Photo Editing on Linux

On September 26, 2015, I will be at FREDLUG at the England Run library in Fredericksburg, VA discussing photo and video editing on Linux.  I will be working with a couple of other presenters on the agenda  My focus will be on photo editing and managing photo collections using Linux.  This subject is dear to me as I have been processing photos on Linux for many years for my kids Cheerleading competitions, Karate events, Weddings, family photos, nature photos, etc.
I frequently take photos of a very wide range of subjects:

• Art:  museums, sculpture, paintings, family-created art
• Astronomy:  astrophotography, planets, sunrise, sunset
• Family:  kids, weddings, Christmas and related events
• Nature:  day and night, forests, mountains, waterfalls, trees, sunrise/sunset
• Photo art:  creative shots with multiple cameras, creative post-processing, etc.
• Scanned images:  from film typically including very old family photos
• Scanned documents including some 100-year-old telegrams
• Sports:  Cheerleading, football, and karate
• Technical:  circuits, equipment, Arduino, buildings, family inventory
• Travel:  ancient sites, interesting structures, Churches, Mosques, Temples, Wats

I have used many, many cameras, film and digital including:

• Canon 50D and 350D, plus other Canon and Nikon SLRs, and mirrorless systems
• Celestron and generic digital microscopes
• Multiple web cams 
• Raspberry Pi camera module (5MP)
• Point and shoot digital cameras including Nikon Coolpix, Olympus, and others.
• Canon AE1 Program, EX-Auto, and misc other film cameras and SLRs
• Scanned images from family pictures, some over 100 years old

I have used many lenses on the SLR cameras including 50mm 1.8, 20mm, zoom lenses, etc.

When processing photos on Linux, I primarily use these tools:

• GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) for editing images and graphics
• Shotwell:  Comes with the Gnome desktop
• Digikam:  Full image processing collectcion
• Darktable:  good for processing batches of raw pictures including RAW photos
• Picasa from Google, Windows only but works great under Wine
• OpenOffice/LibreOffice draw for printing small/large/custom images

Note, Picasa is not open source but works well for non-destructive editing of large sets of photos.  I began using it years ago, so still use it to organize the huge sets of photos I manage.  I still use Picasa as it is fast and does retouch well, but am considering moving to Digikam.

This is a good review of image editors for Linux at techradar.com.

For processing RAW images I have used multiple tools.  I really liked RawStudio, however the link at http://www.rawstudio.org seems to be broken so I used the link to github.  RawStudio seems to have less support so I am leaning towards Darktable.

• Darktable:  seems slower than RawStudio, good for batches of images 
• RawStudio:  good for batches of images, seems to be dying or not well supported
• UFRaw: good for single images

Some image software and editors I have yet to try, but am interested in:

• RawTherapee for processing raw images
• RegiStax for image stacking (Window, run with wine?) -- closed source
• AfterShot Pro from Corel (commercial, not-free or open source)
• Photivo photo processor
• LightZone digital darkroom software

My next mission is to move from Picasa to a fully-open-source image processing workflow stream that is compatible with the current version of Fedora and that supports my existing photo hierarchy. I will post my progress in this task in future blog entries.

I may have to stick with RegiStax for stacking astro images.... Again this will be the subject of a future blob posting on Astronomical Image processing on Linux.

I have stitched together some panorama images using Hugin with excellent results.  I also tried to make HDR images using Luminance HDR (with varying degreees of success).

Many cameras can be directly controlled from Linux using Gphoto2, for example I can change the ISO, shutter speed, aperture, and shutter for my 50D.  I can command the camera to take 20 pictures, 1 second apart, and download them all from a script.  Great stuff and also the subject of a follow-on post....

I have done only a little video processing on Linux.  The options here are not as mature.  

I will do a post in the future about Video on Linux including my experience with Kino and Kdenlive. This seems to be an interesting Linux video editor review at linux.com.

Update:  9/28/2015:  The presentation went very well.  We demonstrated a lot of applications and captured from a webcam, Celestron microscope, and the Canon 50D!

Some of my photography can be seen at:  https://wadesfavorites.shutterfly.com/.

Enjoy!