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My free-software photography workflow
- tripu 5y agoVery useful, thanks!
- fidelramos 5y agoGlad you liked it! :)
- AussieWog93 5y agoRawTheRapee sounds a lot less pleasant than RawTherapee! :P
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y agoI thought "why would someone name anything that?" until I went to the website and found that this guy had for some reason changed the capitalisation to something much more creepy.
- IYasha 4y agoVery useful info there, thank you for sharing. I'm surprised there are no comments on software itself. o_O
- yazantapuz 5y agoAt first glance I have read it as rawtheRapee too. Was totally confused as how on earth they could have choosed that name.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoReminds me of the “analyst-therapist” in “arrested development”
- thechao 5y ago(Analrapist) "Oh! It's pronounced uh-nalll-rupist!" "I wasn't concerned with its pronunciation."
- spaetzleesser 5y agoI was considering writing it down but the joke works only with the correct pronounciation.
- reaperducer 5y agohttp://www.penisland.net http://www.penisland.net
- FredPret 5y ago"We specialize in wood" "Once we built a pen so large that we had difficulty finding a box it would fit in." Also, their logo is... suggestive
- sdoering 5y agoFrom their FAQ: > Q: Can I provide my own wood? > A: In most cases we can handle your wood. We do require all shipments to be clean, free of parasites and pass all standard customs inspections. Damn - thanks. Now I will never get this site out of my head again.
- gjm11 5y agoThe section of the TeXbook (the user manual for Knuth's TeX typesetting system) that talks about hyphenation has the lovely/horrible example of "the-rapists pre-aching on wee-knights".
- dylan604 5y agoI think I've seen this SNL skit of Sean Connery: I'll take RawTheRapee for $500 Alex.
- fidelramos 5y agoBlog author here. Would you believe I didn't notice the proper capitalization is RawTherapee and not RawTheRapee? I didn't think twice about the semantics, now I can't unsee it. Thanks for the comment!
- leephillips 5y agoThanks for putting together your article. It’s useful and informative, and a generous effort on your part.
- fidelramos 5y agoThank you for your kind words, much appreciated!
- igouy 5y agoSo can you edit your blog post to fix that?
- fidelramos 5y agoAbsolutely, I just uploaded the fix.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoI have a similar workflow but with darktable. Rawtherapee has an easier interface but last time I checked it didn’t have local adjustments which I need sometimes. Once you understand the UI, digikam is fantastic.
- corbet 5y agoI recently did close looks at both RawTherapee (https://lwn.net/Articles/883599/ https://lwn.net/Articles/883599/) and darktable (https://lwn.net/Articles/881853/ https://lwn.net/Articles/881853/) for anybody interested in a comparison. One point worthy of note is that the RawTherapee development community has been struggling, which could be a long-term problem.
- Tobu 5y agoART — Another RawTherapee — could be addressing this, with recent releases: https://bitbucket.org/agriggio/art https://bitbucket.org/agriggio/art
- fidelramos 5y agoI had seen some mentions to ART a while ago, it looks like it has come a long way. I see several features that I was missing from Darktable (automatic perspective correction, improved shadows-midtones-highlights handling, masks...), I definitely need to give it a try. Thanks for sharing!
- dantondwa 5y agoI personally just use Darktable, and I'm incredibly happy with it. It's just a fantastic software and we're lucky to have for free. Kudos to all the developers making free-software photography a reality!
- Saris 5y agoI like Darktable, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get defringe working. It's completely intuitive in lightroom and rawtherapee, but for some reason darktable just doesn't do what I want.
- jumaro 5y agoNot sure if it helps you, since you seem like you already tried a lot. I was confused about the different ways to do this, so I wrote down the ways I found: https://makandracards.com/darktable/477993-remove-chromatic-aberrations https://makandracards.com/darktable/477993-remove-chromatic-...
- Saris 5y agoThanks, yeah I think I've tried the first 2 methods. I'm expecting something like an eyedropper to come up where I click the fringing, but I think it's something else I need to do.
- sound1 5y agoDarktable is an incredible piece of software, especially considering it is free and open source. Thank you developers!!
- fidelramos 5y ago+1! Darktable is simply amazing. I also use it, just on specific photos. RawTherapee gives me good results for the bulk of my photos in less time, which for me it's an important constraint. In the end it's just great having multiple top-tier free-software options for photo editing, a big thank you to all their developers!
- manaskarekar 5y agoI have played with these in the past and found that rawtherapee results look far less appealing (or need far more effort than what I was willing to invest) than Adobe Lightroom for non trivial settings. I wonder how things compare now. It is great that these softwares are offered for free though.
