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Linux Alternatives To Apple's Aperture
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Jul 10, 2008 10:57 AM
from the linux-users-deserve-pretty-pictures-too dept.
from the linux-users-deserve-pretty-pictures-too dept.
somethingkindawierd writes "An experiment focusing on open source tools for Ubuntu Linux to compete with Aperture on the Mac. The author didn't think he would find a worthwhile open source solution, but to his surprise he found some formidable raw processing tools. A good read for any Linux fan or photographer looking for capable and inexpensive tools"
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Linux alternative to aperture: (Score:5, Funny)
It's too bad Adobe got their hands on RawShooter (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's too bad Adobe got their hands on RawShoote (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:It's too bad Adobe got their hands on RawShoote (Score:4, Funny)
I'll choose Raw The Rapee for 1000. Haw haw.
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Here's a Summary! (Score:5, Informative)
F-Spot, The default photo editor that comes with Ubuntu 8.04, was quickly discarded. [FOSS]
Picasa, Really liked the application overall. I crop all my photos to the golden ratio of 1.62:1, so this limitation is unacceptable. [NOT FOSS]
LightZone, very similar to both Aperture and Adobe's Lightroom. Costs $200 and is not open source. No online support forum.
Bibble, very fast and it only costs $130. It does not however have any photo-management capabilities. No tagging, project management, or meta data editing. [NOT FOSS]
Raw Therapee, raw photo processor, free. It does not, however, run on Mac OS X. Does not manage projects. And it does not work with anything but raw photos, so it will not allow for processing jpegs or tiffs
Qtpfsgui, another useful application. HDR tool for Ubuntu Linux, Macintosh, and Windows.
The result:
There isn't an all-in-one package that will do the trick, but by combining Ubuntu's file manager Nautilus for project management, Raw Therapee for raw processing, and the Gimp for non-raw processing, just about everything I do in Aperture can be done on Ubuntu Linux using free and open source solutions.
Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:5, Insightful)
But that's part of the shortfall...
Lightroom and Aperture are so good BECAUSE they are integrated.
There is nothing really in Lightroom that you can't do with Photoshop - but the way it's integrated and how it's able to work with / organise large collections of photos makes Lightroom one of the most run Apps on my Mac.
As long as Linux doesn't offer a good competitor to Lightroom / Aperture, I will keep doing my photography stuff on the Mac...
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Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:4, Informative)
There's also digikam [digikam.org] which does a *lot* of things including management, basic editing and raw processing (although I do that last bit in Bibble). It's Qt but will run fine on a Gnome desktop.
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Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:4, Funny)
Holy crap, how does one spell that? o_0
How did the author come up with this name? Did he smashed the keyboard with an enraged basement cat or what? Or is it "Cthulhu" reversed and triple-ROT13'd?...
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Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:5, Informative)
Raw Therapee, raw photo processor, free. It does not, however, run on Mac OS X. Does not manage projects. And it does not work with anything but raw photos, so it will not allow for processing jpegs or tiffs
Huh? out-of-the-box it can't, but you just click on Preferences > File Browser, uncheck Show only RAW files, and there ya go. Can't understand why "doesn't run on MacOSX" would be a con in an article about *Linux* alternatives to Aperture either, but oh well.
Ohh, and about Lightroom, the older (v2.x) versions used to be free (as in $0) on Linux, plus they ran on non-SSE2 CPUs, so Linux users strapped for cash may want to search the 'net for them instead.
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Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, it's been a joke/cliche/truism for years about OSS packages with crappy names, but... damn. I think we have a winner. 6 consonants in a row and two vowels at the end. No one will over beat that. It looks like someone's cat walked over the keyboard just as the owner was clicking 'create new project' on SourceForge.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As far as GIMP interface is concerned, let's just say its different than, er, Photoshop. It has been discussed and beaten to death already anyways, and offtopic here.
Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:5, Funny)
In my opinion, it hasn't been beaten to death enough.
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Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:4, Informative)
The GIMP is disqualified for not being like Aperture at all, but like Photoshop.
Aperture and its Adobe competition, Lightroom, are metadata-based editors with very powerful RAW processing engines. They draw upon the power of metadata for everything from nondestructive editing (pixels are not touched until export) to project organization (through EXIF data and IPTC keywords).
They also both use a streamlined, task oriented interface, instead of the random collection of tools that is GIMP or Photoshop. Some "power user tips" that take a long sequence of steps in GIMP or Photoshop have been intelligently condensed into single sliders in Aperture and Lightroom, for easier use by everyone.
GIMP is still basically a destructive pixel pusher, like Photoshop. I don't think it has any RAW capability unless you tie it to dcraw. Therefore GIMP does not play in this sandbox.
