose 1 year of photos, which is better than 20 years.
|
| If you think I'm too distrustful of sync tech: a year ago at work
| OneDrive wiped out all my files. I've pressed internal IT and
| Microsoft itself for answers, but none were given but this:
| OneDrive is a sync solution, not a backup solution.
|
| Point taken.
| fidelramos wrote:
| OP here.
|
| You make a great point, and I am that careful with my photo
| collection. I didn't put it in the article but I do copy my
| full photo collection into a USB hard drive about once a year
| when I visit my parents. This way they have my photos and I
| have yet another backup. :)
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Very useful, thanks for sharing Fidel! Just to note that this
| guide is Linux focused but most of the tools, except Geeqie, are
| also available for Windows (and macOS of course). He's also
| covering replication/synchronization with the excellent Syncthing
| (+1 vote from my side) as well as backup with Wasabi (being
| cheaper than Backblaze). And to top it of, here is what he states
| about an online viewer: "I am currently working on creating a web
| gallery software that will give access to my full photography
| collection and allow navigating it...I will release the software
| as open source when its basic features are working, so stay
| tuned!"
| fidelramos wrote:
| Glad you liked it!
|
| About the web gallery project, this being Hacker News I would
| like to give some more details about it: I have implemented a
| React frontend and FastAPI backend, navigating through the
| albums and photos already work, but thumbnails won't display
| because Digikam uses PGF image format [0]. PGF images are great
| for thumbnails because images load progressivel and can be
| quickly rendered at different sizes, but they are not supported
| natively by web browsers. I'm going to try compiling libpgf [1]
| to WASM so the frontend will be able to display the Digikam
| thumbnails directly (and allow for on-the-fly thumbnail
| resizing!), otherwise I will need to handle the conversion in
| backend.
|
| Once thumbnails work I will deploy it on my home server,
| dogfood it for a while, polish a few things and release it. Of
| course Hacker News will get an announcement.
|
| [0] https://www.libpgf.org/
|
| [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/libpgf/
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Do any of these OSS tools allow you to apply colour management?
| That is applying DNG or ICC profiles to images?
| q3k wrote:
| darktable does.
|
| https://darktable.gitlab.io/doc/en/color_management.html
| igouy wrote:
| https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Color_Management
|
| https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Color_Management_addon
|
| https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/ICC_Profile_Creator
| CarVac wrote:
| I wrote my own one-program, more-streamlined workflow for this,
| Filmulator.
| lostgame wrote:
| I would like to see a list of these for all sorts of different
| workflows!
|
| Also - holy _shit_ , RawTheRapee needs a new/different name, eh?
| I'm guessing/hoping English is not the creator's first language?
| :3
|
| Edit: Apparently, it's 'RawTherapee' - as in 'RAW therapy' - not
| 'Raw the Rape'. It actually took me until Googling it and seeing
| it that way that I got it. Maybe it should've just been called
| RawTherapy? :/
| hbn wrote:
| "Okay, Lindsay, are you forgetting that I was a professional
| twice over? An analyst and a therapist. The world's first
| analrapist."
| Vegaltden wrote:
| > _File grouping means that by default Geeqie will only show the
| JPEG file of each photo, while the RAW file and potential
| sidecars (e.g. XMP or PP3) are hidden away, but still only one
| click away. Then when a file is deleted all the files in the same
| group are deleted as well. Sidecar grouping works well by
| default, but if necessary it can be tweaked it in Preferences_
|
| I would be interested in reading OP's approach with sidecars, and
| how he configured Digikam for storing metadata (in file or in
| sidecar ? How does the two communicate between Digikam and
| Rawtherapee/Darktable ?)
| fidelramos wrote:
| OP here. I honestly don't worry too much about full sync
| between Digikam and other software. In my workflow I process
| all RAWs first, then edit all metadata in Digikam. After that I
| very rarely have to come back to RawTherapee/Darktable so I
| treat it as a one-way flow.
|
| Last time I checked about keeping Digikam and other programs in
| sync, about 2 years ago, it seemed to me that it wasn't going
| to work seamlessly, so I decided to let it be. If someone has
| experience about it I would love to hear about it.
| corbet wrote:
| I recently did close looks at both RawTherapee
| (https://lwn.net/Articles/883599/) and darktable
| (https://lwn.net/Articles/881853/) for anybody interested in a
| comparison. One point worthy of note is that the RawTherapee
| development community has been struggling, which could be a long-
| term problem.
