LWN: Comments on "Luminance HDR 2.0.1, an improved, but still trying, photography tool"

Digikam can of course develop RAW!

thinkfat — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 08:50:21 +0000

Digikam has everything built in to develop raw files. You just open the file in the editor and all image operations can be performed. Color management, 16 bit images, linear development, all possible without using any external tool.

Exposure blending tool in digikam

buchanmilne — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 14:31:19 +0000

Digikam now (since kipi 1.1.0) has an exposure blending plugin, which uses enfuse from enblend. Select the images in Digikam, use Tools->Blend bracketed images, it offers to add or remove images (but, if you selected the images you want from a Digikam album or search result, you can probably click Next), it will offer to align the images with align_image_stack, then gives you a window with a preview on the left, some sliders to adjust on the right, and preview and save buttons.

While you may be able to twiddle more knobs with qtpfsgui, Digikam's plugin is easier to use, just works with no fuss, and I can get the same results in 5 minutes or less as takes about 15 with qtpfsgui. Maybe it is possible to get better results with qtpfsgui ... but I haven't figured out how (maybe I need to read the papers).

Since Digikam 1.4.0 has good lens auto-correction (using lensfun) - with improved lens detection for some camera models in 1.5.0 with lensfun 0.2.5 - for both distortion and chromatic aberration, there is very little that you need to do outside Digikam (at least for me, someone just taking home photos with an entry-level DSLR).

I guess the biggest missing piece at present is "developing" RAW images, I guess ufraw is probably the best option for that at present. I would also like some multi-user and/or multi-machine features, but maybe those will come after non-destructive editing. For panoramas, nothing beats hugin at present ...

Luminance HDR 2.0.1, an improved, but still trying, photography tool

n8willis — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:58:03 +0000

In those shots, the sliders still expose controls with little direct explanation of what the parameters do (though I'd also argue that that's true of unsharp masks and several other tools; the point is that photographers have the left-brained-chops to handle things like this, despite being "creative types"). I also think not every proprietary app is quite as refined on the simple-usability-front; consider: http://bibblelabs.com/products/bibble5/features/tools.htm...

But it's definitely true that automatically picking sensible defaults is what these apps ought to be doing. Hugin's making progress in this area, although the app as a whole still requires too much jumping-back-and-forth between the tabs.

Nate

Luminance HDR 2.0.1, an improved, but still trying, photography tool

rossburton — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 09:35:45 +0000

"Most have gotten used to the arcane demosaicing and noise-removal algorithms found in raw image editors, after all."

In bad RAW editors used by geeks, sure.

In something designed for real use such as Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture, demosiacing is automatically picked depending on the camera type and noise removal algorithms are reduced down to three sliders.

http://modifiedphoto.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/lr2-lr3c... is screenshot showing LR2 and LR3's detail panes.

(chromatic aberration moved in LR3 from Detail to Lens Correction, where if LR has a profile for the lens you used it's automatically set to the right values you for)