Someone once said that the failure of Open Source office suites was their slavish imitation of Microsoft Office, and that what was really needed was a fresh new approach. The same could be said of why GIMP fails against Photoshop. The fresh new approach is being provided by Adobe and Apple's metadata-based image editors.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't realize GIMP handled RAW (NEF and suchlike) formats and allowed adjusting of whitepoints, etc. I thought it was purely a raster image editor/tweaker.
This is the whole reason Aperture exists and people don't just use Photoshop (which incidentally does all of that too) for RAW processing.
Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't realize GIMP handled RAW (NEF and suchlike) formats and allowed adjusting of whitepoints, etc. I thought it was purely a raster image editor/tweaker.
Glad we could set you straight on that. I love the RAW tools in GIMP, they simplify my workflow significantly.
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Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, GIMP doesn't actually support RAW formats, and for good reason. They are both unnecessarily manifold and proprietary.
That's not "good reason". That's just lacking capability.
Even the most basic cameras generally offer support for uncompressed images (usually in some sort of TIFF encapsulation), and if this is what you need, then use it.
You really don't know what raw files are even used for, do you? Very few cameras these days support TIFF, and that's because TIFF has none of the benefits of raw CCD data files, and is even larger than them.
(Technically, DNG raw files are TIFFs, but those are not in any way widely supported yet.)
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Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:4, Informative)
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Linux needs system-wide color management (Score:5, Interesting)
Color management means an image is shown the same on every screen, and as close as possible on paper. You cannot do serious photo work without integrated color management, but unfortunately even Winsh*t still leads Linux by ten years here. It's time the Linux guys moved their efforts to desktop app integration - the server is done - you hear me, guys ? the server is done, move to improving the desktop !
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
the server is done - you hear me, guys ? the server is done, move to improving the desktop !
So far, I have not been impressed with the efforts to "improve" the desktop. With every new iteration of the various popular distributions, it seems like more and more functionality is tied to GNOME and/or KDE with fewer and fewer features available through the command line.
I think it would be better if people kept their hands off the desktop.
Oh, and I can't do serious photo work, because I'm not any good at photogra
Re:Linux needs system-wide color management (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A line needs to be drawn somewhere..
Us geeks like the CLI even today because we know that the CLI is much more efficint for the kind of task that we do. It is quicker to do many tasks from the CLI than the click>wait app to launch> Click the Tab> Select The Option> Apply> Close. But we need to remember that the population of average user outruns the population of us geeks.
The developers need to continue designing better GUI apps without compromising on the CLI bundle that we still use.
Re:Linux needs system-wide color management (Score:4, Insightful)
Speak for yourself, and don't try to speak for "us geeks". There are a lot of geeks who use the GUI for almost everything. Yes, I like to have tcsh available on my MacOS Terminal (I know some prefer bash), but the idea that preferring a GUI costs me geek cred (finally!) died over a decade ago.
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Re:Linux needs system-wide color management (Score:4, Insightful)
You aren't much of a geek, then. Preferring the GUI for CERTAIN TASKS is a good thing. But the GUI is simply not the best interface for everything. There are some things that are much better done with the CLI, which is what I think the GPP was getting at. Don't stop development of the command-line interface and tools simply because we want to appeal to grandmas and other people scared of the command line.
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Re: (Score:3)
Seeing as how most of that color-management some want so badly is patented by various for-profit companies, and considering that patent lifetime is (currently) 17 years, and finally if Windows is "ten years" more advanced than Linux, then it's as much as 7 more years (Barring a patent lifetime extension being rammed through Congress) before those patents expire and Linux distros can finally start integrating those technologies legally.
For the time being, there are ways to get color management in Linux [wikipedia.org] depen
Golden ratio? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Golden ratio? (Score:5, Funny)
I immediately subconsciously discredited the author when he stated that the golden ratio was a requirement.
Apparently, your subconscious also posted this to slashdot.
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Re:Golden ratio? (Score:4, Interesting)
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What a tool (Score:5, Insightful)
I stopped caring when the author said that he crops "all" his photos to the same (non-standard) ratio.
Closed, done. Sorry.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
digiKam? (Score:5, Informative)
What, has no-one mentioned digiKam [digikam.org] yet?
What a terrible omission from the review.
Take a look, it's really good.
Re:digiKam? (Score:5, Informative)
Totally agree.
I prefer Digikam to iPhoto for many reasons. The most important to me is that I can keep a folder organization that makes logical sense on disc and have it reflected in digikam.
One thing it gets right that other photo managers get wrong: Selecting photos and moving them to another photo will bring up a small dialog asking if you want to copy or move the files. Stupid and irrelevant for /.'ers, but great for those that forget that holding down the shift or control keys are how this is generally done in other applications (like my dad, who constantly screws up his iPhoto folders by copying when he thinks he is moving, or vice versa).
