A friend of mine is interested in photography; first I lent him a camera, now he bought his own (talked him into MFT ), and now he is looking for a way to organize and edit photos using Linux.
He only shoots JPEG. I tried to sell raw processing for Darktable but he is not interested yet, āit looks complicatedā. What would be the best FOSS solution (under Linux) with the following requirements:
import and organize photos from an SD card
crop and rotate JPEGs
occasional mild tone and maybe white balance corrections
stability, maturity, easy installation from official deb packages
I used Shotwell in the past before Darktable but that was decades ago, I donāt know what the best option would be today. Is it Digikam or something else?
(Clarifications that occurred to me: should not be too resource intensive, no GPU should required. Nothing fancy will happen to those photos, no extreme denoising, pulling shadows, etc)
I agree, but I also recognize that some people just want to do photography and not get into post-processing. I think that when one is learning the basics of composition and exposure, raw post processing can be a distraction. Camera JPGs can be dialled in to a particular style.
In any case, I havenāt given up trying to convince him to use DT. Just taking a strategic break
The page says that it is resource-hungry and rather slow (ārespond within 1 second for images up to 20 megapixels on a strong computerā), how does it compare to Darktable?
If he likes the camera jpeg result, fair enough. Let him enjoy.
I went from there to GIMP. Mostly just adjusting shadows and highlights with tone curve. I was already on Linux, so none of the Windows famous names were available to me. Raw processing seemed to be a very complex thing to turn a dull image into anything even half as good as the camera jpeg. Local corrections, in Rawtherapee I could not understand.
darktable made it all possible for me, especially post-sigmoid, with starting point that looked close to the camera pic.
But early days of raw processing can be hard and unrewarding, ending up choosing the camera jpeg in the end and wondering why one wasted the time.
I found that digikam can do this to a certain extent, but it really saves versioned snapshots instead of applying a layered pipeline each and every time. Still need to find about fotocx, the manual does not say anything.
Personally I think it is the wrong solution: you invest in finding the right composition and exposure, capture an interesting image, only to find that you want to change some minor details, but with JPG there is so little you can do.
Darktable is now at the point where you can just make a default style (lens correction, profiled denoising, sigmoid, maybe a bit of saturation added with color balance rgb) that you get neat images with zero effort, and the freedom to correct WB/colors to a large extent. The only price you pay is speed, JPG workflows are snappier.
But I gave up arguing about this and I recognize that there are many roads to photography.
I was often surprised at how much one can do. I remember when one opening and saving of a jpeg caused visible damage. it is much better now.
There are limits. I used to hit them with GIMP when, for example, I wanted to change brightness (novice terminology) or saturation by colour. Horrible things soon happen. Yes, one can go so much further with raw. But that can always be another day
Of course the perfectly cromulent darktable answer: which ever one you want.
Exposure is the simplest, Color Balance RGB provides a few more lumimamcd sliders. Tone Equalizer does its thing. Even the old shadows/highlights might be fine on a jpeg.
I went back and edited all my old jpg files from 2005 forward that were taken on a couple of old Sony point and shoot cameras and a Nikon Coolpix S8100 or something like that I donāt even recall the exact modelā¦ Many of them were over saturated and had weird green colors and many other flawsā¦
On some I only corrected the tone a little on others to sharpness as they could be soft and others I did a lot of work on themā¦
The results were not up to something modern or even results from good jpg captures but many photos were hugely improvedā¦ I found I think going from memory that the tone eq preset relight was often a great tool to improve the jpg that were too dark and using exposure with multiply or subtract blend modes could boost washed out photosā¦there was a surprising amount of room to help out these old photosā¦keeping in mind I was just trying to make better versions of those keepsakes and not generating anything stellarā¦
Another approach for a new person might be to try ARTā¦The tone eq in that software with the false colors/heat map for guidance works really well to adjust toneā¦along with cropping and a few basic tweaks it might be all that is needed for basic JPG editingā¦its not going to do any organizing but as an editor its also a good choice for keeping it simpleā¦
Yes, the problem is that you donāt have much data to work with, so always be wary of banding and other artifacts, but any module (sans demoasic, tone mapping) will work.
), and now he is looking for a way to organize and edit photos using Linux.