something for the open-source types…

Forums Forums Get Technical Software something for the open-source types…

Viewing 14 posts - 1 through 14 (of 14 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #2549
    chupathingie
    Participant

    I just found out about this recently. Finally some high color depth capabilities for Linux…

    http://rawtherapee.com/blog/features

    Also available for Windows/Mac in 32 and 64 bit flavors.

    I have yet to load it up and take a test drive, but as soon as I tire of Skyrim I’ll be ignoring my Windows partition and will once again be back in Linux playing with the toolkit. One of the members over at CloudyNights has been using it to tweak post-stacking results on their astrophotos and the results look impressive.

    #44069
    Choc-Ful-A
    Participant

    I just found out about this recently. Finally some high color depth capabilities for Linux…

    http://rawtherapee.com/blog/features

    Also available for Windows/Mac in 32 and 64 bit flavors.

    I have yet to load it up and take a test drive, but as soon as I tire of Skyrim I’ll be ignoring my Windows partition and will once again be back in Linux playing with the toolkit. One of the members over at CloudyNights has been using it to tweak post-stacking results on their astrophotos and the results look impressive.

    Nice find! I installed it and used it on a couple of NEF files to see how it works. There are lots of knobs and buttons to play with, some of which are adjustments I’ve never heard of before. The UI was a little confusing and I had some trouble getting it to load the thumbnails at first. But once I got over that bump in the learning curve I didn’t have any more trouble.

    Also, it was very nice to see that they have been incorporated into standard Fedora repositories so installing just means typing “yum install rawtherapee” and it’s done. That also means as updates are made available they will automatically be installed whenever you check for updates going forward.

    #44070
    chupathingie
    Participant

    Good to hear that. I’m looking forward to having something other than Krita’s instability and very limited toolkit.

    #44071
    chupathingie
    Participant

    OK, so I installed RawTherapee and had some time to play with it. It didn’t take long to realize that the manual I had was for version 4 and the linux repos installed ver.3. I fixed that today. Wow! What a difference. I’m still playing with all the widgets but so far I’m finding that I *really like* this program! Noise reduction and sharpening work well, and the vibrance function really does a great job of bumping the color up a smidge without simply increasing saturation… it looks much more natural. Gotta love new toys.

    #44072
    Choc-Ful-A
    Participant

    Yeah I really like it too even though (as usual) I just pushed all the buttons to figure things out instead of reading the manual. The user interface is counterintutive for me, but I’m getting more and more used to it. Part of that is the sheer number of buttons and knobs you can twiddle. There are so many tools it’s hard to figure out which ones to disable, which ones to set to “auto” and which ones to spend time fine tuning. But it seems to get pretty close to what I want when I initially enable things (meaning the automatic “best guess” it makes). So I mostly find I’m just making minor tweaks to get the final result.

    The most interesting bits so far are these.

    1. Using the “black” and “shadow recovery” sliders as a replacement for tweaks with color curves and brightness/contrast. The black/shadow controls seems to give you a way to target just the depth of color in the image.

    2. There are lots and lots of white balance choices, which is fun to play with even if it’s not really all that useful.

    3. But the “OMG I love this!!!” has to go to the “select straight line” method of picking the rotation angle. It makes aligning a photo so that the horizon line is parallel to the top/bottom of the image trivial. I have a lot of photos of things with the ocean in the background. And getting the water line level is so much easier with this tool.

    The only thing I’m still beating my head against is the sharpening options. Nothing in that set of tools (meaning Sharpening, Edges, Microcontrast, Impusle Noise Reduction, Noise Reduction, Defringe, and Contrast by Detail Levels) seem to make any visible difference when I apply them. So I might have to break down and RTFM after all at some point.

    #44073
    chupathingie
    Participant

    Oh yeah, I liked the rotation angle tool…. at first I couldn’t figure it out, but a little RTFM action turned the lights on pretty quickly. The authors did a great job on the manual, and it looks like you can run a series of actions on an image and then batch those to a group.

    I want to play more with the tonemapping. My initial impression is good, being able to control the strength and avoid color shifts is a huge plus over any of the other tonemappers I’ve used. Anyone who wants to be able to use tonemapping without having to deal with the surreal HDR look will likely find this useful.

