[jersey]

Hello

I am currently moving from desktop to laptop (space savings) and as I will be using my work laptop I need a software for Linux for image editions. On Windows I used only ACDSee, as it had everything I really needed in one package. But there is no Linux version and I rather not try to make it work on Wine.

So what can I try to use and check if such workflow is feasible for me?


I need:

- raw editor (needs PixelShift and HDR) or converter to TIFF
- in case of raw converter some editor though I think GIMP will be ok

- some sharpening tool (if editor is not good enough for the job)
- some denoising tool (as above)
- photo manager (not a must, but nice to have)


Any recommendations? I think there are some Linux and/or OOS users here?

[BigMackCam]

I use linux and Windows 11 interchangeably, with mostly the same tools on both:

For raw conversion and adjustments, I use and recommend RawTherapee (which has one of the best PixelShift implementations - not sure about HDR, though). Noise reduction and sharpening are both excellent if you learn to use them properly. I also use GIMP for heavier and/or alternative sharpening using unsharp masking, as well as spot removal, editing, resizing etc. For library management, I use digiKam, which is very full-featured and powerful - though it doesn't have the most polished user interface, IMHO.

[ThorSanchez]

I'll second RawTherapee. I've used it for most of my photo processing needs for at least 3-4 years and like it a lot.


Very occasionally I'll use GIMP for things like spot removal. The dev version of RawTherapee apparently has local edits including spot removal, but I just use the latest stable version.

For importing files I use Rapid Photo Downloader.

For the (very) occasional panorama stitching there's Hugin. Some people also use Hugin for HDR but I could never get satisfactory results. But then I found out that Photomatix has a Linux version (paid). I think it's lacking a few features of the Windows/Mac app, but it does what I need it to do, and it's easy to use.

I've been trying to get the Topaz tools to work under Wine or a VM in Linux, as they don't have a native Linux version or any plans for that. But so far no success, so I'm stuck using my kid's Windows computer to run Sharpen and (possibly one day) Denoise, although I don't know if I really need Denoise with the K-3 III's high ISO capabilities.

[damianc]

Agree with the others above, Rawtherapee has excellent noise reduction and sharpening tools. Gimp's high pass filter also makes an excellent sharpening tool. I'll second the advice for digiKam and hugin. Hugin can produce excellent HDR with careful application of HDR methods and not going too heavy handed on the sliders The command line tools that come packaged are also useful for stacking and panoramas

[MossyRocks]

I am basically exclusively Linux now and my preferred tool set is:
RawTherapee - Raw development, support pixel shift with lots of options. There are lots of options to play with and it has a much steeper learning curve than Lightroom but I find it to be much more capable. I don't know how it handles the incamera HDR stuff but I never use that and instead shoot bracketed shots and process elsewhere.
GIMP - General editing for things I can't do in RawTherapee. I use it for a lot of astro images but for other images not so much. I would recommend getting the resynthesizer plugin for it as it adds a number of features that are similar to the photoshop context aware fill.
Hugin - For creating panoramas, various stacking, HDR (actually enfuse and I like the enfuse look more than regular HDR) and various other things where working with piles of shots becomes useful
Astro Pixel Processor - Used for astro stacking and some of the starting astro image processing like color correction, light pollution removal, and graident correction a special purpose tool

For sharpening there is a lot that can be done using RawTherapee when working with the detail tab with things like the various sharpening methods (unsharp mask and R&L deconvolution), and contrast by level. Going beyond that in the advanced tab there are all sorts of wavelet options that can find lots of detail and bring it out but again this has a steep learning curve and can go sideways really fast until you have some idea of what is going on.

When it comes to noise again RawTherapee has lots of options for dealing with it under the detail tab with lots of little controls. Here again playing with the contrast by levels sliders will make the best use of things to preserve detail while squishing noise. There are also tools under the wavelet section in the advanced tab that can also deal with noise but I haven't mastered those yet.

Another good option for Raw development is Darktable which has much more of a Lightroom feel but again has many more options and tools. It is easier to learn but still a really powerful tool.

The dev version of RawTherapee apparently has local edits including spot removal,

That would be really nice as that is most of what I do in GIMP with non astro images.

