digiKam vs. Aperture/Lightroom

nixcamic · 12-08-2008, 09:13 PM

Hey, just wondering if anyone on here ever used the Linux photo software digiKam, and one of the main two (Aperture/Lightroom) it seems to have most of the same features, at least in the most recent version, and I was wondering if there was wondering what exactly justifies me paying $200 for aperture (I already have it, but eventually I'll have to upgrade) over digiKam. I must be missing some huge awesome features of Aperture/Lightroom thats worth the price difference, maybe you pay that much for the painfully slow experience?

EricT · 12-08-2008, 10:39 PM

Digikam is definitely a great piece of software, and it has most of the features of Lightroom (haven't tried Aperture) for image processing. I find it's a bit more difficult to use, it requires more mouse clicks to acheive the same thing. Lightroom also does a better job on "full auto".

newmikey · 12-09-2008, 03:18 AM

Originally Posted by nixcamic

Hey, just wondering if anyone on here ever used the Linux photo software digiKam, and one of the main two (Aperture/Lightroom) it seems to have most of the same features, at least in the most recent version, and I was wondering if there was wondering what exactly justifies me paying $200 for aperture (I already have it, but eventually I'll have to upgrade) over digiKam. I must be missing some huge awesome features of Aperture/Lightroom thats worth the price difference, maybe you pay that much for the painfully slow experience?

I have been using Digikam for years but have never used Lightroom or Aperture I cannot comment on any comparison other than remarking Digikam is probably all you'll need when looking at the "must have" features. For the "nice to have"s, apply the Linux philosophy: get involved in development even if only by suggesting features or opening a discussion about them. They are bound to be included somewhere down the line.

I suppose the non-free software out there is very capable...but not so much fun!

Fredshome · 12-09-2008, 07:52 AM

Roughly, either you run a system that can run Aperture and you can consider running it, or you run an open system which probably cannot run Aperture and you don't even wonder about it, and that's the end of it.

In my case, I pretty much *had* to switch (long story I won't bore you with) around 1994.

Since then I've had a Windows partition, on and off.

For games. I never, ever trusted it for data (rather silly, I know, but it was more a matter of tools than environment... I had my tools in Unix, I didn't in Windows).

SO when I switched from chemical to regular photography, I used xpaint (now *that* was painful), and a lot of other tools and finally settled on Bibble Pro (already great, next version should be awesome), Gimp, digiKam (absolutely amazing, and looking to be truly wonderful with KDE4), Kate (made *heaps* of progress, not there yet, but almost), and the numerous command line graphical manipulation utilities (mostly pbmtools and ImageMagick, with lots of others though), the likes of which are mostly absent in Windows (and are /almost/ absent in Mac OS, for a few users have found the terminal).

All of this is why, although there are quite a few bumps to overcome on the Unix side, there are so many things that are waaaay easier that there is no way I'd go back, ever.
However I'm a Unix guy. Been one for more than 20 years now. Which doesn't mean anything other than "I've gotten used to (or I've learned a certain way to) doing things my way."

Windows people (or Mac people) will feel as out of place in my environment as I in theirs (and I have used an iBook for a year, it's now living a happy life as a paperweight because I hated it).

The moral of the story ? If I'm used to it, I'll like it. If not, I'll probably hate it.
Getting someone to learn something new is a *lot* of work. Some of it is learning something new. A lot of it is overcoming the basic distrust for anything that's "foreign".

(I hope that made sense)

nixcamic · 12-09-2008, 08:49 AM

SO when I switched from chemical to regular photography

Before I start, I'd just like to say that that was brilliant.

And thanks for all the replies, I was afraid I wasn't going to get many.

I've been using Linux, on and off, since I was about 10 or 11 (yeah, I'm not to terribly old) and am as comfortable with it as I am with any OS, haven't used it on the desktop in a year or two though. When it comes to photo manipulation I generally much prefer to use just one program instead of having to put stuff through a bunch of different programs, as then I can try a bunch of stuff, see the results, undo some stuff, add some more all the while watching the result. There are places where the unix philosophy works brilliantly, but this looks like it might not be one (for me, as proven by you and your flickr gallery it obviously works great for some in this area) I'll never know until I try so I guess I'll grab an .iso and get cracking. Thanks again everyone for the replies.

Venturi · 12-09-2008, 09:32 AM

Hi Nix,

I'm running linux (openSuSE 11) as my primary OS; dropped Redmond about 2yrs ago. I use digiKam for my photo management (downloading, sifting, sorting & culling) and LightZone for all my post-production editing.

I'm not a fan of digiKam, or the various plugin apps, for doing post work. The default settings for RAW conversion are bad and fine tuning them is frankly just a royal pain. And the tool set, for me, is not a good fit - they're either too "friendly" or too complex for my style of workflow.

I can't comment on Aperture; I don't run Mac.

I tried Lightroom under VirtualBox and rather liked its feature set and flow, but it ran way too slow in the VM. I haven't been successful at all in trying to get it to run under WINE au naturale. LightZone has Win/Mac/Linux versions and has a comparable set of tools to Lightroom (each has features the other doesn't) and is pretty intuitive (photographer friendly). If Adobe would release a Linux version of Lightroom I would most definitely buy it and at the very least run it side-by-side with LightZone.

You might also want to consider BibblePro. I personally didn't much care for the UI but there are several folks here that use it and swear by it.

nixcamic · 12-09-2008, 09:49 AM

Does lightzone have downloading/sifting/sorting/culling as well, or is it only PP? Also, does anyone know of the equivalent of Adobe DNG converter for linux (A must have due to my GX-10's uncompressed DNG files)

Venturi · 12-09-2008, 10:52 AM

LightZone is just post processing and RAW conversion. It does have full support for the Adobe DNG format as well as Pentax PEF files. It works just fine with my K20D DNG & PEF files and did the same with my K10D so it shouldn't have any problems at all with the Samsung RAW files.

From their supported cameras page:
Pentax
K10D, K20D

, K100D, K200D

, *ist D, *ist DL, *ist DS
Samsung
GX10

BetterSense · 12-09-2008, 01:19 PM

Digikam is awesome and I love it. However, the things I still use Gimp for are using the clone tool to brush out dust or small defects from film scans, which is bad because I have to resave the photo twice. Is there a clone-tool and other brush-type tools in Digikam? Probably dumb but I haven't found them.