RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 13, 2010 22:17 UTC (Wed) by DDevine (guest, #60717)
Parent article: RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

I personally am not interested in RAW processing programs, but I would really like to remove Adobe products from my girlfriend's computer.

Fromm what I can see DigiKam + GIMP' seems to stack up quite well against the somewhat industry standard Photoshop + Bridge combination for professional photography. I think if you can learn how to use the GIMP well enough then you could *realistically* use it professionally.

Setting up cameras for doing RAW editing on Linux is much easier than Windows due to DCRAW which from my experience (she let me play for a few minutes) 'just works' with professional level cameras. Plug and Play, no fooling around finding and installing the right plug-in from Adobe.

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RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 13, 2010 23:29 UTC (Wed) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (17 responses)

Until GIMP implement 16 bit per color, it might not be good enough for professional use, depending on the actual needs and your definition of "professional".

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 13, 2010 23:38 UTC (Wed) by freemars (subscriber, #4235) [Link] (15 responses)

Until GIMP implement 16 bit per color, it might not be good enough for professional use (snip>

The GIMP is moving toward 16-bit color, but progress is painfully slow.

CMYK and Pantone color support are also essential to some professionals -- but they are blocked by laws.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 0:56 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (3 responses)

They aren't blocked by law, they are blocked by patent. Photoshop is nearly a decade ahead of Gimp at the professional level. In fact Adobe Elements is probably better than most of what the Gimp can do. Lets be honest, Adobe has spent multiple billions developing Photoshop over more than 2 decades. It's going to be quite a while before FOSS software can match that kind of commercial investment and support. Until someone that wants to be a competitor to Pantone and Adobe that is developing FOSS software steps forward I personally don't think the gimp could ever catch photoshop. Photoshop has a near monopoly in commercial publishing and Pantone does have one in color. Combined that's something that's almost as difficult as the MS monopoly to crack.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 1:00 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (2 responses)

Please explain how a patent is not law?

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 21, 2010 1:30 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (1 responses)

Law means the government with it's endless ability to spend money and the police are involved. If it's a law it means violation means the guys with the badges can come put you in a cage.

Patent means civil court, the company has to prove that you violated a patent then can demand whatever royalty they want. The worst they can do is take money from you, violation will never end up with you in a cage.

If you don't understand the difference between a Law and a Civil violation you really don't understand the modern world or the US legal system.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 21, 2010 1:53 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

This is bogus on two levels: One, you are conveniently focusing on enforcement and ignoring that patents in the US are laid out by the "highest law of the land" i.e. the constitution. Clearly, that makes it law.

But secondly, your attempt to claim that civil litigation cannot land you in jail is also plain false. If you loose a civil case and do not pay the penalties (or choose to not even appear in court in the first place), you will, in your words, still have: "the government with it's endless ability to spend money and the police are involved." and "it means violation means the guys with the badges can come put you in a cage."

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 1:42 UTC (Thu) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link] (10 responses)

To be precise, CMYK and Pantone case applied for prepress work. Although Gimp does not have that support, there is an extension called separate+ that allow to convert from RGB to CMYK.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 4:20 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (9 responses)

What you really want is the ability to easily view the work in the same sort of color gamuts that your printer will end up supporting.

CYMK is 'ok', but most printers don't really do 'cymk' or at least do it in different ways. Depending on what type of process your using, the type of printer, how much money they are spending on the ink, quality of paper etc etc etc. you end up with a lot of different sorts of combinations of colors.

And you don't want to actually 'work' in CYMK. That would be extremely lossy. You just want to be able to easily to view your work as if it was printed out in the colors that your going to print it out into.

And, of course, all that would be rather meaningless without the ability to make sure that the colors your monitor is producing are pretty close to the colors that you think it should be displaying. So some sort of way to calibrate your monitor and your application is needed and then you need some way to transmit that calibration with the image your working on.

So on and so forth.

All of it is amazingly complex and very irritating to deal with.

---------------

As far as 16bit color vs 8bit RGBA the major difference is a sort of 'brittleness'.

I am thinking that it's like clay. 16bit is like soft clay were you can work it and work it and it'll stay looking smooth. 8bit is like dry clay were you can muck around with it only so much before you start to see lots of cracks and other artifacts appearing.

It just makes Gimp that much more harder to use to produce professional results.

-------------------

Of course all of this depends on Gegl for Gimp's further improvement. It's a different rendering engine to replace the rapidly obsoleting engine that gives Gimp it's current limitations.