- 120photo 5y agoI am going to plug Andy Astbury's YouTube channel here, specifically his fantastic RawTherapee tutorials. Where Adobe, MS, and other big companies thrive is the amount of high quality training and tutorials for inferior software. RawTherapee is an amazing piece of software that is hard to use with limited learning resources (compared to Adobe or Capture One) but people like Andy are fixing some of that. Edit: Forgot to add a link https://youtu.be/310rCQZe0NI https://youtu.be/310rCQZe0NI
- atestu 5y agoLink: https://www.youtube.com/c/AndyAstbury https://www.youtube.com/c/AndyAstbury
- traceroute66 5y ago> Where Adobe, MS, and other big companies thrive is the amount of high quality training and tutorials for inferior software. I'm afraid I don't buy this unfounded muck-slinging. I know the open-source evangelists live in a rose tinted world where open-source automatically equals better. However I think its only fair and reasonable to admit that it is possible to make high quality closed-source software. Specifically, in terms of Adobe, I think it is deeply unfair and unfounded to call it "inferior". There is, for example, high-levels of integration between Adobe tools that is simply not present in open-source. Ultimately money talks. December 2021 there were 26 million Adobe Creative Suite subscribers and growing. If Adobe was that shit, do you really think people would continue paying them ? I know some people running companies in the design sector (larger companies, not one-man band freelancers), Adobe is a necessary business expense, they pay it because they want it, because time is money, and if their designers get the job done better, quicker and more efficiently in Adobe then they will pay the subscription. (Oh, and to address your specific point, the designers spend exactly zero hours watching training and tutorials on the Adobe website).
- jknecht 5y agoI will also add that, for photographers, there is bundle from Adobe that I consider to be a tremendous value. For about $10/month (where I live, it's easy to spend more than that on a single drink in a bar), I get access to both LightRoom and Photoshop. I've tried open source alternatives, and they are good, but none of them are necessarily better than the Adobe product. I hate the fact that I am paying for yet another subscription, but in this case, over the course of 5 years, I am just barely paying the retail price of the old CD-based product. So (a) I don't feel like I'm being fleeced, and (b) I get to spread the payments out without really paying more. Every time I've tried moving into the world of FOSS photography, I've wasted dozens of hours trying to figure out how to do relatively simple things, modifying and tweaking configurations, or completely removing and reinstalling because an update broke something that should have never broken. I work in software, so I'm not exactly a dummy on this stuff; and I know that sometimes that's just part of the deal - especially in a world where you get what you pay for. In the end, I had to decide whether I wanted my hobby time to be focused on working with my photos or working with my software. And that is why I happily pay.
- lostgame 5y agoI would like to see a list of these for all sorts of different workflows! Also - holy shit, RawTheRapee needs a new/different name, eh? I'm guessing/hoping English is not the creator's first language? :3 Edit: Apparently, it's 'RawTherapee' - as in 'RAW therapy' - not 'Raw the Rape'. It actually took me until Googling it and seeing it that way that I got it. Maybe it should've just been called RawTherapy? :/
- hbn 5y ago"Okay, Lindsay, are you forgetting that I was a professional twice over? An analyst and a therapist. The world’s first analrapist."
- Jiejeing 5y agoThis is very interesting, my own workflow is with shotwell + darktable but shotwell is a bit too limited for my usage.
- NKosmatos 5y agoVery useful, thanks for sharing Fidel! Just to note that this guide is Linux focused but most of the tools, except Geeqie, are also available for Windows (and macOS of course). He's also covering replication/synchronization with the excellent Syncthing (+1 vote from my side) as well as backup with Wasabi (being cheaper than Backblaze). And to top it of, here is what he states about an online viewer: "I am currently working on creating a web gallery software that will give access to my full photography collection and allow navigating it...I will release the software as open source when its basic features are working, so stay tuned!"
- fidelramos 5y agoGlad you liked it! About the web gallery project, this being Hacker News I would like to give some more details about it: I have implemented a React frontend and FastAPI backend, navigating through the albums and photos already work, but thumbnails won't display because Digikam uses PGF image format [0]. PGF images are great for thumbnails because images load progressivel and can be quickly rendered at different sizes, but they are not supported natively by web browsers. I'm going to try compiling libpgf [1] to WASM so the frontend will be able to display the Digikam thumbnails directly (and allow for on-the-fly thumbnail resizing!), otherwise I will need to handle the conversion in backend. Once thumbnails work I will deploy it on my home server, dogfood it for a while, polish a few things and release it. Of course Hacker News will get an announcement. [0] https://www.libpgf.org/ https://www.libpgf.org/ [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/libpgf/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/libpgf/
- digitallyfree 5y agoI prefer Darktable over Rawtherapee, but both are great open-source RAW development programs. LR is obviously more fully featured but for amateur or semi-pro they are more than acceptable.
