Hub just announced his Niepce digital photography project on Linux. The goal is ambitious: “for those who chose the easy way it is in the same idea than Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture.” As per Hub’s words:
The feature set I wish to see implemented is quite extensive, and the application will be divided in “modules”. The first one, the library is meant to manage the collection of pictures, add metadata, etc. The second module, darkroom, is meant to perform the image editing. Image editing is not like a full blown version of GIMP, but rather a limited and most used set: image adjustments, crop, straighten, dust removal, etc, all performed in a non-destructive mode. This will be for the first milestone, with maybe a few upload modules to export to you favorite image hosting.
Digital camera RAW files will be first class citizen, and actually they should provide the best result, and not be harder to use than JPEG. Metadata will be centered around XMP for maximum interoperability. And of course, color management will be.
Niepce will use of GEGL, libexempi and libopenraw and be licensed as GPLv3. Although it will be quite some time until the first milestone is released, this is definitely a project we want to keep an eye on. Good luck, Hub!
And a view from the Place des Vosges in Paris:
July 17, 2008 at 5:48 pm |
It looks interesting but I would like to know if it would not be better if they help digikam? I mean, the 0.10 is pretty advanced, it is on Qt4 (means every Unix, Linux and Windows) and the comunity is already built.
July 17, 2008 at 6:01 pm |
Yeah same here, and as a fan of f-spot, I wouldn’t want to throw that app away either in favor of this one (unless of course this were indisputably better)
But otherwise, what a great idea. I get sick of all the apps that go half-way toward creating a workflow.
July 18, 2008 at 4:14 pm |
@Daniel: this is a choice to be made according to what you need. It is not about converting, it is about providing a better suited tool. There is an old dogma: when you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail. For now Niepce Digital isn’t really in the usable stage, and maybe it was all a bit premature: there won’t be a release before sometime. We’ll see in the future if you like it or not.
@paurullan: see that sane discussion elsewhere. Just don’t forget I have a GNOME hat by choice. I thought about using Qt4 and voted against it because the application would never have integrated withing GNOME or KDE…
July 25, 2008 at 9:06 am |
Well, I’m not the one to speak about coding, but from what I’v read Hub seems to be reinventing the wheel.
For instance, why creating libopenraw when dcraw does already the job for an extensive number of RAW formats?
August 15, 2008 at 8:52 pm |
@xavier
“One of the main reason is that dcraw is not suited for easy integration into applications, and there is a need for an easy to use API to build free software digital image processing application.”
from the libopenraw web page.
dcraw is designed to work as a separate binary. having a library lets you do things like extract a RAW straight into you programs memory, rather than to a temp file, and then reading the temp file.
August 26, 2008 at 4:28 pm |
Another app along these lines that seems worth watching is BlueMarine. You can check it out here: http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/
April 25, 2009 at 9:41 am |
Very well written post however, I would recommend that you turn the No Follow off in your comment section.
Keep up the good work.