Open Source Photography Workflow
rileybrandt.com
rileybrandt.com
It's probably not a popular opion here but there are some things that are worth paying for. When it comes to working with 500+ photos from a shoot you can pry lightroom from my cold dead hands.
It also has seamless integration with Photoshop for heavyweight operations.
hope this makes some sense :)
Last year, on a whim, I bought a copy of Lightroom. I have rarely been so impressed with a piece of software, and was immediately more productive, and generating better results.
At some point I caved in and downloaded the LR trial, and it was clear that they had put a lot of effort into making it easy to do your workflow. And having the import/culling, undestructive basic editing, and library functionality in one tool won me over.
[1]: https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=7513.0
after this, started with RAWs, and I started using Lightroom. There are things I like a lot (quick interface for stuff intended, ie lens corrections, playing around with sliders). the thing is - I am not buying into Adobe's workflow totally. I don't want to load and edit all the files I take, meaning easily 100-300 from a weekend. First step is selecting interestin gones, maybe 20%.
I select few interesting quickly (irfan is still MUCH faster than doing it through lightroom), separate panoramas (Lightroom/Photoshop has very primitive interface without much control, plus their alghoritms are archaic and don't work so well compared to what Autopano brings on), and then work in Lightroom on selected ones. I HATE the way Lightroom's process is done - no flexibility outside of a narrow path.
You don't want to use Catalog and manage things on your own? Don't worry, we'll keep annoying you every single time you start it.
You want to just export result into a normal format that doesn't lose so much quality (ie PNG)? well get an external plugin, because who supports exotic formats like PNG in 2015, right? Are you effin' kidding me? this is THE software to process photos, and I cannot export a photo into most of the formats?
You actually want to join panorama, ie the most basic functionality expected from expensive software? well till now some versions just pointed you to expensive photoshop, if you had it. if not, bad luck, pay more! panorama joining feature is still pathetic in 2015, cropping out parts of photos without good reasons. Autopano just works, all the time.
Picture management is a joke, rotation, crop etc don't feel like a primary tool. again, freeware tool brings much more productivity, not only because I am so used to it. It seems to me marketing guys were the ones designing this product.
Did I find something better for processing RAWs photo by photo (or in batch?). Nope. But for many other steps necessary for the process of shooting -> final ordered set of photos from the event, there are better, faster tools out there. And yes, LR is SLOW, on fast i5, 16 gigs or RAm and fast SSD. Irfan is so much faster when working with RAWs, it's shameful.
White Balance, curves, spot fixing, all of that is there in a much more streamlined package.
I can cull/wb/crop/curve well over 500 photos in under 30 minutes. The only time I pop over to photoshop is when I want to do some LAB color processing and that's 0.001% of my use cases.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is you're paying for lightroom specifically because they though of the photo workflow as a whole rather than trying to solve specific discrete problems.
I will say their UI and look & feel looks very much like lightroom although I'd be curious what their culling workflow is like.
https://www.darktable.org/2012/10/whats-involved-with-adding...
The lens correction comes from the lensfun project, which is also open source. They even run a lens calibration service if you submit the necessary images:
http://lensfun.sourceforge.net/
A lot of distributions have ancient versions of lensfun for some reason, so upgrading can make a big difference. They're currently working on splitting the lens definition file into a separate package from the software so that it can be updated more frequently.
If you have any questions for the developers you can always jump on to #darktable on freenode IRC. darktable 2.0 has just entered feature freeze.
Aesthetically, the darktable GUI is not as polished as C1 and LR, and is less responsive. In some cases, tools and controls that have fairly standard interface conventions in other imaging software are different in darktable. The UI is generally less intuitive than C1 and LR.
On the technical side it does better, but can't compare to C1 and LR. A lot of the controls are difficult to use, and the effects don't seem as "smooth" as C1 and LR, if that makes any sense. It's also a lot slower, and I'll often make an adjustment and have "working..." show up over the image while it chugs away. And I mean for simple stuff like adjusting levels and exposure, that take effect almost instantly in the other software. To its credit, I don't think there's any effect or feature in C1 or LR that couldn't be achieved in DR, but it would usually be a lot more work.
