Linux Alternatives To Apple's Aperture 271
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"
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: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.
Re:Aperature not as good Lightroom (Score:2, Informative)
Why did she get a new computer?
There's a MacOS X version of Lightroom, and it seems to work just fine - I specifically chose it over Aperture after evaluating the trial versions of both last year...
Re:Here's a Summary! (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.
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: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.
Re:Here's a Summary! (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: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
Re:huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Aperature not as good Lightroom (Score:1, Informative)
I have never had such a problem with aperture with 600+ images per job (even some 2000+ jobs). My complain with it is that it is too slow.
OTOH, Lightroom + Photoshop work pretty fine on my G4 machine.
As for Open Source, my main complain is that it is not as productive as the Lightroom + Photoshop setup. I do like RAW Studio. I love The Gimp. But they do stand in my way of setting up lots of images.
In a simple math, RAW Studio + Gimp is a work day more than Lightroom + Photoshop. And I'm more used to GIMP's interface than Photoshop's one, as GIMP was one of the first image manipulation programs I ever used (circa 1998).
Re:huh? (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, filterable and so on!
With regard to editing, here's a screenshot from the develop view [hylobatidae.org]. All the edits are non-destructive - you can see a history on the left. 'RAW' refers to the image from the camera being in an unprocessed, raw-data-from-image-sensor format, which gives you a bit more latitude in tweaking white balance, contrast, exposure and the like.
(I don't normally shoot 'RAW', but my once-in-a-lifetime shipyard visit [flickr.com] coincided with some utterly horrendous weather - getting just the right exposure in unlit, semi-derelict Eastern European industrial buildings at 7am on a cold, dark, wintry morning proved a little tricky at times... ;-] )
Open, but perhaps not Free (Score:2, Informative)
F-Spot, The default photo editor that comes with Ubuntu 8.04, was quickly discarded. [FOSS]
Maybe change that to [fOSS].
It's open source, for sure, but since F-Spot is built on mono, a port of Microsoft .NET, it probably contains Microsoft intellectual property, the licensing of which may be dependent on which distro (e.g. SUSE) you're running, so 'Free' is debatable.
It could be a patent trap ... or not. That uncertainty is certainly disconcerting.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
Re:Aperature not as good Lightroom (Score:2, Informative)
Aperture doesn't generate filenames. It uses the filenames generated by your camera. I'm guessing you have your camera set to restart the numbering for each memory card. I'm not sure exactly what you did to delete your files but don't blame Aperture for your mistake, it will only do what you tell it to and will prompt you if you want to replace a file with another of the same name.
I'm betting that you still don't have a backup. When you lose files next time are you going to blame Lightroom and the PC and switch to Linux? Seems like a lot of work when you could just admit to yourself that you screwed up and change the way you work to include a backup.
Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:3, Informative)
Yes - sure, but for one thing, Lightroom allows the same (even allowing two different apps to be called from within lightroom -- in my case, these would be Photoshop and DXO (for which, I think, there also isn't a linux alternative).
But the 'trick' is more about not needing most of the programs for most of the time; or being able to batch-use them (like DXO, which I can run once every new import or so to work on all new pictures in one go).
Just as a bit of background - for someone 'occasionally' shooting photos, the whole gimp + various other things for different jobs might work fine. On the other hand, my photo library is about 20.000 photos - many of these still need to be sorted/sifted through to filter it down further, but if I wouldn't have a well integrated package like lightroom, I would probably have given up on it long ago. Thanks TO apps like lightroom, I'm much less hesitant to take LOTS of photos, because I know sorting/ordering/filtering/pruning is going to be both quick and easy. When I say lots, I do mean take several images of the same shot (often with bracketing) and then look through afterwards deciding which to take.
Regarding calling gimp / photoshop, it's a nice feature to have, but for the most time, I won't need it - Photoshop mostly comes into play for filtering options Lightroom doesn't have - e.g. perspective correction. For most photos, the various development options in lightroom are more than enough.
(the above is just as valid for Aperture - I think both Lightroom and Aperture are on about equal footing; I just happen to prefer lightroom (after using each separately for a while).
Re:Here's a Summary! (Score:2, Informative)
That's Lightzone that was available free for Linux, not Lightroom.
Re:Here's a Summary! (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.
I see a few missed apps listed here. (Score:3, Informative)
But I'm a bit surprised to see that no one has mentioned BlueMarine [tidalwave.it].
Granted, I'm just beginning to examine how such applications address me needs (not sure if they do, yet... Adobe Bridge seems to be all I need), but I do like the way that BlueMarine works.
Any thoughts?