This is a truly unix-philosophy tool: one tool for one purpose, but do it well. So Rapid Photo Downloader will allow you to:

• download your images to a defined directory
• rename them in the process
• create a backup copy at the same time

and the beauty of it is that it is very simple to configure: a few clicks and you define where the photos will be downloaded, how they will be renamed, where the backup will be and if you want RPD to start doing its job automatically when a new device is inserted.

Here is what the preference windows looks like (for my work habits, obviously):

and here is Rapid Photo Downloader in action:

Interested? You should! Have a look at Rapid Photo Downloader’s website, including installation instructions for major distros.

And just to keep a tradition alive, here is an “autumn in Montreal” image:

Michael Reichmann – The Leica M9, a field review

Joe McNally – a photographer’s best piece of equipment (youtube video)

Comment anyone?

We are making pretty good progress towards GIMP 2.8 which has turned into an “everything but GEGL” release. I think it would make sense to also go for a single-window mode in 2.8 and not 2.10 as originally planned.

[...]

I intend to start working on this asap, and peter will work on a UI spec as soon as he gets time. If you have objections, please speak up.

/ Martin

Obviously, quite a few people spoke up (read the thread).

This also prompted Peter Sikking (GIMP’s UI designer) to blog about the issue: why this is desirable, what are the advantages and problems, etc. Peter also introduces the “image parade” to see the currently open and recently used images. Very interesting stuff (ie: read the blog post).

While it is always good to see progress in open source software, my personal taste would have been to get 16 bits support so that GIMP gets actually *usable* for photographic work. Still, kudos to the GIMP’s team for their work and best of luck with GIMP 2.8.

(But hey, based on how constant I am at updating this blog, who am I to lecture others??)

Now during the recent Libre Graphics Meeting, there was a short talk (I don’t remember the speaker) about “What’s new in GIMP 2.6?” and one of the hotness is the very explicitly named c2g feature, conveniently buried in the GEGL operations (sub-)menu.

And guess what? c2g is a black and white converter… maybe the ultimate one.

The other good thing about conferences is that you get to actually meet people, so I had a chance to listen to some more explanations from Øyvind Kolås (aka Pippin), c2g’s author. I say listen since I was the least technical guy around the table so there was not much talking on my side; which is also why I hope this blog post is accurate – please correct me if someone knows better.

The idea behind c2g is to convert each pixel to B&W using an optimal white balance: the black and white points are calculated for each pixel according to its surrounding, giving the closer pixels more weight (and following a gaussian curve). And basically this mimics the way our human eye perceives the image – how we perceive a color (or grey nuance) depends not only on its value, but on its environment.

You probably came across this optical illusion: both greys in the middle are of the same density (value) but one is perceived clearer than the other because it is surrounded by a darker tone than the other one.Now if I process the image with c2g, here is what I get:See the idea? The absolute value of the greys in the center are “corrected” to “fit” our perception. By the way, this is with every c2g value left as default, except samples set to 10 – resulting in a longer processing time, but less noise.

The best way I would describe what c2g does is masking done automagically right for maximum contrast. For the purpose of illustration (rather than for artistic purpose) take this photo:

And this is what you get with c2g – default parameters except a radius set to 280 for a more dramatic effect on a small image:

Just for comparison’s sake here is the Luminosity (from HSL):

Øyvind has a comparison between several more B&W conversion methods (including c2g, obviously).

What do you think? If c2g is not the ultimate B&W converter, it is darn close to it, if you ask me. By the way, here is the comparison’s image processed with c2g:

Basically, Phraymd is an image collection management tool: it allows you to work on your images metadata – tags, titles, copyright, etc which is stored inside the image itself. You can then search through your image collection, modify metadata in batch, etc.

This is what Phraymd does. Just as interesting is what it does not: image editing. Don’t look for a red-eyes removal tool,  brightness and saturation cursors or black & white conversion. However, Phraymd makes it very easy to open your images in an external editing program (GIMP, gThumb and others).

Phraymd is coded in Python – it uses wrapper around standard libraries. To quote from the webpage:

• Emphasis on a snappy interface. All the heavy lifting is done on background threads or external processes to ensure the UI never blocks. User is informed of what is going on in the background with progress notifications etc.
• Keep metadata in the images where it belongs. To the extent possible, databases/indexes are temporary files that can be deleted without losing useful data.
• Simple notion of a photo collection: all of the images (jpeg, png, raw etc) in a directory including its subfolders. A database to speed up image lookup is maintained in the users home folder.
• Database keeps track of image metadata for speedy search and sort of images (the database can be recreated from the underlying images)
• Support collections with 10,000+ images (currently, the program should run ok with 100,000 images but may use a lot of memory — that can be tweaked)

On the UI side, Phraymd uses onmouseover overlays to present you with basic information about the current image.

Sounds interesting? Here is what Phraymd looks like after you have chosen your image directory:

Here it is when you are working on a particular image – note in the above toolbar that I am working on the subset of images tagged for Montreal.

And here is the metadata entering dialog:

Lastly, a few more notes from Damien:

• “phraymd” is just a working title — I’ll hopefully find a better name by the time its ready for mainstream consumption (branding seems to matter).
• phraymd is in its very early stages (I started coding in about January), a part time project with a team of 1 (and even he isn’t a programmer by trade).
• feedback is especially welcome: I set up a google group, or people can use Launchpad to create bugs or ask questions.
• volunteers are welcome to join the project (code, docs, art etc)

Have a look at launchpad and google group, test Phraymd and let Damien know about your experience, suggestions or help. I have this feeling that Phraymd could well be filling a much necessary need in the Linux for Photography eco system. My only wish would be to be presented with a list of tags to tick rather than typing them each time (with typos which make subsequent searches impossible).

