On editors, OS', and other things

Hi Andy,
don’t want to start a debate or thread on GIMP vs PS but I thought I needed to make a comment after reading your post. I have both GIMP and PS. I personally have the opposite opinion to you about the two programs. I find GIMP easier to use and PS rather clunky. But the truth is because in your case you are use to the PS workflow and I am more use to the GIMP workflow we have our preferences. PS is now a subscription only option unless you have a perpetual licence from years gone by. GIMP is free so there are no economic barriers to people trying and using GIMP. Don’t knock GIMP because it is a great program and bonus is its free. GIMP was used to make films like Stuart Little and Harry Potter so it is no slouch. PS is definitely part of a suite of programs that I would expect a professional graphic designer or artist to use. I have the suite of programs and realise why GIMP would be less attractive to a professional designer. But the professional can afford the subscription. BTW I agree RT is a great program and well laid out GUI. I personally prefer Darktable because of the incredible masking options to localise adjustments. This is one area I would like to see improved in RT. Sounds like you are making some good videos about RT. I will check them out. Thanks for your effort here.

Terry

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Hi Terry :+1:
As I always say - “in my opinion”…
Now if only someone could show me how to colour dodge from behind a dark midtones 2 mask in GIMP…

I couldn’t keep the loading of the GIMP image and paragraph when I posted the link to the tutorial on luminosity masks. If it isn’t obvious, the blue text is the link. I thought it might assist you with your issue. That may or may not be true but it’s there to check out.

I agree with Terry on the GIMP vs PS issue being one about which one starts with 1st and uses most affecting how one approaches the 2nd. GIMP was a natural for me because I’ve used LInux since Red Hat 4 came in boxes of floppy disks in computer stores. I had Windows in versions from the 1.0 preview through Win10 running in various VMs over the years and so have used lots of Windows software when needed. I can no longer remember the various versions of PS I paid for and paid to update–but never much used. I made it available to the folks in my lab and I don’t think any of them found it particularly “intuitive.” However, I don’t mind that others think it’s the cat’s meow. PS users seem less generous toward GIMP but they did pay a ton for PS (and I know I did for the lab–although it didn’t make me fond of it). :wink:

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I remember well the huge bills for Photoshop back in the day Don, they were scary!
But three coffees in Starbucks costs more than Photoshop+Lightroom every month so now it’s not really much to pay.

On the ‘intuitive’ front I think both are lacking equally so, but obviously Ps holds no problems for me because I’m so used to it.
Short of the “16bit vs 15bit+1 level” thing, there is nothing in GIMP that can’t be done in Ps, but quite a bit you can do in Ps that you can’t do in GIMP.

It’s funny you say that about Ps users - I find Linux users are the same! But if you are on Linux then you do not have the mainstream image processor options, so Photoshop does even enter your field of view options-wise.

As a Mac user I fully appreciate the value of ‘free OS’ - why anyone would pay for the carve-up that is Windows is quite beyond me - but that’s the cornerstone choice people make when they get a new machine.
For obvious reasons Linux and MacOS are quite similar, and I for one would like to see the likes of Adobe cater directly for Linux, imo they are missing a trick there because RT+Photoshop is a brilliant combo.

I wouldn’t know about the costs of either Adobe’s rent or Starbuck’s coffee. I say that as someone who was in the first Starbucks store in the world before the counters were installed and the coffee roasting machine was hooked up. That was some long time ago.

Right again: as I said, “used to it” is the key. Once I was used to GIMP, I never was sufficiently motivated to use PS for anything other than putting out CMYK images for printing. Then for at least a decade that’s been pretty easy in GIMP.

I’ve never had a problem with compatibility of graphic hardware or nearly any other computer hardware under Linux. The one exception of compatibility is my Canon scanner. It works fine under Win in VBox but Canon has always been pretty disdainful of Linux. My Epson scanner works great with Vuescan running in Linux. My 4 core 8 thread i7 is long in the tooth now but still usefully swift in Linux.

I’ve used virtually ever version of Windows (exception Vista) since before Windows 1.0. (Most folks don’t know about the era when MS’s way-late delivery of Windows 1.0 caused it to produce the “Windows Run-time System.”) Since Win98 I’ve run Windows under virtual machines–often running faster and more stable than native Windows. Win4Lin was terrific running W98–faster than native and rock solid.

I still use Windows to run tax software, WordPerfect and rarely to wrestle with PS. Graphics hardware never got in my way with PS–I’ve just never had the patience to “get used to it.”

When I got a Canon R5 I had trouble with CR3 files in RT and went to DPP4 in Win10 in my VM. I gave that up pretty fast. Too ponderous a UI. Dealing with images from a network drive was also ridiculous with DPP4 (as it has been since I first used earlier versions in 2002). So I gave up on DPP. I really like RT. It has been pretty unstable with crop mode R5 images and for a while RT was trying and failing to read EXIF info and tanking but it now works well with full frame CR3’s from the R5 so I’ve been sticking with FF photos and using exiftool with it’s GUI to get metadata from specific images–in Linux. Fast and stable as usual.

