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"
Golden ratio? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Aperature not as good Lightroom (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Re:Linux needs system-wide color management (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.
By the way I havent seen any distro that has been dumping any CLI feature in favour of GUI.
Re:Aperature not as good Lightroom (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Aperature not as good Lightroom (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that, he also blames the OS for it.
Lightroom runs on Mac too... (Score:3, Insightful)
And how is disappointment with one program (it's spelled Aperture by the way), translates into not liking the OS and the hardware?
This is just silly. If you are using the Mac, then you don't need aperture nor lightroom, since both try to be image database first and image editing software second.
Mac OS's spotlight does everything Aperture does, and if you create regular backups you are fine.
Re:Definition of the Golden Ratio from Wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
It's non-standard because no camera sensor or standard print size uses that ratio.
I don't care if he dislikes any Apple products. In fact, he seems to be quite fond of Apple products, since he uses them.
No halfway decent photographer shoehorns absolutely all of his work into ONE nonstandard aspect ratio. Different compositions require different aspect ratios.
The only reason to use one aspect ratio on all of your compositions is that you're simply not good or talented enough to know any better.
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. :-)
Re:Square peg, round hole (Score:3, Insightful)
8BPP is fine for viewing images, or just making a few edits. But having only 256 steps in each channel becomes a liability very quickly if you need to apply a few filters, touch up a bit, do a little dodging, etc. You quickly loose the subtly.
I am very excited that GIMP is integrating with GEGL. Of course I have been waiting 6 years for this (not kidding that is when the effort to go beyond 8BPP started), and it still isn't out yet. So I am not going to hold my breath until it comes out.
But even when it does GIMP is still going to be lacking compared to Photoshop, Aperature, LightRoom, and ZoneEdit when it comes to nondestructive editing. So even with CEGL it is still going to be a hard sell for me to consider GIMP
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.)
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.
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.