My free-software photography workflow
blog.fidelramos.net
blog.fidelramos.net
For Canon at least, their in-house raw converter/photo editor is available for free (Canon Digital Photo Professional) and while its features are definitely not quite as good as either free or commercial offerings, its features are (for a total amateur like me) "good enough", and it will produce images that are identical to what comes off the camera. Plus you can save some of the raw processing steps that you did to a profile that you can load onto the camera and use in the field, so if you're shooting to JPEG you can bake in some of that processing ahead of time.
This is absolutely true even for Nikons and Canons of the world.
I'm always baffled about the obsession with open source for photo editing workflows on a desktop. From "I just want to get stuff done" OSS is just junk. It is a better junk than it was before, but it is still junk. And why would not it be? It is all about optimizing for the experience and there's not a single piece of open source software that is optimized for user's experience. Why on earth do we think this -- a fairly complex type of software -- would be any different if we cannot get themes in GNOME work consistently?
However I will say that Lightroom is horrible and I hate it. Only because of the memory gobbling and the persistent cost until I’m dead.
As I’m not a professional I settled on Apple Photos and Pixelmator Pro for when I bend Photos too far. This is good enough and doesn’t come with the persistent cost issues associated with subscriptions and paying for lots of RAM. Also works entirely offline or online if you need it to.
My motivation for moving on from Lightroom is simply that Adobe no longer sells Lightroom. I'm not going to rent software that doesn't need constant updates to be useful. Sure, Adobe pushes out constant updates but their primary utility is in support for new bodies and I don't go through camera bodies that frequently. Unfortunately Adobe used a 32-bit installer for their 64-bit version of Lightroom so if I ever do a clean macOS install I'm boned.
I don't really see the distinction between amateurs and professionals here. I think both want the RAW starting point (after import) to look the way it was rendered in-camera.
I think it's a myth that professionals "want" a bland starting point and customize everything. The ideal workflow is that your RAW looks the same as in-camera, and then you use the power of RAW to customize. That's quite different from having a neutral RAW and trying to reconstruct everything.
Aside from that, the default settings and processing that the manufacturer applies may be undesirable for someone pursuing a more realistic and less "filtered for focus groups" result. All photography is illusion, but some want more control over the illusion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMMogOoWEbI
My guess is that professionals need to take a lot of photos, process them quickly; and probably show their clients what they are doing, while they are doing it.
In my mind there are different kinds of professionals. Some, as you say, like to process lots of photos quickly. My sister-in-law shoots weddings semi-professionally and has Lightroom presets that she has built out to give her a quick jumping off point for the style that she likes, and sifts through hundreds of photos per session. Others spend a long time tweaking one or two exposures to frame or publish. Of course, if there was only one correct workflow, then we wouldn't have articles like this!
Me neither, I think of it as The Camera.
> More often than not I end up ruining shots because of it though...
I find me-ruining-the-shot less-frustrating than the camera-ruining-the-shot :-)
> different kinds of professionals
For sure.
Well, it's funny how that could go either way. A huge amount of amateurs use RAW and they might actually have more time/interest to do max tweaking on a file compared to a pro, who is on the clock.
But there's also big differences between disciplines. In landscape photography, people use RAW to maximize the use of dynamic range, hence tweak it a lot.
In sports and wedding photography, not so much. To comment on the Nikon domain, Nikon is widely praised for its color science. Their engineers spent decades perfecting it and it even carries through in lens design. In the case of wedding photography, typically the photographer wants to Nikon rendering as it was intended. And it's not just color science, also tone compression and noise reduction. Done from the source.
If you'd take that RAW file and open it "neutral", without the proprietary demosaicing, curves, noise reduction, you're going to spend forever trying to reproduce the Nikon look. You fully dismissed a huge amount of value and are unlikely to regain it.
That's why I strongly believe that both amateurs and pros want the camera vendor's rendering in RAW as a starting point. Unfortunately, this is only fully possible in their custom crappy desktop apps.
Not necessarily. My D500's raws look OK in Darktable, but my D850's were awful last time I tried it, noisy and with patches of weird color casts.
I didn't try very hard to fix it, because I like Lightroom's functionality and UI a lot better anyway. Maybe they've successfully reverse-engineered the format by now, and I respect their work immensely no matter that it doesn't work for me, but especially with relatively new or relatively high-end cameras there is no guarantee of good FOSS support for raw formats.
Kudos to all the developers making free-software photography a reality!
In the end it's just great having multiple top-tier free-software options for photo editing, a big thank you to all their developers!