- vanderZwan 5y ago> LR is obviously more fully featured IIRC there have been a few times when CS researchers working on image algorithms published their findings with a Darktable implementation first.
- moolcool 5y agoI can't speak to lightroom, but I found that CaptureOne renders Sony RAWs much better out-of-the-box than either Darktable or RawTherapee.
- paulmd 5y agoYes. "Open-source workflow" means you're leaving quality on the table. This is one place where there's just no replacement to hiring engineers to sit down and work on the product for a few years. The open-source stuff is nowhere close to CaptureOne or Lightroom in terms of quality of RAW conversion or the quality of the image processing.
- Melatonic 5y agoI found CaptureOne to beat out all of Adobes stuff by quite a bit as well
- paulmd 5y agoI haven't used it but I hear very very good things. Does CaptureOne support a "RAW+sidecar metadata" format? It is important to me that the raws not be modified (i.e. metadata not written directly to them) and that the metadata be a per-file sidecar and not just a single giant catalog file. Lightroom seems to support this workflow but others didn't seem to (or at least didn't explicitly state they did). That would be the ideal workflow for me in terms of generating useful catalogs and making backups smooth.
- corndoge 5y agoNever heard of rawtherapee, looks dope. Like others I use Darktable, which is especially awesome because it allows me to directly export to a new album on my Piwigo server. If you publish photos Piwigo is awesome too.
- Vegaltden 5y ago> File grouping means that by default Geeqie will only show the JPEG file of each photo, while the RAW file and potential sidecars (e.g. XMP or PP3) are hidden away, but still only one click away. Then when a file is deleted all the files in the same group are deleted as well. Sidecar grouping works well by default, but if necessary it can be tweaked it in Preferences I would be interested in reading OP's approach with sidecars, and how he configured Digikam for storing metadata (in file or in sidecar ? How does the two communicate between Digikam and Rawtherapee/Darktable ?)
- fidelramos 5y agoOP here. I honestly don't worry too much about full sync between Digikam and other software. In my workflow I process all RAWs first, then edit all metadata in Digikam. After that I very rarely have to come back to RawTherapee/Darktable so I treat it as a one-way flow. Last time I checked about keeping Digikam and other programs in sync, about 2 years ago, it seemed to me that it wasn't going to work seamlessly, so I decided to let it be. If someone has experience about it I would love to hear about it.
- fidelramos 5y agoI discovered ART [0] from other comments here, and it looks like it explicitly supports Digikam/Darktable metadata sync through XMP files: > Better metadata handling (thanks to the exiv2 and exiftool libraries), with (optional) support for reading and writing XMP sidecar files. I will check it out soon, ART has some very useful features that I miss from Darktable in RawTherapee. [0] https://bitbucket.org/agriggio/art https://bitbucket.org/agriggio/art
- teeray 5y agoAny good recommendations for video workflows? I’m really not excited about paying a tithe to Adobe just for my hobby drone flying.
- Scene_Cast2 5y agoNot OSS, but the free version of Davinci Resolve is pretty great.
- _joel 5y agoAgreed, there's also https://kdenlive.org/en/ https://kdenlive.org/en/ which is OSS
- seanw444 5y agoAnd also Shotcut.
- smoldesu 5y agoI actually kinda love Kdenlive. It's not half as powerful as something like Davinci Resolve, but it's been a consistently wonderful experience every time I need to splice together a couple clips or composite a video. Now if only it could get more NLE features...
- nybble41 5y agoThe NLE video editor function of Blender also gets good reviews. It can be used independently of the 3D modeling & rendering features. [0] https://www.blendernation.com/2020/08/30/video-editing-with-blender-complete-tutorial-series/ https://www.blendernation.com/2020/08/30/video-editing-with-...
- fidelramos 5y agoI'm much more of a photographer than a videographer, but I have used Openshot [0] and KDEnlive [1] and they got the job done. [0] https://www.openshot.org/ https://www.openshot.org/ [1] https://kdenlive.org/en/ https://kdenlive.org/en/
- cycomanic 5y agoI still find lightzones editing model the most intuitive and at the same time extremely powerful. Unfortunately development is extremely slow and it has not seen significant functionality updates since it was made oss, and is quite slow in comparison to the others.
