Here's a list of recommended applications for photographers using Linux.
Rather than being extensive, the list focuses on applications best fitted for the job.
I tried to cover all area of interest.
Feel free to complete the list and share your tips. Thanks!
Photo Managers
- digiKam- F-Spot F-Spot is a full-featured personal photo management application. It provides intuitive tools to help you share, touch-up, find and organize your images.
Website:
Main Page - F-Spot
Screenshots:
Features - F-Spot
Documentation:
User Guide - F-Spot
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel
Licence: open source
gThumb is an image viewer and browser. You can organize and view images as catalogs, or as a slideshow, bookmark folders and catalogs, and add comments to images. gThumbs includes basic image editing.
Website:
http://gthumb.sourceforge.net/
Screenshots:
GTHUMB
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel
Licence: open source
Picasa helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your computer. It automatically locates all your pictures and sorts them. Picasa makes it a snap to share your pictures (email, post to blog, and upload via Picasa Web Albums).
Website:
Picasa 3 for Linux: Free download from Google
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel
Licence: closed source, freeware
Import your images efficiently and reliably with Rapid Photo Downloader. This application generates meaningful, user configurable file and folder names. It can also download images from multiple devices simultaneously and perform backups automatically as photos are being imported.
Website:
Rapid Photo Downloader
Licence: open source
- Geeqie Geeqie is a lightweight image viewer. It supports EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata browsing and editing, as well as, fast preview for raw image formats. Geeqie comes with tools for image comparison, sorting and managing photo collection.
Website:
Geeqie Image Viewer
Screenshots:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/gee...ki/screenshots
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source
The Eye of GNOME (eog) image viewer is the official image viewer for the GNOME Desktop environment. With it, you can view single image files, as well as large image collections.
Website:
Eye of GNOME
Screenshots:
Eye of GNOME -- Screenshots
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel
Licence: open source
Gwenview is a fast and easy to use image viewer for KDE, featuring folder tree window, thumbnail view and basic lossless manipulations.
Website:
Gwenview | News
Screenshots:
Gwenview | Screenshots
Licence: open source
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel
Note: default image viewer for the KDE desktop
- UFRaw UFRaw is a utility to read and manipulate raw images from digital cameras. It can be used on its own or as a Gimp plug-in.
Website:
UFRaw - Home
Documentation:
UFRaw - User Guide
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source
Rawstudio is a program to read and manipulate RAW images from most digital cameras. It will convert your RAW files into JPEG, PNG or TIF images which you can then print or send to friends and clients.
Website:
Rawstudio
Screenshots:
Rawstudio
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source
Raw Therapee is a RAW converter and digital photo processing software. It offers ICC color management, thumbnails browsing and numerous post processing in 16 bit / channel mode.
Website:
RawTherapee 3.0 alpha 1 and license changes
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source (since version 3)
LightZone is a non-destructive RAW editor. It allows you to enhance photos in a simple and natural way. LightZone can create and apply pre-determined image transformations to an entire batch of images.
Website:
http://www.lightcrafts.com/linux/
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: closed source, $199.95
Bibble is workflow and RAW conversion software designed to quickly and easily let you maximize the results from most major cameras and RAW formats.
Website:
Bibble Labs - Professional Photo Workflow Software
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: closed source, shareware $70 and $130 respectively
- GIMP- Krita- Cinepaint CinePaint is a deep paint image retouching tool that supports higher color fidelity than ordinary painting tools. CinePaint is used to retouch feature films and in pro photography. CinePaint opens high fidelity image file formats such as DPX, 16-bit TIFF, and OpenEXR, and conventional formats like JPEG and PNG.