Dear Joel,

We stumbled upon your “Linux Photography” blog a few months ago and have been following your posts for some time. While your attempts are valiant, they are also somewhat pathetic – or so we feel.

We at Apple, don’t sit around criticizing others. Rather we deliver solutions. Therefore, we have shipped to your place a brand new MacBook Pro with the latest Mac OS X. It comes loaded with Apple Aperture and (as a special treat from our partner Adobe) Photoshop CS4. This will show you what state of the art operating system / photographic software can do for photographic work.

We hope you will appreciate this gift and look forward to your next blog entries.

Best regards,

XXX, Apple Marketing

Now today (and to my complete astonishment), the UPS man rang at my door and brought me a huge box shipped from Cupertino… after unpacking and plugging in, all I can say is “Wow!” – the hardware, the OS and the photography functionalities just look stunning.

At that stage, I am not too sure when I’ll reboot one of my Linux computers…

The idea

ArgyllCMS (blog 1, 2) is a Linux / Windows / Mac OS X set of command line utilities for color management – including but not limited to monitor calibration. So dispcalGUI is a make-your-life-easier frontend to Argyll which allows monitor calibration. This is especially handy since creating a profile with Argyll involves several steps with quite a few command line options – “dispcal -v -q l -y c samsung” anyone?

Installation

dispcalGUI comes blundled in a very “windows-like” installation package (and indeed, it works on MS-Windows, MacOS X and Linux). Just download the package, extract it and go through the installation process. You will need to point it to your Argyll installation, click a few “next” buttons and you are done.

Using it

Before srtarting using dispcalGUI, you need to plug your calibrating device and make it user writable (just like with Argyll). Type lsusb in a terminal to find your device busid and deviceid and then type:

sudo chmod 777 /proc/bus/usb/busid/deviceid

That will be it for the command line.

You can now load dispcalGUI. This is how it looks:

Functionalities are the same as Argyll’s – ie quite complex. DispcalGUI has a manual well written and quoting relevant part of Argyll’s – so RTFM. Otherwise, you can just check that the right monitor / instrument are picked. Chose your monitor type (LCD or CRT) and the calibration and profile quality. Leave the rest to default. Click on calibrate and profile.

After a (relatively long) time and a couple “y” or “any key” in the terminal, you will get an icc profile which you can load with dispwin or xcalib (for screen calibration) as well as your graphic application (for profiling – if the application supports it). Check this entry if you need to know more about color management.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, means one less item on the Linux & Photography todo list.

And if you are coming, Montréal is a beautifull city, full of shooting opportunities. So much, in fact that Popular Photography has it on its list of photo treks.

About me.

As a kid, I won a small price, an USSR made camera. Very quickly I become obsess with it. As result, it became a problem. I was bended from all parties because unwillingly produced too much “black mail” quality photos and second my parents and I could not afford the expensive hobby. I was forced to give-up on photography. At the same time I become fully occupied with the computers and later it turn into my profession. Several years ago I bought my self a new shiny digital camera and the old charcoals re-ignited again. I am Windows System Administrator at work, but at home I would run Linux only. Except I am struggling setting-up good workflow for my photography under Linux. That is how I found Joel’s blog.

What is the solution?

After I finished reading Joel’s post my immediate reaction as other that have commented his post was that we need new Linux distribution, design from the ground up for all of us Linux photographers, armatures and professionals. Not only that I in fact started to research and create plan for that kind of distribution. Very soon I hit the wall and now I think this is wrong approach to the problem.

1. Creating a new distribution has big overhead that will slow down the project.
2. The new distribution will have limited set of tools that will provide single workflow and making this workflow fitting the needs for every one will become impossible task. I thing that is why we have so many independent projects that re-discover the wheel over and over again. And the main problem is that many of moved to Linux because we like to customize our systems to fit our needs not other way around.
3. Linux distribution designed for Photography has place only on dedicated workstation in professional studio, but most of as will need our system for general tasks like surfing the Internet, e-mail and etc.

So the big question do we accept the current situation and wait for independent projects to mature on the own or we can take charge and help the process?

What I would like to see?

I think what we need is new approach to our problems. After reading all the comments I realized that there is huge untapped pool of knowledge between us. So I think the first step should be everyone of us to make effort to document their workflow. This should produce lists of tools that can handle each step of the image processing. Next, if we can establish contacts between leaders of those projects allowing them to work together on building a common frame work. For example how many databases we need to store tags? I would say one that provides core functionality and expandability for new features. If we are successful with that very soon all tools will improve rapidly because each project could spend more time on their custom features. At the same time interoperability between tools will make quantum leap. Even better if we have stable frame work will allow to be included in different desktop environments and even the kernel it self.

Can we do this?

I think we can. So I have an idea for project something like wiki pages where everyone can document their workflow. Share ideas between us how to overcome common problems. At the same site we can maintain list of common and unsolved problems that will work as reference for other projects. We can have something like live FAQ and HOWTO pages. I would like to know if there is interest in that kind of project or might be already exist!

Thank you,

Svetoslav Trochev