The day Goats invaded the GIMP

Unless you have been living in a cave for about 10 years, you know that the next big thing in GIMP is called GEGL – that library has been in development for several years and aims to be the new engine that will launch GIMP to the stratosphere of image editing (more or less…)

Enfuse – multi-exposure blending and a proper HDR

In a comment on my previous post about HDR, Felix Hagemann recommended Enfuse as an alternative to HDR. Enfuse doesn’t require to build a “real HDR” image that you tonemap afterwards. Instead it blends together images that are exposed differently – a lot more simple and direct. Let’s see what the results can be and compare them to proper HDR and “mere” RAW processing.

Love it or hate it, HDR is here… and it’s on Linux, too

These days, it is hard to avoid HDR when you are interested in photography. Just for the record, High Dynamic Range is a way to combine different exposures of the same image: you end up with an image that has a wider range of shadow and highlight that what you normally see on printed paper or on your monitor. You then rearrange this extra dynamic to fit into a file that you can see on your monitor or print.

The result is an image that has a lot of details in both shadows and highlights – in my opinion, most of these images look very unnatural (not to say ugly) and very rarely do I come across “good taste HDR”. Like every post-processing, it is only when you don’t notice it that it is done right. Other people, of course, will disagree and process every single one of their pictures in HDR.

To know more about HDR, have a looks at the wikipedia article as well as the HDR Flickr gallery.

Although I won’t cover HDR in all details, I decided to give it a go out of curiosity, especially since Linux does it – via Qtpfsgui, that’s right GUI means: “no command line” 🙂

Final touch up with Cinepaint

OK, we are still in the process of producing a high quality (tiff 16bits/channel) image file from a RAW camera file, using Linux and a color managed workflow. Our example image is the “magic trees”. After the image selection, a quick and dirty post-processing, a careful processing with Ufraw, now is the time for the final touch up. We will be using Cinepaint for that, since the program is Color Managed and supports 16bits/channel.

What is left to do, anyway?

Most of the general color adjustments, curves, brightness and so on have been done in Ufraw, as close as possible to the original RAW file. However, there are some touch ups that cannot be done in Ufraw and which we will review here. We will to through each step, even if most of them were skipped in the “magic trees” picture.

Krita – the Kontender

We have been talking at length about The Gimp (as the historical graphic software in the Open Source world) and about Cinepaint (as its features set makes it interesting for serious photographic work). Now here comes Krita, the KDE Kontender (web, wiki). Krita is part of Koffice, KDE office suite.

On paper…

On paper, Krita has everything we are looking for, and even more:

If not The Gimp, then Cinepaint?

Howdy !

We left our last post on software about The Gimp with “good things to look forward to, with a grain (or two) of salt”. Although it has lots of interesting features (a quite a few of no use for photography), The Gimp really falls short with its color calculations limited to 8 bits per channel.

Let’s get started with The GIMP

When talking about imaging on Linux, you won’t be able to ignore The Gimp for long. Love it or hate it. Actually, Gimp vs Photoshop is a bit like Apple vs PC, Linux vs Windows, Canon vs Nikon (I am Pentax, btw) or ManU vs ManCity: lots of whining, rants, trolling and flaming. So let’s have a look at The Gimp with a photographer’s eye.