[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/ ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-05 23:01 UTC)