Interview for jpeg2raw podcast

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I heard from Mike Howard who runs the jpeg2raw photography podcast this past weekend and he wants to interview me on the show. I’ve scheduled to be on February 23rd, 2016 (next Tuesday).

In particular it looks like he’s interested in pixls and the work everyone does with free software (or maybe he just likes my images? :slight_smile: ). Which brings me to some questions for the community:

  1. Please chime in with any notes or ideas that you think I should emphasize in regards to the free software community in general as it relates to photography.
    Keep in mind that much of the audience may not be aware of free software overall.
  2. They will run images during the video podcast for viewers, so if there are some images you’d like me to include during the interview to showcase work from the community, please link it to me here (and license in a way that we can use it). I’ll compile them all and pass them onto the host.

This is another opportunity for us to raise awareness of free software + photography so don’t be shy with recommendations and ideas for me to bring up!

https://www.youtube.com/user/jpeg2RAW/videos

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Don’t forget to mention that you contribute also to the free software you are using to process your images.
That’s probably an important difference between users of proprietary and free software that should be emphasized IMHO. People here are not only users, but often contributors too.
I think about all the people that are able now to use your “Film emulation” presets. How cool is that !

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I choose to only use free/libre software because, as an artist, I must have control over my tooling and the tooling needs to be reliable, in that they can’t be made to turn off or invalidate.

What if you could only rent a paint brush? Every time you wanted to paint you had to take the paint brush to the store and the store would check to make sure you’ve paid your brush licensing feel. After ensuring you’ve paid your licensing fee, the paint brush is “enabled” for your painting session. That’d be a crazy way to work and I don’t think the company that makes those paint brushes would sell very many.

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Good luck with the interview.

I did a talk at my local camera club back in the autumn all about ‘Open Source Software’. I was trying to enlighten our members that there is another world of post processing out there that doesn’t involve Lightroom / Photoshop.

One issue that people were nervous about is support / help for the free software. I told them that the support is as good as any commercial product, as each Open source product will have a homepage with links to forums / wiki’s / you tube tutorials etc. I think you need to emphasise that fact. If you get stuck / have a problem there is always somebody in the virtual world to offer you a hand. I’ve certainly benefited from on line help.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that mainstream photography magazines / websites seem reluctant to give free software a plug. Maybe magazines won’t do it because it may jeopardise their relationship with advertisers and effect revenue streams, In the UK, if you open a photography magazine it will have tutorial / editing techniques / tips all geared towards photoshop, it’s as if photoshop is the only thing out there. Doesn’t seem fair really or am I just being an idealist in a world that isn’t fair. Was that a rant ?

Anyway good luck, I am sure you will do a sterling job promoting free software. I might link a couple of my images when I am at home this evening :slightly_smiling:

Regards

Phil

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Based on my experience as a non developer/engineer hobbyist photographer getting into FOSS photography:

Not only are most people not aware of FOSS tools, when they do hear them it is usually in the context of a question posted by someone on the lines of ‘Can I use GIMP instead of Photoshop’ (or other open source tool and its equivalent) and the reply usually lists all the things you can do in Photoshop but not in GIMP. They never hear of all the things that you can do in GIMP but not in Photoshop. This encourages the notion that OSS tools are toys for nerds to play with rather than something that grown men take seriously for work. Talking of specific issues faced by photographers that are solved by OSS but not by proprietary software may help with this.
An obvious example I can think of is Magic Lantern (or CHDK) which is one of the OSS tools that many photographers have heard of, and does not have any challenger in the proprietary world.

It may also help to emphasise that many FOSS tools are cross platform and easily available on Windows and Mac, and users don’t need to use Linux to get started. Many people might be willing to download and experiment with an individual tool but will draw the line at getting to grips with an entirely different OS just to try out a Photoshop alternative.

Another point is ease of getting started with the tools themselves. I was (and continue to be) pleasantly surprised at how I can download, install, and use an OSS tool without needing a single login or signup anywhere. There are no hoops to jump through and you don’t have the uncomfortable feeling that you’ve revealed so much personal identification information about yourself that even social media companies would be impressed. And you don’t need to be paranoid about cloud based solutions.

Pixls.us is also addressing another issue that was faced by OSS beginners: Previously, if I faced issues with an image stack I might have had to register on the RawTherapee, GIMP, and Hugin forums before I solved it - and this is without considering the frustration of never being able to register on the RawTherapee forum. Now we have a one stop shop where we can get help for all these in a single thread from users, which is very similar to how Photoshop forums operate.