Website:
http://www.cinepaint.org/
Screenshots:
http://www.cinepaint.org/pix/index.html
Documentation:
http://www.cinepaint.org/docs/index.html
Supported color depth: up to 32 bit/channel
Licence: open source
Fotoxx is a small application to edit or enhance image files from digital cameras. It includes the usual tools for color and contrast enhancement, red-eye removal, sharpen, etc. plus HDR and panorama image compositing. Unlike similar applications, Fotoxx focuses on ease of use through a restricted set of options.
Website:
fotoxx - kornelix
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source
- Luminance HDR- Exposure Blend (plug-in for Gimp) exposure-blend is a GIMP plug-in for contrast blending 3 bracketed images.
Website:
JD Smith: Code - Exposure Blend
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel (GIMP dependent)
Licence: open source
- Hugin Hugin is panoramic imaging toolchain based on Panorama Tools. With it you can assemble a mosaic of photographs into a complete immersive panorama, stitch any series of overlapping pictures and more.
Website:
Hugin - Panorama photo stitcher
Screenshots:
Hugin Screenshots
Documentation:
Hugin Tutorials
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source
Pandora is a GIMP script which helps in stitching together multiple images to make a panorama.
Website:
Pandora: a GIMP Plugin for Making Panoramas
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel (GIMP dependent)
Licence: open source
- Phatch- ImageMagick ImageMagick is a software suite to create, edit and compose bitmap images. Use it to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.
Website:
http://www.imagemagick.org/
Documentation:
ImageMagick v6 Examples
Supported color depth: up to 32 bit/channel ?
Licence: open source
Color Management Profiler
- LPROF- Argyll CMS Argyll is an open source, ICC compatible color management system. It supports accurate ICC profile creation for scanners, CMYK printers, film recorders and calibration and profiling of displays.
Website:
Argyll Color Management System Home Page
Licence: open source
GAMMApage is a small gamma-adjusting utility for your monitor. Able to adjust gamma on the fly and save settings to be used at each login (on a per-user basis. GAMMApage will only write to the user's home directory.)
Website:
http://www.pcbypaul.com/software/GAMMApage.shtml
Licence: open source
- PhotoRec PhotoRec is a data recovery software tool designed to recover lost files (including JPEG & CR2) from digital camera memory, hard disks and CD-ROMs. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.
Website:
PhotoRec - CGSecurity
Licence: open source
- PhotoPrint PhotoPrint is a utility designed to assist in the process of printing digital photographs. It allows you to print photographs 1-up, 2-up, 4-up or with any user-selectable number of rows and columns, create posters, split over several pages. PhotoPrint sends 16-bit data to the printer, to avoid "contouring" problems in smooth gradients.
Website:
http://blackfiveimaging.co.uk/index....2F01PhotoPrint
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source
It is possible to run some applications written for Windows on Linux through Wine*.
The following softwares have been reported to work well:
- Adobe Photoshop version 7 to CS2
- Noise Ninja Standalone version 2.1
- Adobe DNG Converter
While Wine gets frequent updates and the number of supported applications grows with each release, most softwares written for Windows are still unusable on Linux.
(*) Wine is an emulation software that provide a compatibility layer to run Windows applications on a Linux system. The Windows operating system itself is therefore not needed.
Get the softwares / installation
Most of these applications are available from your distribution software channel and requires no manual installation. Select the applications you want from your package manager and click the install button. You may have to enable extra repositories to access them all. Please refer to your distribution manual for more details.
For softwares not available through your distribution software channel, refer to the application's website and follow their instructions.
Further Reading
- Linux Photography (blog) Linux Photography is a blog dedicated to digital photography on Linux. Its author, Joel Cornuz, discusses color management, workflow, photography techniques, printing and much more. Think of it as a giant tutorial.
Website:
Linux Photography
GIMP 2 for Photographers" has evolved from the classroom materials which the author developed and taught in courses and workshops on image editing with the GIMP. It covers the basics of image editing and guides the reader through the functions and tools of the GIMP from simple adjustments to more advanced techniques of working with layers and masks
Website:
GIMP 2 for Photographers - O'Reilly Media