About the web gallery project, this being Hacker News I would like to give some more details about it: I have implemented a React frontend and FastAPI backend, navigating through the albums and photos already work, but thumbnails won't display because Digikam uses PGF image format [0]. PGF images are great for thumbnails because images load progressivel and can be quickly rendered at different sizes, but they are not supported natively by web browsers. I'm going to try compiling libpgf [1] to WASM so the frontend will be able to display the Digikam thumbnails directly (and allow for on-the-fly thumbnail resizing!), otherwise I will need to handle the conversion in backend.
Once thumbnails work I will deploy it on my home server, dogfood it for a while, polish a few things and release it. Of course Hacker News will get an announcement.
Edit: Forgot to add a link https://youtu.be/310rCQZe0NI
I'm afraid I don't buy this unfounded muck-slinging.
I know the open-source evangelists live in a rose tinted world where open-source automatically equals better.
However I think its only fair and reasonable to admit that it is possible to make high quality closed-source software.
Specifically, in terms of Adobe, I think it is deeply unfair and unfounded to call it "inferior". There is, for example, high-levels of integration between Adobe tools that is simply not present in open-source.
Ultimately money talks. December 2021 there were 26 million Adobe Creative Suite subscribers and growing. If Adobe was that shit, do you really think people would continue paying them ?
I know some people running companies in the design sector (larger companies, not one-man band freelancers), Adobe is a necessary business expense, they pay it because they want it, because time is money, and if their designers get the job done better, quicker and more efficiently in Adobe then they will pay the subscription. (Oh, and to address your specific point, the designers spend exactly zero hours watching training and tutorials on the Adobe website).
I hate the fact that I am paying for yet another subscription, but in this case, over the course of 5 years, I am just barely paying the retail price of the old CD-based product. So (a) I don't feel like I'm being fleeced, and (b) I get to spread the payments out without really paying more.
Every time I've tried moving into the world of FOSS photography, I've wasted dozens of hours trying to figure out how to do relatively simple things, modifying and tweaking configurations, or completely removing and reinstalling because an update broke something that should have never broken. I work in software, so I'm not exactly a dummy on this stuff; and I know that sometimes that's just part of the deal - especially in a world where you get what you pay for.
In the end, I had to decide whether I wanted my hobby time to be focused on working with my photos or working with my software. And that is why I happily pay.
Exactly.
I aggressively delete most images as-soon-as they are on the file system. (Is this image worth my time?) So less of an image management problem.
I use ~5% of what RawTherapee provides, because I no longer struggle to make OK pictures from flawed images. Instead I make pictures I like from OK images.
I would really love to use open source tools instead, the network drive bug is very annoying and not being able to run on Linux is pretty unfortunate. The overall process just ends up being quicker with Lightroom than Darktable or RawTherapee though :(
Yes, most of the time when you know your tools you will not spend much time going through training material, but if you needed to there are plenty of options and not just from Adobe. If you want to learn and get started there are plenty more options.
2) > I know the open-source evangelists live in a rose tinted world where open-source automatically equals better.
I don't recall stating that OSS = better, but in many cases it is. RawTherapee may not be as easy to use compared to Lightroom of Capture One but if used properly you can achieve superior results. One closed source RAW processor I can think of that lacks much training material but achieves great results in Raw Photo Processor (better than LR of RT in many ways). GIMP is great but until they can implement Adjustment layers it will never be a good alternative to Photoshop. IMO PhotoLine is much better than Photoshop in many ways, but also lack much training material or a large budget (being developed by two brothers in Germany). I can keep going.
I should add to my original comment that the amount of training and getting a product out for users to use is major for a company to succeed. Adobe and Microsoft have done a great job at getting their products in front of students and making sure they are comfortable with their products before going into the working world.
GIMP is not great until it has adjustment layers.
In the meantime, nobody on a budget should be using Photoshop when Affinity Photo is so inexpensive (and significantly better than Photoshop in a couple of important ways).
To be fair to GIMP, I used PS back to when adjustment layers were not a thing. The work that team does is amazing and I give them props (though I still would love to see adjustment layers).
Yeah, this is super-useful. Also the layer blend curves are amazingly useful, particularly combined with live filter layers. And it can do LUT inference (e.g. from HALD CLUT images). I use that all the time.
> To be fair to GIMP, I used PS back to when adjustment layers were not a thing.
So did I, but GIMP has existed for almost as long as adjustment layers in PS! And for all that time they've refused to prioritise something that IMO is transformative in photoshop; it's the basis of non-destructive editing.
For my purposes jpegs have usually been good enough so I seldom need to do raw processing. For those times I have Darktable and RawTherapee installed, both are incredible programs that have worked well for me.
GIMP continues to be a primary tool. It's not perfect but it does many things extremely well. For example, making color separations for CMYK printing is pretty easy and straightforward. GIMP also allows effective image manipulation, particularly when plugins are added: gmic, cyan, resynthesizer, autosave.
Workflow also relies on other FOSS programs such as Scribus (for printing positives) and occasionally inkscape, krita, paint.net for certain image effects. Yes, it takes time and effort to work out components of a custom workflow.