Been in development since 2000. API stable since 2006. Introduced into Gimp's development in 2007 and has been introduced into the application and replacing a piece of Gimp at little bit at a time every since then.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 15, 2010 16:50 UTC (Fri) by eli (guest, #11265) [Link] (8 responses)

drag: You are consistently using "your" where you intend "you're". "Your" is a possessive pronoun, such as "That is your bicycle." "You're" is a contraction of "You are", such as "You're going to ride your bicycle."

This is a common error on the web, and I think it comes from "your" and "you're" sounding the same, but on a well-edited site such as LWN, such errors stand out more starkly. I hope this is helpful to you.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 15, 2010 18:28 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (7 responses)

Yes I know. But unfortunately no matter how much I attempt to keep these
errors from popping up I just lack the ability to care that much. Call it a
personal failing, if you will, but as long as it looks ok I simply am not
going to notice it; either in my own posts or anybody else's.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 16, 2010 13:59 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (6 responses)

Unfortunately other people notice. What you're saying is you care more
about your convenience than that of everyone else reading your posts.

(Personally I find things like this so intensely distracting that I just
skip your posts rather than battle through them. The often-bizarre layout
doesn't help much either.)

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 16, 2010 22:03 UTC (Sat) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (1 responses)

I tend to skip drag's posts too -- for all of the above reasons -- and also because there's something like a 40% chance that any one will be a libertarian rant.

I do *really* wish that lwn had an 'edit comment' feature though. For some reason, the preview window manages to cloak mistakes that only become glaringly visible after I submit.

40% if you are lucky

Posted Jan 17, 2010 23:38 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Plus the sheer amount of text. I positively know that drag has a lot of signal, but even so it is often lost in the noise.

nix and drag are value-add

Posted Jan 18, 2010 16:12 UTC (Mon) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] (3 responses)

Well, I for one find both your *and* drag's posts among the most interesting and informative. You both display deep technical experience plus astute and enquiring minds plus a basically decent streak. Such comments have for me become one of the value adds of lwn.

Sure, drag's posts are somewhat discursive (why is that so bad?), and his speling and apostrophe's leave something to be desired (although they have improved).

(I used to be bothered exceedingly by wrong use of "it's", but now I've trained myself not to notice it where I can't do anything about it.)

A bit of tolerance can go a long way ...

It all adds to a pleasant, collegiate, mug-of-good-ale atmosphere ...

nix and drag are value-add

Posted Jan 18, 2010 22:02 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

drag's posts are not bad at all, no. I shouldn't post with a searing
headache: it turns me into a grouch. (And when in that mood, drag's posts
are too long to read, as are all posts longer than about one line. Of
course I would never have the same failing. Oh no. Never.)

Unfortunately I have the proofreader gene, so any tiny typo stands out
like a neon sign :/

nix and drag are value-add

Posted Jan 19, 2010 4:48 UTC (Tue) by eli (guest, #11265) [Link] (1 responses)

My concern with the tolerance approach is that I have found these same errors occurring with greater frequency in my own writing. It appears that what I read affects what I write, and I read a lot of "loose" vs "lose", "it's" vs "its", "there" vs "their" vs "they're" errors on the 'net. So when I find someone contributing valuable insight marred by such errors, I try to politely and gently suggest greater care in avoiding said errors.

However, I did not intend to start a week-long digression on the topic of typos. ;)

nix and drag are value-add

Posted Jan 19, 2010 7:45 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

Never mind the typos! For a non-native English speaker, your use of "this" and "that" is intolerably inconsequent. It's torture. Why can't you say "thit" and "that" like normal people, or "this" and "thas" if you absolutely have to?!

Language is a drag. :-)

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 14:00 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Well, Digikam does support 16 bit/channel images — and it has a large set of tools for color manipulation, rotation, skewing, correction, cropping. And if you need complex selections and layers, you could try Cinepaint (if your distribution still packages it, the project seems to have died by now) or Krita, if you have a bit of patience. (We are working on Krita's performance and stability, but it'll take a bit of time before the results will be released.)

About RawTherapee: I'm trying to get it compiled, but g++ hangs on bilateral2.cc -- so I don't know yet how it stacks up against Rawstudio, Ufraw, Bibble, Lightzone, Digikam or Darkroom, which are the other 16 bit/channel capable gui raw importers on Linux.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 0:29 UTC (Thu) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link] (10 responses)

> I think if you can learn how to use the GIMP well enough then you could *realistically* use it professionally.

Well, I've been using it here and there, a little bit of this, a little bit of that -- for several years, and still can't make it feel comfortable. E.g. those small windows always try to lurk away somewhere behind all those Firefoxes and other windows -- without even being on the task bar, and each time before starting to duly minimize everything in order to find them back I feel like banging my head on the wall. It was said many times that GIMP has usability problems -- and answered that it's a matter of taste and habit, but I've got to say it just doesn't feel that way to me. I've used Photoshop much less than GIMP, but from what I've experienced it really is much more handy.