Some people also use Hugin for HDR but I could never get satisfactory results.

The GUI that sits in front of it kind of sucks and hides a lot of the controls so for stuff like that I use hugin to output remapped aligned images that I then manually stack those using enfuse from the command line.

[The Squirrel Mafia]

I fourth RawTherapee! Hahaaha!

It is my go to RAW converter on Windows & Linux. I have a thread with a bunch of settings for it. I have tried using darktable many times during the past several years, but I cannot get the results that I get out of RawTherapee, especially when it comes to high ISO photos.

I will occasionally use GIMP as well, but it's on a very rare occasion. I don't have the patience to tweak photos even further.

I don't use any DAM software, but digiKam is supposed to be decent if you're into the tagging photos & related, similar to what people do in Lightroom.

[ThorSanchez]

I fourth RawTherapee! Hahaaha!

It is my go to RAW converter on Windows & Linux. I have a thread with a bunch of settings for it. I have tried using darktable many times during the past several years, but I cannot get the results that I get out of RawTherapee, especially when it comes to high ISO photos.

I will occasionally use GIMP as well, but it's on a very rare occasion. I don't have the patience to tweak photos even further.

I don't use any DAM software, but digiKam is supposed to be decent if you're into the tagging photos & related, similar to what people do in Lightroom.

If you're going to use RawTherapee and you're not a RT guru sitting alone in a cave somewhere deep-diving into wavelets and Retinex and the like, I very highly recommend using Squirrel Mafia's PPT files and other settings. He has PPT files for various ISO levels, and you can just set up dynamic profiles to match the noise reduction scheme to the ISO level automatically. I don't have much of a clue as to how all those noise reduction settings work, I just apply the appropriate Squirrel Mafia file and it works.

[mir]

I prefer Darktable for raw editing especially since I do a lot for analog photography which I digitize and for this purpose Darktable is superior to RawTherapee since Darktable provides a module for both B&W and colour negatives. Apart from this recent development has changed all raw work to be in scene referred mode instead of display referred mode and last but not least almost all modules works in the RGB colour space which means the order of the modules has no effect on the result. And as a bonus you can tether with all Digital Pentax cameras from K10D or newer. For full support the camera needs to support PTP (live view and full remote control among the most important).

[aaacb]

It may be worth trying both darktable and rawtherapee for some time to see which you prefer, they're quite different in use. I prefer darktable, but it won't support pixelshift. Everything else works, and I prefer the workflow and results to rawtherapee, I find it easier to use and get the results I want. Inverting film negatives is a breeze indeed.

[BigMackCam]

I prefer Darktable for raw editing especially since I do a lot for analog photography which I digitize and for this purpose Darktable is superior to RawTherapee since Darktable provides a module for both B&W and colour negatives.

With apologies to the OP for the slight detour, and not wishing to "pimp" my own threads, but if you haven't already reviewed the below articles, you might wish to take a look. I spent a lot of time developing a workflow for colour negatives with GIMP and either RawTherapee or Darktable, that gives consistently better results than the built-in modules in either of those raw converters. There are more steps involved, but it's easy and - as I said - consistent. I now use this approach in preference to the built-in modules, and even in preference to Lightroom 6 with NegativeLabPro...

Colour-Accurate Conversion of Negatives using GIMP 2.10 and RawTherapee 5.8 - PentaxForums.com

Colour-Accurate Conversion of Negatives - Darktable variant - PentaxForums.com

[JensE]

As a long term user of both, I have shifted mostly to Darktable from Rawtherapee. Darktable has just the amount of cataloging features I need and the scene-referred workflow, i.e. linear in captured light, gives you a lot of room for tone and color adjustments before you produce visible artifacts. Noise reduction and de-mosaic algorithms have also come a long way, almost on par with Rawtherapee. The ability to have multiple instances of the same module with different masks, reuse masks across a chain of modules ... makes it an incredibly powerful tool. The ability to do (simple) retouching withing the tool also helps with a quick workflow. I still use Rawtherapee for Pixelshift (best tool, bar none) and whenever I need to squeeze the ultimate detail out of an image, e.g. large prints of crops.

