As I was gone for a week to visit Nicole’s family in Hoyerswerda (near Dresden), I had the chance to take lots of photos. On one day we visited Leipzig’s great Zoo, a great oppurtunity to get some nice pictures, which resulted in me completely filling up my 1GB flash disk.
If you are new to photography, as I am, try something like this: Lots of different lighting situations, targets far of, targets close, shooting through a fence, fast moving target, and so on. A nice way to get to know your camera a little bit better. Some pictures came out really great and I will make them available as soon as I get the time.
But for now I’d like to talk about the possibilities Linux is offering hobby photographers using digital hardware. Being a strong supporter of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) I was trying to get everything done with native KApplications, so no offense if a great piece of Gnome-Software is not mentioned. My list is not long anyway, since I am pretty new to this, comments and suggestions are greatly welcome. Feel free to tell me your set of tools.
Initially supposed to be a simple frontend to gphoto, this application has grown rapidly and still is. One reason for me to like digikam is the fact, that you are in total control of your folder hierarchy, only one database-file is placed in the root-folder of your picture-collection (SQLite I suppose).
This collection can be browsed in a classic album view, each folder symbolizing an album with a customizable album thumbnail.
Each picture can be tagged with any number of tags, which are not fixed, but can be added by the user. This way you are able to make subselections of albums (e.g. “best of holiday X”) or collect good shots of certain categories (e.g. “my best macro shots”). A simple rating can also be assigned to a photo.
Viewing, manipulating and tuning images is all done using kipi imageplugins an application indipendent image manipulation plugin for the most common tasks, yet, but growing really fast.
Another nice thing is that my Canon is supported out of the box, as are a large number of other cams. When importing pictures there is an option to create sub-albums for each day, by exif file-information. But careful: There is another option, to rotate every picture according to exif-information, which removes exif information from each picture that actually gets rotated. If I do not use this option, but rotate every picture manually, everything works fine, nothing gets lost.
EDIT: As this Release-Info tells me, this bug is fixed RC1:
o camera download: auto-rotated images lose EXIF meta data (#126326)
What I am missing currently:
- some sort of mass-tagging:
go through an album and tag pictures by a simple “spacebar”-hit or sth like that - compare pictures of a series to each other:
10 shots of 1 motive, which is the one you keep, which are the 9 to delete? help pls
- simple panorama-tool
Manipulation
Since I do not often feel the need to manipulate my pictures, I do not have done much in this field. Traditionally The Gimp should be a candidate for image manipulation, but also krita is on the move.
Panorama
I was looking for a simple tool, to 3 or 4 pictures together to one panorama. Not as easy as it sounds. In the end I found hugin. But couldn’t get it to work correctly, control points generated look good, but the jpeg rendered is always one color only, no idea why. Any help is greatly appreciated. Since there is no official package for dapper drake, I guess it has something to do with my installation.
Exposure-Blending / HDR
One way to generate High Dynamic Range (HDR) pictures is exposure blending. Shoot a scene with different exposure lengths and blend them together to eliminate very dark or bright parts (e.g. shot from inside a room through a window – outside the sun is shining). Unfortunately I did not find software specially suited for this, only some gimp-tutorials.
Since HDR profits from higher color depth CinePaint could be a useful tool for it.
Finally I would like to ask you to tell me: what tools are you using?