| Tobu wrote:
| ART -- Another RawTherapee -- could be addressing this, with
| recent releases: https://bitbucket.org/agriggio/art
| fidelramos wrote:
| I had seen some mentions to ART a while ago, it looks like it
| has come a long way. I see several features that I was
| missing from Darktable (automatic perspective correction,
| improved shadows-midtones-highlights handling, masks...), I
| definitely need to give it a try. Thanks for sharing!
| notyourday wrote:
| I prefer to spend my time shooting rather than fighting with a
| software.
| midiguy wrote:
| The fact that 5 different open-source software are required to do
| the same thing as Lightroom has convinced me to stick with Adobe.
| toastal wrote:
| I didn't see Hugin, but it should have been mentioned. It
| produces some amazing results for stitching panoramas, focus
| stacking, or man other techniques that require multiple photos.
| igouy wrote:
| ICE magically easy to use --
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computation...
| fidelramos wrote:
| OP here.
|
| I do use Hugin for panoramas, and it's fantastic. I was going
| to write a bonus section about it but I wanted to get the post
| out of the way as I had been working on it for too long
| already. I will add it in a future update.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I still find lightzones editing model the most intuitive and at
| the same time extremely powerful. Unfortunately development is
| extremely slow and it has not seen significant functionality
| updates since it was made oss, and is quite slow in comparison to
| the others.
| smm11 wrote:
| I've got no dog in this fight, but when I was getting paid for
| photos long ago I used something called Breeze Browser to do just
| about everything. Nothing did batch processing nearly as well.
| dantondwa wrote:
| I personally just use Darktable, and I'm incredibly happy with
| it. It's just a fantastic software and we're lucky to have for
| free.
|
| Kudos to all the developers making free-software photography a
| reality!
| Saris wrote:
| I like Darktable, but for the life of me I cannot figure out
| how to get defringe working. It's completely intuitive in
| lightroom and rawtherapee, but for some reason darktable just
| doesn't do what I want.
| jumaro wrote:
| Not sure if it helps you, since you seem like you already
| tried a lot. I was confused about the different ways to do
| this, so I wrote down the ways I found:
| https://makandracards.com/darktable/477993-remove-
| chromatic-...
| sound1 wrote:
| Darktable is an incredible piece of software, especially
| considering it is free and open source. Thank you developers!!
| fidelramos wrote:
| +1! Darktable is simply amazing. I also use it, just on
| specific photos. RawTherapee gives me good results for the bulk
| of my photos in less time, which for me it's an important
| constraint.
|
| In the end it's just great having multiple top-tier free-
| software options for photo editing, a big thank you to all
| their developers!
| jumaro wrote:
| Somehow I missed when RawTherapee added the feature for bulk
| editing. Thanks for pointing that out in your article. Maybe
| I should give RawTherapee a new try :)
| teeray wrote:
| Any good recommendations for video workflows? I'm really not
| excited about paying a tithe to Adobe just for my hobby drone
| flying.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Not OSS, but the free version of Davinci Resolve is pretty
| great.
| _joel wrote:
| Agreed, there's also https://kdenlive.org/en/ which is OSS
| seanw444 wrote:
| And also Shotcut.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I actually kinda love Kdenlive. It's not half as powerful
| as something like Davinci Resolve, but it's been a
| consistently wonderful experience every time I need to
| splice together a couple clips or composite a video. Now if
| only it could get more NLE features...
| fidelramos wrote:
| I'm much more of a photographer than a videographer, but I have
| used Openshot [0] and KDEnlive [1] and they got the job done.
|
| [0] https://www.openshot.org/
|
| [1] https://kdenlive.org/en/
| shrubby wrote:
| Thank you. I'm not taking too many photos these days with a real
| camera or shoot RAW, but this'll come handy should the day come
| again.
| manaskarekar wrote:
| I have played with these in the past and found that rawtherapee
| results look far less appealing (or need far more effort than
| what I was willing to invest) than Adobe Lightroom for non
| trivial settings.
|
| I wonder how things compare now.
|
| It is great that these softwares are offered for free though.
| sandreas wrote:
| Very nice article. I'm suprised, that nobody mentioned
| photoprism[1]... It does deduplicate and provide a nice web
| interface for browsing and searching photos as well as a very
| powerful AI for object detection...
|
| [1] https://photoprism.app/
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