The Ultimate Guide to Linux Digital Photography Software - Introduction

I had been using digikam for several years to manage my collection of digital photographs. With the recent purchase of a new DSLR (my first I might add), I was looking to see what else was out there in the terms of software, functionality, features, costs, etc. At the same time, while looking on the net to see what was available, I found many people looking for the same things as I. There was also a lot of mis-information out there. Due to the popularity of our Ultimate Linux Guides to ....I decided to create this one.

In this article, I will list some of the software that is out there along with a basic description and their homepage url's. I will randomly pick the software as I try it out and add to this collection, tentively entitled, "The Ultimate Linux Digital Photography Guide". This guide will help you chose the correct workflow that works for you.

Please use the talk-back forum to discuss this article, make suggestions or recommendations or corrections, add your insight, or add to the articles.

Available Software

Here are some links to software available for Linux that can be used by Digital Photographers, photo editing, and DAM workflows..

RAW Developers & RAW Workflow

Bibble by Bibble Labs:Commercial, professional RAW workflow for fast development of large number of photographs. The linux release is fully supported and fully featured. Program is able to correct chromatic aberration, distorsion, hot pixels and do all corrections needed in a workflow. If you are looking for a great noise reduction give it a try as it incorporates noise ninja algorithm. Be sure not to miss wonderfull plugins (some of them are free) and if you are willing to write one - ask Bibblelabs for an SDK.

DigiKam:open source photo management for KDE, surprisingly good quality, quite complete application, some GUI improvements needed to make processing faster (GUI is designed for amateurs). Good RAW support. Excellent basic editing tools available. Very stable!

Lightzone by Lightcrafts:Commercial, professional. Get the special introductory price of $149 for LightZone Linux. Use the coupon code LINUXLAUNCH to get this special pricing. The release of Lightzone 3.5 is now available (at the time of this article)! It is an application with some DAM capabilities and unique editing features, dedicated to photography, not computer graphics.

Raw Studio : Open source, GTK RAW developer. Very fast and simple, so if you are looking for something that will simply convert your RAWs into jpegs or tiffs reproducing colors right (white balance, color management) try Rawstudio. If you want to do some more processing look for something different or export images through rawstudio to image editor. Supports nearly all RAWs as it uses DCRaw for decoding and demosaicing.

Raw Therapee by Gábor Horváth: Free but not open source, GTK application that delivers surprisingly high quality. It is a one man project therefore lacks some features - still it is one of the most interesing free programs on the net. Don't forget to donate to this project - definately worth your $$$.

UFRaw by Udi Fuchs : It used to be open source plugin for theGIMP allowing it to open RAW files using DCRaw. Now it is not only a plugin for GIMP and Cinepant but also a standalone RAW developer. It allows user to tweak the conversion selecting demosaicing algorithm, gamma value, white balance and some more. If you are looking for low level developer - here it is. If you want to do something more (BW conversion, sharpening), you need something more than this developer. It allows to do command line batch processing.

Photo Manipulation

Cinepaint: 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. It has a flipbook for movie playback of image sequences in RAM. It supports 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit color channels, HDR and CMS. CinePaint is used for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching, dirt removal, wire rig removal, render repair, background plates, and painting 3D model textures. It's been used on many feature films, including The Last Samurai where it was used to add flying arrows. For still photography, CinePaint can import bracketed HDR exposures. It has gallery-quality 16-bit per channel color printing with GutenPrint. CinePaint's high dynamic range is crucial with B&W still photography, where images only have a single channel.

GIMP: well known open source, GTK image editor, lack some features needed in photo retouching, RAW support via UFRaw plugin

GIMPshop: GIMPshop is a modification of the free/open source GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop. Its primary purpose is to make users of Photoshop feel comfortable using GIMP, no new features, only changes in GUI

ImageJ: java open source image editor for technical and scientific purposes, quite fast, and multi-platform (including running on Sharp PDA's)

Krita: a painting and image editing application for KOffice. Krita contains both ease-of-use and fun features like guided painting (never before has it been so easy to airbrush a straight line!) and high-end features like support for 16 bit images, CMYK, L*a*b and even OpenEXR HDR images.