One slight gripe: It follows the KDE standard of a single click opening a photo instead of selecting it (easily changed by installing kcontrol in ubuntu and changing the mouse property).
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Re:digiKam? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, no.
You point digikam to the root folder of your photos. It will create a single file there consisting of it's database.
No importing of folders necessary. :-)
Maybe you had it confused with f-spot?
Give it a try. You'll really love it and never go back. :-)
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Re:digiKam? (Score:5, Informative)
To clarify. If you move a photo in digikam to another folder, it will move that file to the corresponding folder on the disk (just as you would expect it to).
The purpose of the database file is (I believe) just to keep track of thumbnail images it creates.
I'm not sure about RAW file support. According to this web page ( http://www.digikam.org/drupal/node/344 [digikam.org] ), RAW is supported with a standard plugin.
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Raw Therapee can handle JPEG/TIFF (Score:5, Informative)
Also missing from the comparison: Rawstudio [rawstudio.org] and UFRaw [sourceforge.net].
If you're interested in RAW processing on Linux, there's an excellent blog called Linux Photography [wordpress.com] about this very subject.
Square peg, round hole (Score:5, Informative)
Since the author of the blog post is asking for an Aperture clone for Linux, the answer will pretty much always be "no". If the author were to ask "Can I do my photo processing, from importing RAW files to storing the finished picture and printing?" the answer is yes.
Here's how I do it:
Just save all projects in .xcf or .xcf.bz2 and export finished product to .png.
One last thing, for all the haters who whine about ONLY having 16.8 million colors to work with, even without your help GIMP is integrating GEGL which will bring 16bit integer and 32bit floating point per component.
Digikam works great for a JPEG workflow (Score:4, Informative)
He is confused (Score:4, Informative)
This experiment focuses mainly on Aperture and what tools, if any, exist for Ubuntu to replace my Aperture workflow with something cross-platform and open-source that I can use on Mac OS X and Ubuntu.
And then what he looks at,
He stated a criteria ("open-source"), then 4 out of 6 had nothing to do with that criteria. Nice work on consistency there, pal.
Re:Aperature not as good Lightroom (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Aperature not as good Lightroom (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, he also blames the OS for it.
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Re:Aperature not as good Lightroom (Score:5, Informative)
Aperture's "library" is just a folder; Use "Show Package contents" from "Get Info" and copy all the originals wherever you want.
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Re:Aperature not as good Lightroom (Score:4, Insightful)
we lost a year of work because Aperature's doesn't generate unique filenames for its images across subdirectories and when you export it overlays them...
Why didn't she just restore from the backups you've been helping her keep?
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Informative)
The RAW image is the one straight from the camera (basically a RAW dump of the CCD output).
Photo Management includes more than just folders (a good example is tagging -- I want to find all images tagged "Outdoors" or tagged "Porn" or tagged both "Outdoor" and "Porn"). Of course, like folders, tags are only as good as you make them.
Layne
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Re:huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:huh? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Screenshots might help - basically it's a file manager with additional sorting, filtering and whatnot designed for organising photos. Here's Lightroom's library view [hylobatidae.org] as an example - I've filtered to show only photos I've given three stars or more, and selected one so you can see all the keywords and other metadata assigned to that photo. All searchable, sortable, filterab
Re:huh? (Score:5, Informative)
"RAW" photos are a lossless capture, which means they are larger files (bad) but with few of the artifacts produced by JPEG compression, and thus your editing options are greatly increased (good).
The exact details of the format depend on the make and even the model of camera you're using; a low-end "point and shoot" camera seldom provides RAW output (see recent Slashdot article on FOSS firmware that adds RAW support to higher-end Canon P&S cameras, however).
A modern digital camera will also add a nice chunk of metadata to each image, giving the details of its exposure. The main difference between a FILL manager and a PHOTO manager is the latter's awareness of, and ability to use, this metadata in a "workflow."
By "workflow" we mean the situation where a professional photographer will routinely generate thousands of images at a wedding, and will want to pick through them to find images worth further refinement, apply a set of transforms (crop, tweak the exposure, sharpen 0.02%, yada yada) to them in large batches, but SELECTIVELY, to produce a finished body of quality work.
Managing those images only with a file manager would be nightmarish; being able to select just the images that were shot with Lens A to apply a certain transform means you can automate the process, go have pizza while the mass of bits gets twiddled, then come back and get creative with the results.
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Aperture Laboratories is a computer-aided enrichment center to test the Aperture Science Hand-held Portal [half-life2.com] device.
More information is available in a video [half-life2.com].
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