RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

Posted Jan 13, 2010 23:29 UTC (Wed) by Los__D (guest, #15263)
In reply to: RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor by DDevine
Parent article: RawTherapee: the newest open source raw photo editor

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".

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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.