I have no doubt proprietary programs offer greater levels of convenience (for "standard" workflow) at significant monetary cost. Like everything else tradeoffs are implicit, one approach isn't absolutely "better" than the other.
IIRC there have been a few times when CS researchers working on image algorithms published their findings with a Darktable implementation first.
This is one place where there's just no replacement to hiring engineers to sit down and work on the product for a few years. The open-source stuff is nowhere close to CaptureOne or Lightroom in terms of quality of RAW conversion or the quality of the image processing.
Does CaptureOne support a "RAW+sidecar metadata" format? It is important to me that the raws not be modified (i.e. metadata not written directly to them) and that the metadata be a per-file sidecar and not just a single giant catalog file. Lightroom seems to support this workflow but others didn't seem to (or at least didn't explicitly state they did).
That would be the ideal workflow for me in terms of generating useful catalogs and making backups smooth.
Not only that, but they also have an extensive collection of camera profiles and lens corrections for pretty much every vendor. Their support for Sony and Fuji are particularly great.
> "Open-source workflow" means you're leaving quality on the table.
That is true, but my choice of software is not uni-dimensional, I also care about trusting the software I run in my computer and their maintainability in the long term, to highlight two other important dimensions for me. When considering all this together I have little choice but to use free software exclusively.
Of course different people will assign different weights to each dimension, and that is completely fine, but let's not oversimplify the decision to just "quality".
I expect that the professionals take better pictures straight out of camera and need less adjustments while the dabblers like me need more post processing help. Now, I am struck on a loop with Topaz and LR and cannot switch out of windows (or mac).
Using Darktable has gotten easier over time. But it definitely has some things that are probably not that intuitive for new users. The lack of features and opinionated nature of Lightroom might be considered a feature for some but I don't think there is anything specific that it does that doesn't have at least several alternatives in Darktable at this point. We can haggle about the quality of the algorithms on either side of course. I'm pretty happy with what Darktable does here and it seems it has developers that are really obsessive on this front. Check e.g. lead developer Aurelian Pierre's youtube channel for some in depth discussion of what Darktable does and why it works the way it works.
The transition to the so-called the scene referred work flow in Darktable in recent years has made my workflow a lot simpler. But it is also something that has a bit of a learning curve.
Scene referred means that instead of applying some one size fits all curve based on your camera model, it actually looks at your photo and applies the exposure and filmic modules which together will try to fit the curve for each photo using some heuristics and nice algorithms. The result is typically pretty good out of the box and any further tweaks tend to be straightforward.
A typical workflow for me in Darktable works like so:
- import photos and move them to the right place. I'm not big on tagging, so I tend to skip that.
- apply some initial star ratings in the lighttable section so I can focus on the ones I like the most.
- after initial screening, anything below 2 stars gets hidden and I start editing.
- I open the photos for editing one by one and let Darktable apply its defaults (and my overrides). For example, my Fuji requires +1.25 stops exposure correction as it tends to underexpose to avoid blowing highlights and I have a preset for this that auto applies. Auto applied settings and copy pasting parts of a history stack or applying them as styles is one of many workflow enhancements that allow you to be productive in Darktable. Worth reading up on if you have a lot of photos to process.
- I tweak the exposure defaults manually to set the gray point. The nice thing with this is that filmic adjusts black and white points accordingly. You can think of this as an intelligent way to set the brightness.
- tweak filmic parameters if still needed (quite often this is not needed). I do typically apply some contrast but not a lot. This is also the place to deal with highlight recovery if that is needed.
- Crop & rotate as needed. You can do this at any point of course but I like to get this out of the way early.
- decide if I want lens correction and local contrast modules turned on. Not every photo needs this. Lens correction is nice for wide angle photos. Local contrast can be nice but I try not to over use it.
- Deal with any color issues and saturation as needed. There are various modules for this, including a few recent additions that work well with the scene referred work flow. Mostly Darktable does the right things here and I don't actually need to do a lot here. But I do like the new perceptive saturation slider in the color balance module.
- Apply other modules as needed; I tend to be conservative with this. For example noise reduction is sometimes nice and profiled noise reduction does a good job out of the box but sometimes when noise is really a problem there are alternative strategies to explore.
- export everything with 2 stars or more as jpg & upload it some place for publishing
The place where I store my RAW files is not where I work on them - I'll typically copy them from a memory card to my machine, do whatever processing, then shift them away to storage, so I find the whole idea of a 'library' unecessary.
Frankly, this is all BS. All of these softwares are capable of producing professional results. The difference is made by the user, not the software. Learn one of them; any one of them. Learn it well. The individual choice in the end is just a preference, but does not determine quality. You do. Thankfully.