Another problem I had was that RAW support seems to lag behind C1 and LR quite a bit, especially for cameras with new or unique sensors. I have a FujiFilm with an XTrans sensor, and it took a long time for it to be supported in darktable. On a similar note, it is pretty far behind on things like lens correction.
Overall I just get stuff done faster and easier in C1.
I find that Darktable is in no way a good competitor for Lightroom. The image processing quality seems to lack, speed lacks, file support is not always good. It looks like a nice clone, but apart from the looks it has to work well.
Now, this right here is the chicken and egg issue with professional quality production software in the open source world.
What the open source pro software suites need is more professionals using them. I get it, you have a job to do and no precious time to spend on learning new tools or deal with bugs. But even if you put in an hour every now and then, or check out how has Gimp/Darktable/Blender progressed in the year or two since you last touched it, you can help.
The guys who are working on these software most likely are not professional photographers or digital artists, they are programmers with a keen interest on the topic. They have limited time on their hands and they primarily target their own use cases. They don't have big budgets like Adobe and other companies do.
I applaud OP taking the time and the effort to get comfortable with open source tools. He has contributed a few excellent blog posts on moving from proprietary pro software (I particularly liked the one where he describes what he did in Gimp to get comfortable coming from a Photoshop background). He'll probably get in touch with the developers in one way or another, to give feedback or submit bug reports, perhaps even patches. This is valuable work!
Free software is a team effort, you need to chip in if you want to see things improve.
It took him years because he wanted open source software only.
I've been using Bibble 5 for years. It's been available for Linux since eons; Bibble Labs was meanwhile acquired by Corel (surprisingly not mentioned in the Wiki page) so now it's called Corel AfterShot / AfterShot Pro; AFAIK, it's the only professional photography software that's available natively for GNU/Linux (in .deb/.rpm, 32/64bit flavours) aiming to compete with Lightroom. But it's commercial software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibble_%28software%29
Edit: clarified.
Some things I think are still missing from open source photography workflow: adequate support Linux from high-end printer manufacturers (eg. I have a Canon Pixma Pro 1 and I basically have to use it through a shitty Windows VM), and better front-ends for lens distortion calculators.
(Of course Epson has its own issues...)
I've transitioned to RAW in the past couple of months, and while I'm starting to develop a workflow, I get occasional surprising (to me) behavior. Is there a nice review of the thinking and backend behind the Darkroom UI?
http://www.darktable.org/resources/
The screencasts might be a good place to start, and the user manual is quite comprehensive. Disclaimer: I did some of the screencasts. Riley's course is a more-complete overview, but it's not free.
Also keep in mind that darktable just entered feature freeze for 2.0, should be released around the end of the year.
Mostly I like rawtherapee because it can be pointed at a directory of .CR2/raw files, be used to filter them, convert them, and makes zero attempts to be an image-manager. I don't want to import my images into a collection, or tag them, etc. Instead I use a filesystem hierarchy for that purpose:
Images/2015/
Images/2015/10/
Images/2015/10/15-Helsinki-Sunset
Another good command line program is dcraw, especially for batch developing RAW photos. These two programs probably make up more than half of my photography workflow.
Doing a generic search via DuckDuckGo [ https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Alwn.net+photography ] shows a number of articles which may be of interest.
Considering that their current platform providers are moving towards business models where they will want to take large share from every software sale, it would allow Adobe to gain competitive advantage and negotiation power.
Beside they would probably create completely new market for themselves.
There is some exceptions like Blender and GIMP, but overall, there is no such thing as getting together to build a killer mega-app. This is why OSS have hard time getting into CAD, EDA and (serious) accoutability feilds. Those are simply too large to wrap small tools into bigger ones.