Lphoto: ((link to flash presentation)): Viewing, managing and retouching in one application by Linspire

Paint Mono: Paint.net is a great open source application for windows. Paint Mono is a linux port (from .net to mono platform) done by Miguel de Icaza (blog). It is unofficial and may contain bugs but definately worth tracking.

Pixel: commercial, a RGB, CMYK and HDR image editing, photo retouching, graphics manipulating and animation program available for many operating systems formerly known as Pixel32. It is available for Windows, Linux, Linspire, MacOSX, BeOS, Zeta, QNX, MorphOS, FreeBSD, eComStation, OS/2, SkyOS and even old plain DOS, for both x86 and PowerPC architectures.

PixInsight: commercial astrophotography application with many features (RAW support, color management), QT

Photo Managing

Appliworks: photo management that uses virtual folders

F-spot: open source, Mono based, photo management for GNOME, lack some features, basic RAW support

flPhoto: FLTK based photo management and basic photo manipulation program, supports RAW

Fotox: open source, GTK application for image editing, panorama stitching and HDR

GOFoto: manages large collection of photos, creates web galleries and videoCD

GTKphotogallery: simple GTK photo manager (rotating, moving, doing backup and simple webgalleries)

GTKrawgallery: simple GTK photo viewer that opens RAW files using DCRaw

jBrout: photo manager, with some interesting features

KPhotoAlbum: an open source photo manager for KDE

KPhotoBook: rather old photo management for KDE

Mapivi: open source image management

Mission Photo: an open source, GTK+, very simple, and very basic image management

Photovault: a photo workflow and archiving application intended for photographers. With it you can easily keep even a large photo archive in good order, find the images you need and do the normal image processing tasks in all phases of your workflow, including raw file conversion, color corrections and image cropping and rotation. needs java

Picasa by Google : (link to linux version) linux version of amateur, free application, slow since it uses WINE, but looks good, basic RAW support

XnView: freeware (but only for non-commercial use), multiplatform, multimedia viewer, browser and editor

Misc. Programs

Autopano Pro: Commercial, professional panorama stitching solution.

Blue Marine by Fabrizio Giudici: open source java application for the digital photo workflow and tasks like photo-geotagging, basic RAW support. The blueMarine project will provide you an all-in-one tool for managing your photos, from the shoot up to the archiving and beyond. blueMarine is an expandable, open platform and includes specific support for different photographers communities, as well as the latest technologies. At the moment the QA is insufficient and the product is not yet suitable for production use.

FreePV: free panorama viewer - in development

GQview: open source, very fast, GTK image viewer with color management

Hugin: open source, GTK frontend to panotools, a panorama stitching application

imgSeek: QT, open source photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features. The query is expressed either as a rough sketch painted by the user or as another image you supply (or an image in your collection). The searching algorithm makes use of multiresolution wavelet decomposition of the query and database images

Immix: open source image merging application. create one noiseless image from many noisy (but similar) shots

Jalbum: free web album software, needs java

Phatch: a simple to use cross-platform graphical Photo Batch Processor and Exif Renamer with a nice graphical user interface. Phatch handles all popular image formats and can duplicate (sub)folder hierarchies. Phatch can batch resize, rotate, apply shadows, perspective, rounded corners, … and do much more actions in minutes instead of hours or days if you do it manually.

Photo Acute: commercial software that combines many shots into one, noiseless, sharp and in general better image. RAW support. There is no native linux release but company made windows version fully compatible with WINE.

PhotoPrint: GPL utility for printing digital photographs (icc, 16 bits support)

Photorec: is an open source file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its 'Photo Recovery' name) from digital camera memory. 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

RPhoto: small application for rotating and cropping images

Qimage: Commercial printing solution. I found a small note on their website that it works under linux using WINE, I didn't test it.