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Thank you @David_Tschumperle, @paperdigits, @Phil_Howcroft, @Raja for all the feedback!

While I can’t anticipate all of the types of questions that may be asked, I think we can cover the bigger points well.

  • Freedom - an obvious first point, but one that may be unfamiliar to proprietary software users/beginners that may not know any better.
  • Control - in tandem with freedom is the control one has over their entire image processing stack if they want.
  • Functionality - Some free software does things that has no proprietary version.
  • Cost - Not always the biggest motivator for long-time users but certainly a lower barrier to entry for new users when price is not an issue for obtaining quality software.
  • Community/Involvement - Free software communities are usually quite active places where users can interact with other user as well as the folks doing actual development of the tools.

As @Raja noted about only hearing about GIMP in terms of a comparison to Ps, I’m thinking perhaps of making a stronger point for learning/thinking about processing in terms of results and processes as opposed to particular software steps. That is, knowing how an Unsharp Mask works and where it might be appropriate is better than simply being told “Apply an Unsharp Mask with these settings”.

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Today I was reading a thread in the Adobe support forums, where some customers were spelling out their concerns about the new cloud-based selling model of Adobe.

The point there was that as soon as you start paying the cloud subscription and you start creating some artwork with it, then you are de-facto obliged to keep paying the subscription to be able to access and make use not only of new artworks, but also all of the past artworks created with the creative cloud tools!

Once you stop paying, your files on disk become like a broken car: you have it, but you can’t do anything with it, not even just open and print them.

And then suddenly I realised the fact that for professional artists with long-term engagements, the open source model provides the best guarantee of being able to access and use their artworks during an unlimited amount of time.

Adobe’s new commercial model is kind of an extreme case, but any commercial solution could be discontinued at some point, and maybe the old software not supported anymore by new operating systems, making once again the pieces of artwork created with it simply useless.

On the other hand, if you use FL/OSS software you own not only your artwork, but also the intellectual aspects of the software you used to create your artwork. In particular, you are free to modify the software to better fit your needs, and the availability of the sources gives at least certain guarantee that the software will continue to exist and be ported to new operating systems.

Moreover, the exchange of files in native format is simplified by the fact that FL/OSS software usually is cross-platform and therefore anybody can download and install the tools at no cost, independently of the operating system they use…

Maybe you could try to stress at least part of those practical aspects of commercial vs. free solutions?

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If you talk with people from the industry, you will learn that there are at least plans discussed to introduce such a licensing model to electric tools such as drilling machines. They would connect surprise surprise over the internet to the licensing server and every hole you drill will be charged. If your internet connection is broken, I would guess you will not be able to drill a hole anymore (or after 10 holes or after a month or whatever). No kidding.

In that context:

Unfortunately I have to tell you that the latter is true. I am too, but I realize every day that the world rotates in a direction totally orthogonal to mine. That brings me back to the topic: That is maybe not an ideal discussion for this jpeg2raw episode, but what would be really interesting is a plenary discussion between the two groups of photography software users: on the free software side an amateur and a pro user, a contributing user and a developer and on the other side user and pro user of commercial software as well as someone contributing (e.g. a plugin developer). The topic to be discussed: Why the heck, given all the benefits of free software that have been mentioned e.g. in this thread, why is the visible or observed market share of free software so extremely low?

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Maybe because free software doesn’t advertise? I am not even sure if “market share” is the right word as most free software isn’t participating in any market, it just exists.

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Therefore I wrote “observed” market share. What I mean was what was explained above, the internet and all those magazines are full of photoshop and lightroom tutorials and presets, which is free advertisement for adobe. You can see them everywhere. For free software, you have to know where to look to find tutorials. For me this is not a big deal, I know where I have to look/ask. But I would really like to understand why the drawbacks of the commercial software that have already been mentioned (e.g. licensing model vs access to your files, impossible to understand internals, …) are neglected by so many people. This is the reason that I would love to see such a plenary discussion.

In my job I work a lot with very intelligent, smart people with a deep technical background. Even for them it seems not to be a big deal that their work may be lost due to the reasons stated above, and they understand the shiny but intransparent user interfaces and the disability to see the code to know what’s going on as a feature and a user friendly behaviour. For me it is hard to understand them, but I want to better understand them, again, a reason to see such a face-to-face discussion.