(That's a bit like modern cameras. They are all great. They are all capable of professional results. The individual choice in the end doesn't matter.)
"Oh! It's pronounced uh-nalll-rupist!"
"I wasn't concerned with its pronunciation."
"Once we built a pen so large that we had difficulty finding a box it would fit in."
Also, their logo is... suggestive
> Q: Can I provide my own wood?
> A: In most cases we can handle your wood. We do require all shipments to be clean, free of parasites and pass all standard customs inspections.
Damn - thanks. Now I will never get this site out of my head again.
I'll take RawTheRapee for $500 Alex.
Any thoughts on how to deal with DNG files?
A few years ago, I bought into Apple's "DNG promise" and converted all my raw photos into lossless DNGs AND my JPEGs into lossy DNGs. Silly me. I now feel trapped into Lightroom, which I pay for out of inertia and wouldn't like to any longer... and I feel that such conversion was a huge mistake.
The reason I ask is because I've found support for DNG files to be lacking in many cases, and when I researched this recently, the answers didn't seem better than years ago. The article doesn't talk about this at all. So I'd love to be proven wrong :)
I am a very light Lightroom user. I have thousands of pictures, but mostly use Lightroom to categorize them and do some trivial edits here and there. The pictures are already organized in a tree structure with sidecar XMP (?) metadata files, so I don't think the LR catalog has a ton of information I care about anyway?
I'd be nice to have a pure file-system based catalog that separates edits from originals in some way, and that keeps photo metadata attached to the photos themselves.
But I guess my question remains: is it a good idea to continue "investing" into DNG by converting new photos into it, or is it better to "stop the bleeding"? Because from what I have read before, this format didn't seem too well-supported outside of Adobe apps...
Regardless, the best way to get an answer to your question about DNG is probably to try some of these programs with your files and see if you encounter any problems. DNG is typically better supported than camera-specific raw formats.
Sync mechanisms can go wrong. Somebody might hack into your cloud storage account and wipe it out. The odds may be small, but you'd be absolutely heart broken if your lifelong portfolio is gone.
So what I do is that once a year, I manually back up everything on a USB disc. On two actually, the second disc I bring to another location. Once backed up, I never have them connected. They just sit in storage.
Since this manual backup is so infrequent, it's not a huge pain. Should full disaster strike and all hot backups fail, at worst I lose 1 year of photos, which is better than 20 years.
If you think I'm too distrustful of sync tech: a year ago at work OneDrive wiped out all my files. I've pressed internal IT and Microsoft itself for answers, but none were given but this: OneDrive is a sync solution, not a backup solution.
Point taken.
You make a great point, and I am that careful with my photo collection. I didn't put it in the article but I do copy my full photo collection into a USB hard drive about once a year when I visit my parents. This way they have my photos and I have yet another backup. :)
Once you understand the UI, digikam is fantastic.
I would be interested in reading OP's approach with sidecars, and how he configured Digikam for storing metadata (in file or in sidecar ? How does the two communicate between Digikam and Rawtherapee/Darktable ?)
Last time I checked about keeping Digikam and other programs in sync, about 2 years ago, it seemed to me that it wasn't going to work seamlessly, so I decided to let it be. If someone has experience about it I would love to hear about it.
> Better metadata handling (thanks to the exiv2 and exiftool libraries), with (optional) support for reading and writing XMP sidecar files.
I will check it out soon, ART has some very useful features that I miss from Darktable in RawTherapee.
Also - holy shit, RawTheRapee needs a new/different name, eh? I'm guessing/hoping English is not the creator's first language? :3
Edit: Apparently, it's 'RawTherapee' - as in 'RAW therapy' - not 'Raw the Rape'. It actually took me until Googling it and seeing it that way that I got it. Maybe it should've just been called RawTherapy? :/
On a half-way decent machine I find the performance excellent - what kind of slow issues are you finding?
Development, if you track the github issues, is down to one guy at the moment. I fear the relicensing of the project was just a smidge too late, and the field was already well populated, for it to attract more interest, unfortunately.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computation...
I do use Hugin for panoramas, and it's fantastic. I was going to write a bonus section about it but I wanted to get the post out of the way as I had been working on it for too long already. I will add it in a future update.
[0] https://www.blendernation.com/2020/08/30/video-editing-with-...
Darktable is a bad user experience on the Mac but it's definitely capable of good results, as is Rawtherapee.
But I generally don't use open source stuff for photography; I have sunk expense in Mac software and I'll use that until it breaks.
I wonder how things compare now.
It is great that these softwares are offered for free though.
This is my workflow, it doesn't have to fit everybody else. If you want a single software to do everything then you should give Darktable [0] a try, it can handle all steps in my proposed workflow including importing, browsing, editing and metadata organization. It even exports to third-party services. I think it has more features than Lightroom, although the UX is arguably worse.