Qtpfsgui: open source, QT application for HDR image merging, RAW support

Rapid Photo Downloader: a photo downloader written by a photographer for professional and amateur photographers. Released under the GNU GPL license, it is designed for use on the GNOME 2 Desktop. It can download photos from multiple memory cards and Portable Storage Device simultaneously. It provides a variety of options for sub-folder creation, image renaming and backup.

TurboPrint: commercial, advanced printing utility, free version (for private use, with some usability restrictions) available

Unshake: free for personal use java application that recovers blurred images

VueScan: advanced scanning utility, can create camera RAW files from scanned images in DNG format (adobe lightroom)

gpicsync: GPicSync automatically inserts location in your photos metadata so they can also be used with any 'geocode aware' application like Picasa/Google Earth, Flickr, loc.alize.us, etc

LensFun - Digital photographs are not ideal. Of course, the better is your camera, the better the results will be, but in any case if you look carefully at shots taken even by the most expensive cameras equipped with the most expensive lenses you will see various artifacts. It is very hard to make ideal cameras, because there are a lot of factors that affect the final image quality, and at some point camera and lens designers have to trade one factor for another to achieve the optimal image quality, within the given design restrictions and budget.  So that's what's lensfun is all about - rectifying the defects introduced by your photographic equipment

Command-line

ALE: GNU, command-line, utility that is used for tasks such as image mosaicking, super-resolution, deblurring, noise reduction, and anti-aliasing. Its principle of operation is synthetic capture by merging many images to get noiseless, high resolution results

DCRaw by Dave Coffin: open source, command-line program for developing all RAW files, basic RAW IO code for many (even commercial) RAW developers, use UFRaw-batch if you want to do command line batch processing, has more possibilities and it is easier to use

ExactImage: yet another open source image processing library

Exiflow: a set of tools (command line and GUI) to provide a complete digital photo workflow for Unixes. EXIF headers are used as the central information repository, so users may change their software at any time without loosing their data.

gPhoto2: a command line and GUI for managing your camera, offers tethered shots for some DSLR's

Graphics Magick: open source fork of Image Magick

GREYCstoration: an open source denoising, resizing and restoration algorithm, works also as GIMP plugin, implemented in DigiKam

Image Magick: open source, command-line tool for displaying, converting and editing images, good for writing scripts that will process hundreds of images

Netpbm: open source, command-line tool toolkit for processing images, including conversion of images between a variety of different formats. There are over 300 separate tools in the package including converters for about 100 graphics formats. Examples of the sort of image manipulation we're talking about are: Shrinking an image by 10%; Cutting the top half off of an image; Making a mirror image; Creating a sequence of images that fade from one image to another.

PFScalibration: PFScalibration package provides an implementation of the Robertson et al. 2003 method for the photometric calibration of cameras and for the recovery of high dynamic range (HDR) images from the set of low dynamic range (LDR) exposures. Tools provided with this software can be used for photometric calibration of both off-the-shelf digital cameras and HDR cameras.

Photomontage: a scientific project about merging images, source code available

gpsphoto.pl: a commandline tool written in perl to synchronize a gps (gpx) tracklog with the date/time stamps of the image exif-data

Color Management

Little CMS (lcms): LittleCMS is a CMM, a color management engine; it implements fast transforms between ICC profiles.

Argyll: 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.

LPROF: is the only open source ICC profiler with a graphical user interface. It can be used to create ICC version 2 compliant profiles for cameras, scanners and monitors. As such it fills a necessary niche in the emerging open source color management effort.

Linux Color Management Wiki: lots of useful information, links, etc related to Linux color management for printers, scanners, camera's, monitors, software, etc.

WINE

Canon Digital Photo Professional: Digital Photo Pro (DPP) comes in the software bundle included with all current Canon DSLRs. DPP is a very capable image browser, Canon RAW file converter and image editing tool. It has two basic GUIs. The first is the browser window and the second is the 'Edit image' window.

Coming Up...

I have started the digiKam article....it is definitely in the works. I have many other articles planned. Please use the talk-back forum for this article to discuss anything related to Linux and digital photography. If you have any recommendations or request, that is also the place to make them.