Windows runtime… been a while. I remember using (in those days) Aldus PageMaker with its bundled Windows286 runtime. :slight_smile: There were others, too.

More on point for RT, I’ve been on Linux for several years and since I now create CR3s, I recently wrote a small shell script that (depending on the switch passed to it) loops through each TIFF, JPG or PNG in the current directory, attempts to find each’s ‘parent’ raw file one folder up (given my RAW/processed pathing) and uses exiftool to copy the metadata from the raw file to the processed image. I just run it after I complete an RT session. It would be more convenient if RT natively supported all CR3 metadata but that’s apparently not a top priority (if I understand correctly). Also, not a complaint, just what I understand.

I, too, briefly tried DPP on an old laptop, but pulling images from my SAN was too painful.

Yup, Windows RTS before any actual Win OS release. I don’t think I ever used a Win286-RTS but definitely Win 286. Somewhere starting around Windows 95 to 98 I mostly ran Win under several VM systems starting with Win4Lin. My Linux use started with store-bought Red Hat 4.0 through Red Hat 9, and then Fedora Core through Fedora 34 today. I’ve paid for more Windows licences than I can count in spite of using it less and less. I cannot do taxes without Windows tax software and I’ve used WordPerfect since it became a DOS program from Satellite Software after starting life running in Data General machines. My lack of patience with MSWord is somewhat like my lack of patience with PS.

Regarding your shell script for passing exif data from the “parent” raw images to the "child images: I was thinking about doing exactly that but my bash scripting is getting rustier by the day and I’m still learning the exiftool options for writing. Is there any chance you would share that shell script with those of us who are 1) using cameras with the troublesome CR3 raw format and 2) using Linux/UNIX?

Don

I started on Red Hat 4.3 (?) officially but had tried some earlier Linux distros, really before they were much of a distro. The worst of the lot was SLS Linux (Soft Landing Systems). It was missing parts, etc. That was probably 1993 or so. The best was (and still is in ways) Slackware. My first truly Linux box was a dual-boot Red Hat 9 / Win 98 system from Indelible Blue. I went to Windows for a while, but came back to LInux about 6 years ago (worked with Solaris and RHEL at work across all that time). These days I’m on Xubuntu, with a old slow Win 10 laptop as well.

My script? Sure, be glad to. I’m not genius a scripter, but it works for me. Kinda Q&D / brute-force, since it just tells exiftool to copy all metadata, but since RT isn’t getting any it seems to work. The exiftool command line could be tweaked of course. I’m even worse with exiftool than scripting (thank God for Google!)…

As stated it assumes the CR3 is in the processed TIF/JPG/PNG’s parent directory. See the comments for anything else.

Specifically:

  • You’ll need to point it at your exiftool path, see the ‘et’ variable. I’m still on Xubuntu 18.04, so the system-installed exiftool is older and doesn’t do CR3, that’s why the custom path to a newer version in /usr/local/exiftool.
  • I didn’t try to do anything fancy with the file extension handling, just enough to serve my needs. Those wildcards can be improved if needed.
  • If you add more command line options, using getopts would be simpler in the long run.
  • awk and sed are not my forte, you can probably improve them, too.

cpexif.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Copies metadata from raw files to their processed JPGs, PNGs or TIFFs. Run this script in the
# directory containing the images. It assumes the raw files are in the parent directory of the
# processed image files and they have the same basename except with the $rawext extension.

scriptname=$(basename $0)           # this script
usage="Please specify image type (JPG, PNG or TIFF):\n  $scriptname [ -j -p -t ]"
et="/usr/local/exiftool/exiftool"   # full path to exiftool
rawext="CR3"                        # extension of raw files

if [ ! \( -f "$et" \) ]
then
    echo "$et not found, aborting"
    exit
fi

# Filename extensions of image file types to be checked, along with matching $1 values.
# Keep in mind this is a wildcard, not a regex.
# I'm sure anyone can improve on my crudeness...
case $1 in
    -j) # JPG
        fileext="[jJ][pP]*[gG]"
        ;;
    -p) # PNG
        fileext="[pP][nN][gG]"
        ;;
    -t) # TIFF
        fileext="[tT][iI][fF]*"
        ;;
    *)  # anything else (invalid)
        echo -e "$usage"
        exit
        ;;
esac

for image in *.${fileext}
do
    realext=$(echo "$image" | awk -F . '{print $NF}')
    rawfile=$(echo "$image" | sed "s/\.${realext}$/\.${rawext}/")

    if [ -f "../$rawfile" ]
    then
        echo "Updating $image metadata from ${rawfile}"
        $et -q --Orientation -overwrite_original -TagsFromFile "../$rawfile" "$image"
    else
        echo "Error: No matching raw file found for $image"
    fi

done

If it’s good I get the credit, otherwise you get the blame. :smiley:

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Credit always.