Color management is a little tricky at the moment in Linux (Wayland), but both RT & DT allow you to manually configure display (and other) profiles. Profiling at the moment is best done using Argyll, but need command line tools. Color management also one of the pain points with Gimp 2.10, which only completely correctly works with sRGB - Krita is a good, powerful and tidier alternative.

My usual workflows are:

RapidPhotoDownloader to local culling and backup NAS redundantly (avoids double imports) -> FastRawViewer via Wine for culling (just too good, works flawlessly), alternatively Geeqie -> move passing images to final tree -> import into/edit in Darktable -> export

or

RapidPhotoDownloader -> FastRawViewer -> Rawtherapee -> export (and import into DT catalog)

RapidPhotoDownloader -> FastRawViewer -> Rawtherapee -> Darktable -> export - sometimes for pixelshift images, exporting to linear profile from RT, so I can still use scene-referred flow in DT

Astro Stacks:
RapidPhotoDownloader -> FastRawViewer -> (Rawtherapee -> ) Siril -> Darktable

New:
RapidPhotoDownloader -> Rawtherapee or Darktable -> Picolay or HeliconFocus via Wine (still a lot faster than 'native' Zerene Stacker, both work with just little quirks) -> Darktable -> export

And then some, based on LuminanceHDR and Hugin (not only panos, also re-projection of single shots). But you may get the idea. I usually sharpen with the tools in DT and RT.

PS: Linux user since kernel 0.94 or such - sometime before X11 was available.

[MossyRocks]

sitting alone in a cave somewhere deep-diving into wavelets and Retinex and the like

How do you know about my work area and process?

I have tried using darktable many times during the past several years, but I cannot get the results that I get out of RawTherapee, especially when it comes to high ISO photos.

A few years back I spent some money and time taking a year long photo class online (well worth it if you actually are willing to understand the purpose of some of the lessons) and one of the things I got out of it was raw development to get the images to look how you wanted but the class used Photoshop and Lightroom. The general techniques learned for editing were very beneficial and once I figured out the comparable control in RT it actually became very easy to do simple Lightroom like adjustments but with more control and after some practice I was able to get much better results with that control. It is that fine control that is the daunting part of RT but is also where the most gain is to be had.

With apologies to the OP for the slight detour, and not wishing to "pimp" my own threads, but if you haven't already reviewed the below articles, you might wish to take a look.

I do that as well but, like you, provide it as a way to provide information to someone that has already been presented elsewhere. If other's want to read it they can and if not I don't see it as a problem. This avoids creating a wall of text in a thread and provides consistent information so I don't see it as a problem, unless you are trying to state just how great you are like one guy around here did a few years ago who got banned after a couple of weeks.

[jbinpg]

Note that a developer has recently committed to enabling Pentax pixelshift in darktable. It is still early days and has not been merged into master yet but may be there for next general release.

[jersey]

Thanks guys, I will try both RT and DT plus other software.

I am using Linux for my work since I started it 20 years ago. Red Hat and Vim were my work environment for some time, now Linux is easy compared to old times. But I was always using Windows privately so I am not familiar with software other then one for software developement. And as I do not play that much lately I thought that I could use my workstation and Linux for photos and save space and get some money back selling desktop.

[BigMackCam]

Thanks guys, I will try both RT and DT plus other software.

I am using Linux for my work since I started it 20 years ago. Red Hat and Vim were my work environment for some time, now Linux is easy compared to old times. But I was always using Windows privately so I am not familiar with software other then one for software developement. And as I do not play that much lately I thought that I could use my workstation and Linux for photos and save space and get some money back selling desktop.

My main PC (a higher-spec laptop) and a couple of lower-end desktop machines are set up for dual boot with Windows and Ubuntu (Win 11 on my laptop, Win 10 on my lower-end desktops). The only reason I still use Windows is because a small few commercial software applications I somewhat depend on aren't cross-platform. Otherwise, I'd use linux 100% of the time (my low-spec "beater" laptop is running Ubuntu only, and it's my most-used machine ).

I'm reasonably capable with linux these days, but wish I had your 20 years of experience with it!!