As I mentioned in another thread, I’ve been given the chance to give a presentation/demonstration to the photography club at my workplace. I assume/suspect that many of them don’t know anything about free software nor any of the applications we enjoy. I will be giving a very quick primer on free software and I’ll try and sum up what those freedoms translate to in regards to workflow & tooling. There are some good ideas about that here. Then I will give a cursory overview of available applications. Hopefully then a quick demo.
@patdavid was smart to start a github repo so that we can start sharing slides. I’ll be pushing both the final presentation and some informational chunks to that repo. I’d love to see others.
Anyway, I’m not a user of every program that is discussed here, thus I won’t be able to speak in depth to them. But you might be!
Please tell me: what application & feature can you not live without? What makes your workflow better than everyone else’s? When people ask you what sets apart from the commercial offerings what do you tell them?
I use Linux and the most commercial programs don’t run on Linux.
I love the Lua scripting support in darktable. Thanks to that I was able to write an script, that crates a KML file from geo tagged photos. I’m then able import this file into Google Earth or KDE Marble. I use this to create overview maps for photo books.
Three main projects that I can’t live without are:
darktable
RawTherapee
GIMP (+G’MIC)
The basic workflow requirements are a) raw processing and b) pixel editing.
In both cases, darktable and RawTherapee are more than capable for anything that I likely usually need. Same for GIMP.
The core functionality can be combined and manipulated in ways to produce just about the same results that any commercial offering has (mostly). The only thing that may be lacking is the convenience of something like adjustment layers in Ps where you can go back and revisit a modification of some sort and have those changes cascade down through the layer stacks.
To be fair, much of the awesomeness of free software to me is the community. If I have something that I really want to try, I often have not just sympathetic folks to chat about it with, but they are often folks capable of actually doing something about it. It’s an awesome benefit of being part of a community like this (being able to use the film emulation cluts in GIMP/G’MIC or RawTherapee is awesome).
My indispensable tools for digital photography are:
photoflow, my own raw editor
hugin + enfuse for panorama stitching and pseudo-hdr
g’mic for some specific filters: gradient norm for edge detection, bilateral blur, half clut film emulation, rl deconvolution sharpening…
This is exactly what PhotoFlow is trying to implement and the very first reason for starting the project!
In fact, most of my edits are done with levels, rgb curves (usually multiple layers with local masks), local contrast, sharpening and eventually B&W conversion + slight toning with rgb curves.
Filmulator has smooth panning and zooming in the editor because the pipeline renders the full resolution every time. Zooming is completely unconstrained, and zooming in always centers perfectly about the mouse cursor. I just can’t handle any other editor I’ve tried because I expect this functionality.
I did a talk / presentation to my camera club last year.
I overviewed the various open source software available and did demos of Rawtherapee and GIMP.
The tools that were really well received (probably because I love them) were the Film Emulation filters in Rawtherapee and the G’MIC plugin for GIMP.
one thing to be aware is that your target audience are probably windows users (and to a lesser extent mac), so concentrating on tools that run on those O/S might make your demo more appealing.
I was going to demo Darktable, but decided that in a room of 40 camera club members then Darktable wold probably only interest 10% of them.
To my knowledge, I am the only member in our photography club (50+ members) who in a Linux / Ubuntu person.
Anyway back to your original question:
My workflow is Rawtherapee and GIMP (making essential use of film emulations and G’MIC). I sometimes use Darktable, but find RT easier to use
RawTherapee - I use it both for editing raw files from my DSLR and JPGs from my phone. Features I use the most are
Negative Tone Mapping
Lab adjustments
Curve based Luminance Noise Reduction
Black-and-White conversion
Colour Toning
Wavelets
Gimp - For processed TIFs from RawTherapee and for phone JPGs. I frequently use
Wavelet decompose
Luminosity masks
Smart sharpening
On the camera I also make use of Magic Lantern (mostly the Intervalometer and Dual ISO) but nowhere near the extent to which I use RawTherapee and Gimp.
More than just the tools, the advantage that I see over commercial software is that I end up learning not just the how, but also the why, which makes me understand photography more. I suppose you could do this with commercial offerings as well, but I always seem to know more than the Photoshop using photographers who are otherwise similar to me.