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@Carmelo_DrRaw That’s a great point to bring up as well I think, and the crux of a much larger discussion. Could a painter ever imagine that someone else owned the canvas they painted on or the brushes they painted with (as @paperdigits already said).

Because we, as a free software community, lack the manpower and public-relations personnel to help raise the awareness of free software in general.

In some cases we are a victim of our own perceptions and voices, where we feel that being reasonable and factual should be enough to propagate the benefits that we all obviously see:

See? We sometimes feel that any reasonable person would easily see these as fundamentally important points and embrace them as such. It just turns out that this is normally quite wrong - even for intelligent folks!

What doesn’t help further is the quality, quantity, and discoverability of resources for serious photographic work using free software is lacking.

It’s my opinion that we should be advertising - or at the very least being honest, vocal, and visible to as many as possible…

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As a side note, the very existence of this entire site and community is specifically to address these types of issues along with providing a nice place for all of us photo/free-software nerds to commiserate.

We should be directing folks here as often as possible to help propagate the much more serious and incredible work possible with free software1.

1 And I should be getting off my ass to keep content flowing and things fresh - I’ve just been busy irl lately and nobody else has been available yet. :slight_smile:

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I try to point Reddit folks here but I’m not sure that it’s so simple to get people to cross forum boundaries.

I need to keep working on Filmulator too, I’ve been only nibbling away at some changes lately.

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It’s IMHO even worse: the painting would simply become “not visible anymore” as soon as the renting of the brushes is stopped ;-)!

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Well, most commercial programs are not bound to license renewal, so in general it is not a problem that work couldn’t be accessed in the future. That doesn’t apply to Adobe’s latest offerings of course, but I guess many people already invested so much into those programs (even if they only had to learn a new tool it might be a deal breaker for many) that there is no way back for them. And then there are the big masses of people who 1) have no clue and 2) want to be as cool as the big boys, so they use the same tools. And to be honest, just because open source would allow them to look into the code and understand what’s happening doesn’t mean that they are capable of doing that. And if we are honest, even those who know how to read code don’t look into it in general. The way we use all those free tools isn’t any different from how others are using commercial programs. Just free (as beer).

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Pat, sure, I see your points and I’m aware of them. I am using free software wherever possible, since more than 15 years. That means 99 in my private life (tax software and turboprint being the only exceptions) and about 70 in my professional life. But I again totally failed to transfer my point (maybe because I am not a native English speaker and don’t know the right words or, more probable, because of my complicated writing style that I indeed have to get rid of). I wanted to bring up the idea, in the context of the jpeg2raw podcast that brought the idea into my mind, that a plenary discussion (is this the right word¹) about this topic would be interesting to see. Bringing people of both worlds together face-to-face and discuss these things. That could maybe lead to new insights that you do not get when you stay in your community. LGM could be one opportunity for something like this to happen.

¹I thought on something like what the German public TV is broadcasting Sundays around 10 pm, where about 6 politicians are sitting in a half circle and discussing a given topic.

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Yes and no. I am not able to understand most of the code of e.g. Darktable, but, as you know (and thanks to you), one or the other of my ideas made its way into Darktable. That would not have happened with lightroom or other proprietary software. Of course I cannot be involved with every software that I use to the same degree, and there is software where I am much more involved for one or the other reason, but it is the contributing¹ users and the different degrees of contribution that are possible that is a difference between them and us[TM]. Of course, they listen to the users as well, but they listen to the masses and with free software one voice can be heard. And the level of contribution can change. Some start with bug reports, and become more involved over time. And usually, before I report a bug, I have a look at the code. Sometimes this helps finding the bug or at least helps me doing better bug reports. That’s not possible with closed-source software.

¹I mean real changes to the software, tutorials are written for both. But with free software a single user has the chance (not the right) to see his ideas coming to life.

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Maybe you could point out how open minded the foss comunity is.
An hour ago I read this article which is very interesting and very true.

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As far as I have heard, CC still lets you view files, just not enter the “develop” mode to edit them, if you allow your Adobe subscription to lapse. So they’re not holding anything hostage.

Not that I like the business model. At least it lets you avoid the sense of “sunk costs” when you eventually want to switch away…

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Then my informations are outdated or incorrect… it means that if you stop paying, your work is not useless but just frozen.

Still worth making a point out of that!

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