My research associate was a UNIX fan and was at home with Solaris. He was the one who started me on Linux. I played a few times with other distros in VMs and decided I could tolerate the “bleeding edge” of Fedora over the quixotic quirks of the distro of the month. For our machines’ main OSes I haven’t skipped a version of RH/Fedora since RH 4.0. I do generally wait a while after the release of each new version before updating to keep the edge from bleeding out altogether. That has worked better and better as Fedora has been tamed down. My wife and I both have laptops and desktops running fedora. I made the laptops dual boot but their Windows side gets used lightly and then becomes a tedious pain to sit though it’s myriad waiting updates.

I’ve done a few brute force scripts but the “build-rawtherapee” script is something else that I look at but generally dare not to touch. I use rsnapshot as a backup app and sometimes I forget to add new file types to skip and then I have to use a script looping on 23 folders to seek and delete files.

Your script looks like exactly what is needed. I’ve never used awk or sed although I read though a description of them long years ago. I read the exiftools “read this first” about getops and the rest last night. The sloth in me says, “maybe…” I was starting to comb through the output of exiftool to see what to target and what to opt out of but the concept of letting it rip with the whole thing is a good start. I’ll be anxious to update exiftool when version 1.33 hits the Fedora repo because I do want to see the shutter mode sometimes.

So thanks for your help with this. It’s going to save me a lot of time and probably a lot of goofs.

Don

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Note that I’ve moved this posts to a new topic, feel free to change the title if you can. It had wandered a bit far from the topic of Andy’s videos.

Some people don’t really have a choice. If the needed apps requires Windows, then they don’t have a choice. You will find that there are Windows users that prefers Linux, but don’t have choice.

I’m curious as to what apps they might be…

They could be CAD programs as in Rhino/Solidworks/etc (Blender and FOSS cads aren’t solutions) or they are in need of a non-destructive editor on par with Affinity/Photoshop rather than having to find trade-off between Krita/GIMP if they need non-destructive editing.

And there are totally non-photographic reasons. For example, there are lots of business / corporate solutions that effectively require Windows. Many require AD integration, etc. I have astronomy apps available only for Windows. I like Linux and in general much prefer it over Windows as an OS, but when I replace my current computer I may end up moving back to Windows.

Mac? Well, it’s not in any way an indictment of any Mac users (simply my preference) but I butted heads with the overall Apple “do it our way, only our way” philosophy more than two decades ago, so… :smiley: Maybe I need to revisit it. Plus, I like getting kinda technical / under-the-skin with a computer, and that’s generally difficult on a Mac. Then again, maybe I could be converted to the Dark Side. But I’m keeping my Android phone! :laughing:

Says the Mac user.

I used to run Windows back in the days of XP, then SuSE in university, switched to Mac for a few years because “Unix with a GUI”, then back to Linux when I needed a truly powerful desktop for my dissertation, and currently running Windows again.

Right now, Windows has a true Linux scripting environment with the WSL, full support for commercial applications, and reliable hardware support. Linux has various driver issues with all of my computers, and does not run, say, Photoshop or Affinity. The multi-monitor and display calibration story remains troublesome. MacOS is limited to Apple hardware, which comes with its own limitations (few ports, opinionated design, hardware support issues).

All three operating systems are capable of basic OS stuff. There are valid reasons to choose either of them. Derising one, or looking down on users of another, is bad form, though.

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Unfortunately, most are forced to go with either Windows or Mac due to software unavailability on Linux. I’ve been a longtime Mac user, some 16 years or so, and despise Windows with a passion, but with my new machine decided to dual boot Linux and Windows. Why not Mac? Well, in terms of specs, I can get a machine as good as the Mac Pro for about a third or half the cost. And secondly, Mac has ended its support for Open CL, a key process used by my preferred raw editor darktable.

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Derising one, or looking down on users of another, is bad form

It is not the users, despise the corporate greed.

The $19 cleaning cloth Shipping times for Apple’s $19 Polishing Cloth slip to late November [Updated] | Ars Technica
or
The £699 wheels Apple Mac Pro Wheels Kit - Apple (UK)

One thing about subscription based software is you don’t actually own it!

Well, technically you almost never actually own any commercially-purchased software, either, although I understand your point. In the conventional model, you own a (typically non-transferable) license to run it on a specified number of computers, etc. It’s not all that unusual to find fine print in the EULA authorizing the vendor to revoke that license if they so desire (though they rarely do). The software itself belongs to the vendor. However from a functional viewpoint, you’re absolutely right - You ‘own’ it.

I personally prefer the "buy once with an optional support / upgrade / maintenance contract’ model rather than a subscription. I.e., pay for it all up front, but if you buy ongoing maintenance, you get a (often significant) discount at upgrade time. That kind of thing is far more common in enterprise circles than individual-use software, though. Problem is, that’s still not a predictable (enough) revenue stream in these days of corporate goal-setting.

But I digress. :slight_smile:

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@rich2005

The $19 cleaning cloth Shipping times for Apple’s $19 Polishing Cloth slip to late Novembe

At least Ars Technica has a sense of humor about it: “Delays may drive people to buy inferior third-party polishing products. … Unfortunately, this means that your compatible iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, and iPods will need to remain unpolished for at least a month.”

:smiley:

But there’s not much funny about the other link. Not only the £699 wheels, but the nearly £1k stand or computer feet for £75 each… wow.

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