That said, GIMP does seem like the best thing available for Linux. There was also (a non-free) Pixel, but well, that's a *long* story, and everyone who knows it would understand the pun.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 4:40 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (9 responses)

Multi windowed mode with Gimp the 'small windows' should follow the main window up and down in the windows hierarchy. Either your experiences are not with recent Gimp versions or your window manager sucks and you should use a different one.

That should be the default behavior for Gimp 2.6. The 'daughter' windows are hinted as 'utility windows' to the Window manager and they should follow and bring up the other windows.

In earlier versions this was not the default, I think, but you could configure it to make all the windows behave in that manner.

With the current development version of Gimp they added a 'one window mode' so that it'll reflect the Photoshop behavior in Windows.

----------------------------------

Note that in OS X each application has it's own virtual desktop, more or less. Each has their own plane of existence and the main menu bar is always the same place no matter what your window placement is... right there at the top of the screen.

Like if your using a browser with lots of browser windows open. When you click on one of the windows it brings up _all_ the windows for that application.

So Photoshop in OS X is much more like Gimp in Linux rather then Photoshop in Windows in the way the window management works. It's just that in Linux you would have to manually separate your Windows into each virtual desktop rather then have it happen naturally; which makes it all very confusing for people not used to how the Linux desktop works. In comparison people are able to use OS X's multiple desktops without even thinking about it since they are all visible at once because they are layered on top of one another.

With composited desktops it should now be technically possible for Linux to emulate the intuitive window management that OS X uses. (Unfortunately all that people seem to want is to get OS X's dock... which is horrible beyond all words. The 'dock' is the worst feature of OS X's desktop IMO. It looks cool, but it's just kinda fails in practice)

I am hoping that in Gnome 3.x stuff they will introduce a way to automatically group application windows and such together on their own desktop. That would be a terrific feature to have. That way you could get rid of the need for 'tabs' in most applications. I like it in my browser, but hate it in my gnome-terminal.

Plus it would make tiling make much more sense, which is a great feature for some window managers, but requires a lot of manual manipulation or scripting to pull off.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 11:35 UTC (Thu) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link] (3 responses)

> Either your experiences are not with recent Gimp versions or your window manager sucks and you should use a different one.

It's KDE4. When I minimize gimp's main window, those small windows do hide, and after I un-minimize the window they do appear back. But when I merely switch to other window, and then bring GIMP back forward, those windows aren't brought back -- they are still somewhere behind the window I just was in.

I don't think a program should dictate the choice of a window manager.

> With the current development version of Gimp they added a 'one window mode' so that it'll reflect the Photoshop behavior in Windows.

I have a 2.7.2-2009090102~jj version installed, this option is not yet there. It is supposed to be a life saver, yes.

Thanks to you I did find out that it is possible to change window types for those utility windows to be 'normal windows'. Now at least I will be able to bring them back from taskbar.

> So Photoshop in OS X is much more like Gimp in Linux rather then Photoshop in Windows in the way the window management works. It's just that in Linux you would have to manually separate your Windows into each virtual desktop rather then have it happen naturally

Exactly!

> which makes it all very confusing for people not used to how the Linux desktop works.

But this conclusion is just wrong. Linux desktop works pretty much the same way Windows desktop does. Yes, there are additional features like virtual desktops, but many people, me included, find them unnecessary and complicated, and would rather prefer to have Photoshop-like single window. You've said yourself that Photoshop under OS X is like GIMP, BUT at the same time Photoshop under Windows is a single window.

I hope this will all become moot once this new 'single window' mode for GIMP is available.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 14:59 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think a program should dictate the choice of a window manager

Well you need one that works correctly. It's like using a browser with broken CSS support then complaining when somebody tells you to use firefox. It's not a big deal, but it's not really the Gimp's fault with this particular problem.

I don't know for certain, but I think the 'utility window hinting' that gimp uses is _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_UTILITY from: latest wm spec

This particular feature was in 1.1 of the specification, I think. I am not really up on the whole window manager specification thing and it's quite possible that utility window behavior is unspecified and KDE4's behavior is acceptable, but it does not sound like it. It's probable one of those WM corner cases that does not come up very often and it could be a easy fix. I'd file a bug.

I have a 2.7.2-2009090102~jj version installed, this option is not yet there. It is supposed to be a life saver, yes.

I have not tried the developer version of Gimp yet, but this guy says he is using single window mode in 2.7.1, but it's not turned on by default. Maybe it's a build option? how to install gimp with single window

He just goes through adding a PPA repo to Ubuntu to grab the development version, but he has a screenshot of where to enable the option.

