Going back to the FOSS world again, I would appreciate pointers for which applications to learn from

Software
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I started out studying Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom/Illustrator, then switched to Linux FOSS in 2014/2015. For some reasons, there were limitations in much of the available FOSS applications and/or tutorials that I ended up switching back to the Apple world and stayed within the Adobe bubble since. Now, the situation brings me back to having a good Linux desktop at home again. Therefore, I would love to give FOSS another try (after all, I would love to believe that things have become more mature over the past 5 years).

I am currently trying to learn the following:

  1. Pixel manipulator/photo editing
  2. Processing RAW images in large batches
  3. 3D modeling and animation
  4. Photo editing

For (1), I think GIMP is still my go to, but if there are suggestions I would love to hear them. I have heard of darktable/RawTherapee/digiKam to tackle (2) but haven’t used any of them extensively. I’m going with Blender for (3). But for (4), I’m pretty clueless as I have just decided that I want to learn video editing recently.

Do you guys have any suggestions for the software that would serve these purposes? Preferably something with a decent selection of tutorials (I have been spoiled by the availability of contents for Adobe…)? Or something that has reached a more mature state than others? Or any insights that may sway you towards a particular choice?

Sorry if I’m asking too many questions…

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  1. Gimp or krita. Gimp is generally more pixel editor oriented.
  2. RawTherapee or darktable. RawTherapee has a nice system for auto applying partial profiles to images and the auto matched base curve feature is nice. It also has a batch queue, which darktable does not.
  3. Blender

Video editing: Kdenlive

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My winning trio at home under Manjaro Linux is:
Krita for the drawing
Art (a Rawtherapee fork) for raw image processing (for me the most ergonomic and powerful)
Blender for 3D animation but also 2D (extraordinary software)
and editing Kdenlive.

but that’s just my opinion

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I would give another vote for ART, it is a streamlined version of Rawtherapee with local masks added, and is really quick for processing a batch of images.

Both Gimp and Krita have their strong points. Gimp has better photo filters and useful things like aligning layers, whereas Krita has non destructive adjustment layers. Both work well.

I have only used DaVinci Resolve for video editing, amazingly well-featured. Sorry not open source but free and available for Linux.

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I believe, you won’t be dissapointed. There was a lot of progress in foss image processing software over the past 5 years.

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Thanks so much for all your responses. For now, I will stick with:

  1. Gimp
  2. ART
  3. Blender
  4. Kdenlive

Having read there recent release notes (and looking at their glorious dark mode!) I am hyped up again to start anewt anew.

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Try GIMP with GMiC-plugin. GMIC has plenty of useful tools. This kit is quite powerful, but there are some issues to take into consideration. Workflow is destructive and has to be planned more carefully than with Adobe software. There are no adjustment layers and intelligent cloning & selection tools are mediocre at best. Gimp-forked Krita has adjustment layers.

Rawtherapee has useful batch queue and if you are downscaling images, it’s post-resize sharpening is a really good tool. You will have issues with batch queue if you are processing multiple images (different size,c colored / B&W, etc.) from the same raw-files.

  • pp3 sidecar file management is cumbersome
  • there are no templates for batch queue settings i.e. you have to manually type file naming conventions, folder names and export settings each time you want to change them
  • all images currently in queue has to processed with the same queue settings (file names, quality settings etc.) so you cannot make really huge processing queue if you are not ok with this
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A couple of other suggestions:

Geeqie is an indispensable part of my workflow for viewing and culling images, especially working with raw images. It’s fast to view raw files because it displays the jpeg embedded in the raw image, and if you shot raw+jpeg, it deletes both when you delete the image. I also use it for quick and dirty IPTC captions. Also has a lot of other useful features.

digiKam. If you have a large number of images, or expect to, start using it soon. I wish I’d done this years ago as my image files are scattered over several external hard drives and hard to find individual shots.

For batch processes such as resizing, I used to use Phatch, but it no longer seems to be active. Although it’s not open source, XnView does an excellent job of batch processes and even comes with an appimage for Linux users.

Exiftool has numerous useful features, but the one I use most frequently is extracting embedded jpegs from raw files. I rarely shoot raw+jpeg anymore because this is so quick and efficient. The command is (for Nikon .NEF)

exiftool -b -JpgFromRaw -w .JPG -ext nef -r .
exiftool -tagsfromfile %d%f.NEF -r -ext JPG -overwrite_original -r .

The second line is optional and adds in the metadata from the raw file.

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