    Haven’t played with the white balance much, but the noise and sharpening tools didn’t take long to figure out. All I used for the noise was luminance noise… and toggling before/after view or enabling/disabling the effect helps there. Also found that you want to disable a function before making changes to it, else the changes go into the queue and you apparently stack the effects.

    The authors seem to be quite active, there have been a lot of changes in a short period of time… the differences between ver3 and ver4 made for a pretty big leap in functionality (score one for open source). These guys are running on a donations system, so I’m going to throw some cash at them for their work after I play a bit and figure out how much I want to donate. The more I find about this program the higher my estimation of what I should pay up goes 😆

    #44074
    chupathingie
    Participant

    I was just made aware of yet another cross-platform 16bit/channel tool, photivo. I have not had any time since finding out about it to download/compile/install/test drive/etc. but a quick glance at the features makes me want to find time for a trip around the block to see how it runs. Looks like they have package files for SUSE/Debian, and binaries for Windows and Mac in 32/64 bit flavors. Of particular note is the plugin for GIMP integration.

    This project is open-source, written in C++ (as is RawTherapee) with the Qt framework, great news if anyone here is a code freak. This also makes it possible to compile for other OSs when pre-packaged files are unavailable.

    Now if I can ever get time off of work, I’ll see about getting it installed… if anyone here wants to try it out, please post impressions! 🙂

    I’m beginning to think maybe we need a sticky for free/open source/cross platform software for those of us unable or unwilling to throw down the scratch for things like PS…

    #44075
    chupathingie
    Participant

    O.M.F.G. RT knows dark and flat frames. Wheeeee! 🙂

    #44076
    Choc-Ful-A
    Participant

    FWIW, installed photivo looks like an old school “get source, config, compile, install” thing since the braindead “yum install photivo” method I tried didn’t work. So I’ll try playing with it but it will take a bit before I have time to do that. I used to have to couple the browser I like (Seamonkey) years ago so I don’t think it will be a problem to get it running. But it can be a time consuming, iterative process so I’m going to wait until I have a chunk of time to devote to it.

    #44077
    chupathingie
    Participant

    compile:fail:scan logs for missing dependencies:install dependencies:compile:fail:scan logs…. etc, etc… The things we do to get away from commercial software! 😆

    #44078
    chupathingie
    Participant

    Well, we now have another high-depth contender: Darktable. Who knew Linux would explode with choices? ‘Bout damn time us open-source weenies got some love! 😆

    #44079
    linguine
    Participant

    Well, we now have another high-depth contender: Darktable. Who knew Linux would explode with choices? ‘Bout damn time us open-source weenies got some love! 😆

    Linux has always had choices, its just that they’re not always good choices.

    #44080
    chupathingie
    Participant

    ^true that. I dealt with Krita for ages, and cinepaint looked like it was gonna bloom but died on the vine. PLENTY of tech tools, and lots of pieces-parts for the code junkies, but little in the way of polished UIs allowing the steering of the mouse that most casual PC users need.

    Theli is still high on my list of geek tools to learn. Damn near all of my knowledge and skillset regarding photography has developed from astrophotography and applying/modifying those techniques to fit into stuff like panoramas and technical accuracy. I think it’s worked for me, but I’m a far cry from what anyone could call a photographer. Small bites, though. I’m approaching photography from a different direction than most; which is fine by me… I get to share a bunch of stuff that most don’t find coming up from the traditional avenues while I scratch my head over what is basic to the rest of y’all. 😆

    #44081
    Choc-Ful-A
    Participant

    Well, we now have another high-depth contender: Darktable. Who knew Linux would explode with choices? ‘Bout damn time us open-source weenies got some love! 😆

    I installed this today since it was so simple. There’s a pre-packaged version available for Fedora so just one “yum install darktable” and it’s done… I haven’t used it yet. And I could try messing with Theli too if you need UNIX nerd help. I peeked at the website once before but I know zippo about astrophotography so it didn’t seem immediately useful to me. But sometimes just playing around with software because I can is entertaining for me. So we’ll see…

Viewing 14 posts - 1 through 14 (of 14 total)
  • The topic ‘something for the open-source types…’ is closed to new replies.