I won’t usually vouch for a non-free application, but VueScan yields wonderful results for me, I’ve been using it since 2002 or so. I think I’ve paid for it 3 times, but that doesn’t bother me, its that good. Plus I think it is made by one guy.
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I have this idea in the back of my mind since a while, but I never could find a good time slot to get it started… maybe we can set-up a wiki topic, and try to get the experts in the community to contribute to it?
@houz shared a diagram recently, which could serve as starting point:
And here’s the accompanying thread.
[quote=“paperdigits, post:32, topic:931”]
Lol, sorry I was not trying to say you were lazy! It took me an hour or so to draw the graph I made. I put it on github so hopefully someone else would add to it, because I’m lazy. 
[/quote]
Your chart is impressive. As has been mentioned it might be better to divide it into purpose driven charts to address different types of users and goals that they might typically prefer. Or it could be purpose driven charts only and let users decide what they want to peruse rather that labeling it as beginner, advanced or pro?
Paying for my Internet access by the GB means I favor written documentation over video, maybe (some) others might too?
Your chart is visually quite appealing though users will have to know what icon represents which software. The text could be a bit larger for old eyes.
Unfortunately it is not mine, it was drawn by @houz. I just referred to it concerning this thread’s topic, and, especially, the colour management topic. There was some discussion about improving the chart in the linked thread (Correct way to work with color managed applications?).
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I also much prefer written tutorials over video for the most part. Not just bandwidth but also ease of following along at your own speed and ability for far higher resolution samples of needed. (And a bunch of other reasons).
With that being said, in this case I agree with @paperdigits that small vid could be super neat, and curating a list of vids on something like YouTube makes a lot of sense - it lets us point users to videos that we’ve had a chance to make sure won’t waste anyone’s time with clickbait bullshit.
I also prefer written tutorials, but people younger than me (I’m 34) go straight to YouTube when they need a tutorial.
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@paperdigits You’re younger than I am (by a year) and I love me some video tuts.
I do, however, empathize with having to fast forward through unnecessary content to get to the bit you need, but I’ll take YouTube tutorials over charts any day of week.
Part of it may be due to the fact that I’m visually impaired. A blind photographer, if you will. It’s not that I don’t appreciate a decent, well crafted article (charts included), it’s just that a good screencast often includes subtleties not present in most written docs. That, and I find watching (and listening to) others go through the motions strangely entrancing.
Most people seem to agree with you about videos. They do provide some friction though: expensive to produce and difficult to localize. Costly to update if there is an error or something changes.
I write user-facing documentation for a living, so I’m eager to produce whatever people will consume. I’m starting to sharpen my video production skills.
I’m 24 and avoid YouTube like the plague. I hate video tutorials.
Everyone feel free to do with it whatever you want, I don’t have the time to enhance it at the moment.
@paperdigits That’s precisely why I haven’t gotten around to making my own. Although, lately I’ve been wondering if I should just relax a little.
If the focus of the video is to teach fundamental techniques that can be transferred to practically any application (preferably F/OSS), then some of that friction invariably subsides.
After all, when I first started playing around in GIMP, some 9 years ago, there wasn’t much to be had in the way of video tuts. Most of what I learned was gleaned from PS how to’s of the time. The techniques of which I hacked and picked apart in order to implement in GIMP. Most, if not all, of those videos are still reverent, even though many of them were done using CS2.
@CarVac Videos are certainly not for everyone and there’s no denying that the pool of turds one has to wade through in order to find a decent example is vast. However, there’s definitely something to be said for demonstrating the process in real time. Not because any one person’s approach is necessarily superior to any other, or that written tutorials and good documentation aren’t capable of conveying information effectively, but because it acts to drive home the real world application of a given method that just seems to be missing in most written tuts.
This is possibly due to the technical vs the artistic argument and how it appeals to those who lean toward one side or the other. Written tutorials usually err on the technical side of things. They have to in order to make any sense. While videos have a greater potential to expand upon the many nuances of the creative process. Demystifying it in a way that the written tut arguably can’t hope to achieve.
That being said, they can also be somewhat misleading. So many new shooters throw their money away on PS actions sets (many for PSE, barf) like Florabella, MCP, Greater than Gatsby and the like because they fall for the illusion that paying hundreds of dollars for custom curves and gradient maps is somehow going to help them learn and develop their style more than the free resources out there can. And it’s not necessarily the before and after images on the vendor websites that perpetuates this fallacy. It’s the videos. You simply will not find a successful action monger that doesn’t produce vids to showcase their products. The novice, and sometimes not so novice, photographer observes the transformation of the example images and can’t help but be inspired despite the fact that what they’ve just seen conveys very little in the way of technical value. Now just imagine if all the open source tools out there took advantage of that potential.
Good articles and documentation should be the foundation for any comprehensive project and its process, but, love 'em or hate 'em, the benefits and insights inherent in the video model are immeasurable, particularly to new users.
Wow, that went way over what I set out to write initially. 
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What is the target operating system for this article? Should we try and write something that is applicable to as many users as possible, and thus recommend applications that run on the most operating systems?
Hi all,
I’m possibly a bit late to this party, so I hope you don’t mind.
I’m not sure if I get the point, the target this article should aim at. Is this article for writing about a digital workflow with oss software or about using oss software? I think that would be a series of articles but not only one. But please pardon me if I didn’t get the picture because of my bad english.
If you look at what you are aiming from my point of view a digital worflow starts at the preparation of tools. I’m not talking about how to set up a camera to produce technical nice images, but in this area a newbe should know that he/she hast to set the correct time settings as this will later influence i.e. storing or time lining of image and can be very frustrating.
My second point would be, a image or video taken by what ever kind of tool should be treated as an original , no matter what kind of format (raw, jpg, mov …) and as an original it should not be changed. Because if you treat all of your peaces of art that way, you always will have the chance to produce a better end product after having learned to use software. So from the workflow point of view it wouldn’t be that different whether to handle a raw or a jpg. It will change when you want to speak about image processing, means using software to enhance images.
So, from my point of view the typical workflow would be:
0. setting up the tools
- taking the image/video
- getting it into the comp - here it can be a good point to perhaps rename the files but thats more a matter of taste
- sighting the images - here it also coukld be a goot point to do rate, color code or/and flag the imagesalso keyword assigning and alike
- development - so here ot would be the time to talk about raw processing, panorama, hdr and alike
- storing
- archiving & backup
again, I hope you don’t mind
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I just came back across this thread. If anyone wants to write content, please do! The post is community wiki, or you can reply and I’ll edit it into the article.
well I did a pic
I’m still a bit confused about the target group, so I thougt a simplified comparison of analog to digital would do a good beginning.
It’s done with inkscape so it’s availabale as svg.
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AqbB12XnzX2CoT7qcx5LzFQeJ_VQ
Edit: and further questions:
does “Free Software Photography” mean OSS or free available but closed source?
is this for Linux/Unix only or also for OSX or win?
Edit2: corrected the “darktable” issue and because of that the link changed too
I think Free Software (capitalized and proper) means a free licensure. I am not interested in software that is gratis but not libre (like the recently released Nik plugins).
To be pragmatic, we should target software that runs cross platform.
I think the target audience is relative new comers, and that we should write in depth about the process after capture to just before hitting the print button.
Please, it’s “darktable” and not “Dark Table”.
I suggest that the concept of ‘non-destructive’ processing should aired. This is not a consideration for everybody but an important option that everyone should understand. Some processing systems (darktable for instance) make this a cornerstone of their process while other systems simply ignore the problem/option.
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