Personally when I use Gimp I like to have all the dialogs open all the time and dividing things up into 2 desktops it makes it easy to go alt + arrow right and alt + arrow left to access all of them. That way I don't have to hunt through menus or whatever.

But this conclusion is just wrong. Linux desktop works pretty much the same way Windows desktop does. Yes, there are additional features like virtual desktops, but many people, me included, find them unnecessary and complicated, and would rather prefer to have Photoshop-like single window. You've said yourself that Photoshop under OS X is like GIMP, BUT at the same time Photoshop under Windows is a single window.

I've always thought of the virtual desktop thing as fundamental to how the Linux desktop operates. I use it constantly and when I go back to using windows I find the window behavior there quite painful.

Unfortunately here is no way to see all your applications at once if they are spread around, unlike OS X. This is one of the reasons I like the newer Gnome Shell (not that it's perfect... the alt-tab behavior leaves a lot to be desired, for example) since it makes it very easy to locate things.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 15:31 UTC (Thu) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link] (1 responses)

> it's not really the Gimp's fault with this particular problem.

Well, I'm sure you understand that while this is technically true, in reality it doesn't matter whose fault is that.

> I have not tried the developer version of Gimp yet, but this guy says he is using single window mode in 2.7.1, but it's not turned on by default.

Thanks. No, there wasn't such an option in mine's install, but I've just updated from that PPA to 2.7.3-something, and there's that option now indeed! So I turned it on, and I can say gimp looks MUCH better now! Utilities now occupy left and right vertical screen areas, which you can resize with splitters to give more or less space to the canvas in the middle. Also, instead of different windows for different images, there are tabs now. Overall, this looks so much better, you wouldn't believe!

However, right now this works glitchy as hell. Oh well. I'll wait for 2.8. That's all very promising. Thanks for a pointer!

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 16:01 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> in reality it doesn't matter whose fault is that.

It's just the fix is easy. Use Metacity or something that works correctly.
;)

I tested Metacity, Openbox, Compiz, and Gnome-shell (which uses Mutter) and
all those behaved how I expected it. No Gimp windows getting mixed up with
anybody else's.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 11:39 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (4 responses)

<blockquote>Multi windowed mode with Gimp the 'small windows' should follow the main window
up and down in the windows hierarchy. Either your experiences are not with recent Gimp versions
or your window manager sucks and you should use a different one. </blockquote>

God, I'm so sick of hearing this from the Gimp developers. In order to move a selection you're
supposed to alt-drag it. But alt-drag is taken by the GNOME window manager for moving windows.
Neither the GIMP nor metacity developers are willing to budge over this problem. The result is that
the GIMP is not usable in GNOME. No, I am not switching to twm just so I can edit some damn
photos!

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 14:34 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

Uh?

I can move selections just fine by clicking in the middle of it and
dragging. Maybe I am confused or they fixed this. This is on Gimp 2.6.8

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 15:17 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (1 responses)

I am referring to moving the selection and its contents together. Sorry for being unclear.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 16:21 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

That's ok.

I was still confused. I was creating a selection using the rectangular
select tool and that was creating a selection with handles that I was
dragging.

If you create a selection with the magic lasso or from a path then those
handles are not created and there is nothing to grab onto.

But ctrl-alt-drag seems to work.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 19:49 UTC (Thu) by anton.molyboha (guest, #62820) [Link]

In my version of Gnome (2.22.3) you can also change the Alt-drag combination to "Windows logo"-drag in System->Preferences->Windows . Then the Alt-drag is available for applications like GIMP.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 11:16 UTC (Thu) by trm42 (guest, #58308) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah. Maybe Photoshop and Bridge, but how about matching against Adobe's
Lightroom and Photoshop? Rawtherapee seems similar to Lightroom, but I'm
not sure, would RT's usability match LR.

I'm addicted to LR. It's simply the best the way to handle my whole raw-
(and some old jpegs) -library and still be able to develop them on.

Adobe: I'm willing to pay for LR for Linux. Wink Wink.

Gimp is technically nice program even with its old 8-bit limitation, but
it's ui is horrible, and if you're even a amateur, who has invested lots of
time to learn the photoshop -way, GIMP just feels so unintuitive and
awkward. PS happens to be de facto and its workflow is pretty streamlined.

If all the keyboard shortcuts would match 1:1 to PS, GIMP would be a lot
nicer. Don't offer me Gimpshop, it has stagnated to 2.2 series.

RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 14, 2010 14:05 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]

Digikam might be more of a competitor to LR.