- Jedd 5y agoAgreed - LightZone still feels like one of the more intuitive & powerful tools for applying and experimenting with types of filters. It's my preferred tool for doing some quick edits on photos. On a half-way decent machine I find the performance excellent - what kind of slow issues are you finding? Development, if you track the github issues, is down to one guy at the moment. I fear the relicensing of the project was just a smidge too late, and the field was already well populated, for it to attract more interest, unfortunately.
- jimnotgym 5y agoDo any of these OSS tools allow you to apply colour management? That is applying DNG or ICC profiles to images?
- q3k 5y agodarktable does. https://darktable.gitlab.io/doc/en/color_management.html https://darktable.gitlab.io/doc/en/color_management.html
- igouy 5y agohttps://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Color_Management https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Color_Management https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Color_Management_addon https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Color_Management_addon https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/ICC_Profile_Creator https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/ICC_Profile_Creator
- toastal 5y agoI didn't see Hugin, but it should have been mentioned. It produces some amazing results for stitching panoramas, focus stacking, or man other techniques that require multiple photos.
- igouy 5y agoICE magically easy to use — https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computational-photography-applications/image-composite-editor/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computation...
- fidelramos 5y agoOP here. I do use Hugin for panoramas, and it's fantastic. I was going to write a bonus section about it but I wanted to get the post out of the way as I had been working on it for too long already. I will add it in a future update.
- sandreas 5y agoVery nice article. I'm suprised, that nobody mentioned photoprism[1]... It does deduplicate and provide a nice web interface for browsing and searching photos as well as a very powerful AI for object detection... [1] https://photoprism.app/ https://photoprism.app/
- smm11 5y agoI've got no dog in this fight, but when I was getting paid for photos long ago I used something called Breeze Browser to do just about everything. Nothing did batch processing nearly as well.
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoSyncthing is really underrated. Clever, cute little bit of software. Darktable is a bad user experience on the Mac but it's definitely capable of good results, as is Rawtherapee. But I generally don't use open source stuff for photography; I have sunk expense in Mac software and I'll use that until it breaks.
- CarVac 5y agoI wrote my own one-program, more-streamlined workflow for this, Filmulator.
- fidelramos 5y agoI didn't know about Filmulator, will check it out. Thanks for sharing!
- shrubby 5y agoThank you. I'm not taking too many photos these days with a real camera or shoot RAW, but this'll come handy should the day come again.
- jmmv 5y agoThanks for the article. Any thoughts on how to deal with DNG files? A few years ago, I bought into Apple's "DNG promise" and converted all my raw photos into lossless DNGs AND my JPEGs into lossy DNGs. Silly me. I now feel trapped into Lightroom, which I pay for out of inertia and wouldn't like to any longer... and I feel that such conversion was a huge mistake. The reason I ask is because I've found support for DNG files to be lacking in many cases, and when I researched this recently, the answers didn't seem better than years ago. The article doesn't talk about this at all. So I'd love to be proven wrong :)
- Zak 5y agoDNG is supported by most open source RAW developers, e.g. Darktable. I'm assuming you've had some issue more subtle than inability to find a program roughly equivalent to Lightroom that has general support for the format, but you may need to elaborate if you want useful responses.
- jmmv 5y agoTo be honest, I haven't yet put any serious effort into figuring out how to abandon Lightroom. At most... I just did a few searches for a couple of programs I already knew about and looked at whether they supported DNG. Most comments I found online sounded negative (but again, my research was too superficial). I didn't even know Darktable existed for example! I am a very light Lightroom user. I have thousands of pictures, but mostly use Lightroom to categorize them and do some trivial edits here and there. The pictures are already organized in a tree structure with sidecar XMP (?) metadata files, so I don't think the LR catalog has a ton of information I care about anyway? I'd be nice to have a pure file-system based catalog that separates edits from originals in some way, and that keeps photo metadata attached to the photos themselves. But I guess my question remains: is it a good idea to continue "investing" into DNG by converting new photos into it, or is it better to "stop the bleeding"? Because from what I have read before, this format didn't seem too well-supported outside of Adobe apps...
- Zak 5y agoDarktable and RawTherapee are fairly Lightroom-like (but different enough that you shouldn't be surprised when things are, well, different), but Filmulator might actually be the best fit for your preferences. Regardless, the best way to get an answer to your question about DNG is probably to try some of these programs with your files and see if you encounter any problems. DNG is typically better supported than camera-specific raw formats.
- midiguy 5y agoThe fact that 5 different open-source software are required to do the same thing as Lightroom has convinced me to stick with Adobe.
