[plug] Digital SLRs

[Daniel Pittman]

Patrick Coleman <blinken at gmail.com> writes:
> On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 9:19 PM, Richard Meyer <meyerri at westnet.com.au> wrote:
>
>> Now - I haven't done much searching, but I'd like to get it all from the
>> horse's mouth - how well does Linux handle RAW images? Are they easy to
>> convert later?
>
> You can convert them, but I've yet to find any nice, streamlined raw library
> management/photo adjustment software along the lines of Lightroom or
> Aperture.

I don't have substantial experience with those commercial tools, but I have
used the Adobe Photoshop / Bridge / CameraRAW set to handle RAW in the past.

Digikam is, if anything, nicer to work with.  The experience is seamless, with
RAW images treated to a standard set of processing that you define, and with
the ability to easily re-decode and re-process the raw file in the editor.

Performance is great[1], and the images otherwise behave identically to any
other image format that the platform supports.  The only part that sucks is
the interface to tagging and metadata on the images, which is a bit slower
than you would hope.

> I should probably confess I've been running with the Lightroom 3 beta in a
> VM for a while, and it works better than you might expect. If anyone has any
> better ideas, though, I'd love to hear them as well.

Give digikam a try; you may be pleasantly surprised how effective the 1.0.0
beta series is for handling this stuff — and even the previous pre-1.0.0 stuff
was good.

        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  Pretty much instant for an 8MP RAW image on a 2.6GHz Core2 Duo, with the
     image cached entirely in RAM.  Fairly standard, in other words.  Less
     than two seconds to reprocess the image with the highest end
     interpolation, chromatic correction and noise reduction settings enabled,
     in a colour managed workflow.

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✣ Daniel Pittman            ✉ daniel at rimspace.net            ☎ +61 401 155 707
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