Linux for Photography

Conclusion: does it blend?

I said in the introduction that the challenge is to have the different program integrate well. Rawstudio offers an "export to GIMP" feature and right clicking on any image in Shotwell allows you to open them with our "external editor" of choice. So far so good. Tags are more difficult. Ideally, one would liket to add them as close to the source as possible (ie in Rawstudio) but the support in Rawstudio is too bare for that; so even if tags added in Rawstudio will be picked in Shotwell, you are much better off tagging your images in Shotwell.

Three years ago, one of the major pains was getting color management working. Nowadays, colord is coming along nicely putting together other pieces of the color management puzzle (ArgyllCMS, littleCMS...) and Gnome now offers color management via gnome-color-manager as a standard feature - extensible to other desktop environments. In fact, there is even an open-hardware screen calibration device available.

So within three years, most of the items on our checklist have moved away from the "should be doable if you tweak this and that" to the "yes, this is a standard feature" realm. One of the comments on my previous entry was "Linux is playing catch up and always will be". Less and less so. Today Linux is getting there. GIMP, however, is playing catch up and will be for the forseable future - unfortunately, the (workflow) chain only has the overall strength of its weakest link.

And to keep a tradition alive

Just to remember that, at the end of the day, it is all about images (vs photographic material or imaging software) here is one of my local park after a fresh snowfall. Thank you for reading.

-Joel Cornuz (jcornuz)