- fidelramos 5y agoOP here. This is my workflow, it doesn't have to fit everybody else. If you want a single software to do everything then you should give Darktable [0] a try, it can handle all steps in my proposed workflow including importing, browsing, editing and metadata organization. It even exports to third-party services. I think it has more features than Lightroom, although the UX is arguably worse.
- Fwirt 5y agoOne interesting thing to note about open-source vs commercial software when it comes to RAW conversion is that commercial offerings like Adobe CS, CaptureOne and Affinity Photo sometimes have a relationship with camera manufacturers to get access to their proprietary demosaicing algorithm for their camera's sensors. These algorithms are also embedded in the camera firmware and are responsible for converting the RAW sensor data into something resembling an image. Thus, when you view a RAW file in the camera (or a JPEG straight off the camera), or in a commercial offering, you're getting an image that looks more like what the manufacturer of the camera intended. Likely that's what they used in-house when developing the camera software. So whether or not you trust the camera company to do the best job of demosaicing their own sensor is up to you, but if you use open-source software you're still going to get great images, but they're never going to look exactly like the JPEGs you get off the camera. If you're a professional this probably doesn't matter, but for an amateur who just wants to shoot RAW to take great lossless photos and be able to do some tweaking in post-processing it can be frustrating. For Canon at least, their in-house raw converter/photo editor is available for free (Canon Digital Photo Professional) and while its features are definitely not quite as good as either free or commercial offerings, its features are (for a total amateur like me) "good enough", and it will produce images that are identical to what comes off the camera. Plus you can save some of the raw processing steps that you did to a profile that you can load onto the camera and use in the field, so if you're shooting to JPEG you can bake in some of that processing ahead of time.
- notyourday 5y ago> One interesting thing to note about open-source vs commercial software when it comes to RAW conversion is that commercial offerings like Adobe CS, CaptureOne and Affinity Photo sometimes have a relationship with camera manufacturers to get access to their proprietary demosaicing algorithm for their camera's sensors. This is absolutely true even for Nikons and Canons of the world. I'm always baffled about the obsession with open source for photo editing workflows on a desktop. From "I just want to get stuff done" OSS is just junk. It is a better junk than it was before, but it is still junk. And why would not it be? It is all about optimizing for the experience and there's not a single piece of open source software that is optimized for user's experience. Why on earth do we think this -- a fairly complex type of software -- would be any different if we cannot get themes in GNOME work consistently?
- notyourday 5y agoI prefer to spend my time shooting rather than fighting with a software.
- jrapdx3 5y agoIt was film in the old days, but all digital since early 2000's. I've always preferred open source software which has really come a long way since GIMP and friends were in their infancy. My workflow has evolved over the years to suit my uses of photography. Mostly photos are raw material and highly manipulated for artistic purposes. For my purposes jpegs have usually been good enough so I seldom need to do raw processing. For those times I have Darktable and RawTherapee installed, both are incredible programs that have worked well for me. GIMP continues to be a primary tool. It's not perfect but it does many things extremely well. For example, making color separations for CMYK printing is pretty easy and straightforward. GIMP also allows effective image manipulation, particularly when plugins are added: gmic, cyan, resynthesizer, autosave. Workflow also relies on other FOSS programs such as Scribus (for printing positives) and occasionally inkscape, krita, paint.net for certain image effects. Yes, it takes time and effort to work out components of a custom workflow. I have no doubt proprietary programs offer greater levels of convenience (for "standard" workflow) at significant monetary cost. Like everything else tradeoffs are implicit, one approach isn't absolutely "better" than the other.
- fleddr 5y agoSince you cannot really re-take photos and the author has decades of photos, I'd be more paranoid about backups and extend it with one low tech option. Sync mechanisms can go wrong. Somebody might hack into your cloud storage account and wipe it out. The odds may be small, but you'd be absolutely heart broken if your lifelong portfolio is gone. So what I do is that once a year, I manually back up everything on a USB disc. On two actually, the second disc I bring to another location. Once backed up, I never have them connected. They just sit in storage. Since this manual backup is so infrequent, it's not a huge pain. Should full disaster strike and all hot backups fail, at worst I lose 1 year of photos, which is better than 20 years. If you think I'm too distrustful of sync tech: a year ago at work OneDrive wiped out all my files. I've pressed internal IT and Microsoft itself for answers, but none were given but this: OneDrive is a sync solution, not a backup solution. Point taken.
- fidelramos 5y agoOP here. You make a great point, and I am that careful with my photo collection. I didn't put it in the article but I do copy my full photo collection into a USB hard drive about once a year when I visit my parents. This way they have my photos and I have yet another backup. :)
- fleddr 5y agoNice to hear, thanks for the reply :)