Digital Photography with Linux: Reference Guide

Digital Photography with Linux: Application Guide

Here's a list of recommended applications for photographers using Linux.
Rather than being extensive, the list focuses on applications best fitted for the job.

I tried to cover all area of interest.
Feel free to complete the list and share your tips. Thanks!


Photo Managers

- digiKam

digiKam is an advanced digital photo management application with extensive editing options. It offers image enhancement tools such red-eye removal, color management, image filters, special effects and batch processing. DigiKam supports 16 bit/channel images.

Website: http://www.digikam.org​/
Screenshots: http://www.digikam.org​/drupal/node/323
Documentation: http://www.digikam.org​/drupal/docs
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- Shotwell

Shotwell lets you import photos from disk or camera, organize and view them in various ways, and export them to share with others. Editing is non-destructive. You can rotate, crop, reduce red-eye, and adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, and temperature of each photo.

Website: http://www.yorba.org/s​hotwell/
Screenshots: http://www.yorba.org/s​hotwell/
Documentation: http://trac.yorba.org/​wiki/UsingShotwell0.7
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- gThumb

gThumb is an image viewer and browser. You can organize and view images as catalogs, or as a slideshow, bookmark folders and catalogs, and add comments to images. gThumbs includes basic image editing.

Website: http://gthumb.sourcefo​rge.net/
Screenshots: http://gthumb.sourcefo​rge.net/screenshots.ht​ml
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- Rapid Photo Downloader

Import your images efficiently and reliably with Rapid Photo Downloader. This application generates meaningful, user configurable file and folder names. It can also download images from multiple devices simultaneously and perform backups automatically as photos are being imported.

Website: http://damonlynch.net/​rapid/index.html
Screenshots: http://damonlynch.net/​rapid/features.html
Licence: open source

Tethered Shooting (remote capture via PC)

- Entangle

Entangle allows to trigger the shutter of your camera from the computer, features live preview of scene before shooting and control of all camera settings from computer. It is fully colour managed, auto-detecting system monitor profile and applying the neccessary transforms when displaying images.

Website: http://entangle-photo.org/
Screenshots: http://entangle-photo.org/screenshots/
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- digiKam

digiKam offers remote capture via its "Import" facility ("Import", then "Cameras", select your camera model (auto-detected), then click the "Capture" button).

Website: http://www.digikam.org​/
Screenshots: http://www.digikam.org​/drupal/node/323
Documentation: http://www.digikam.org​/drupal/docs
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- Darktable

Darktable proposes tethered shooting since v0.6. (Open the "device" tab (top left), under your camera name, click the "tether shoot" button. Then open the camera settings" tab (top right) and click on the "capute image(s)" button).

Website: http://darktable.sourc​eforge.net/
Documentation: http://darktable.sourc​eforge.net/documentati​on.shtml
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- gPhoto2

Command line interface only. Visit site for details.

Website: http://www.gphoto.org/​doc/remote/

Simple Photo Viewers

- Geeqie

Geeqie is a lightweight image viewer. It supports EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata browsing and editing, as well as, fast preview for raw image formats. Geeqie comes with tools for image comparison, sorting and managing photo collection.

Website: http://geeqie.sourcefo​rge.net/
Screenshots: http://sourceforge.net …c/geeqie/wiki/s​creenshots
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- Eye of Gnome

The Eye of GNOME (eog) image viewer is the official image viewer for the GNOME Desktop environment. With it, you can view single image files, as well as large image collections.

Website: http://www.gnome.org/p​rojects/eog/
Screenshots: http://www.gnome.org/p​rojects/eog/screenshot​s.html
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- Gwenview

Gwenview is a fast and easy to use image viewer for KDE, featuring folder tree window, thumbnail view and basic lossless manipulations.

Website: http://gwenview.source​forge.net/
Screenshots: http://gwenview.source​forge.net/screenshots/
Licence: open source
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel
Note: default image viewer for the KDE desktop

Raw Viewers/Converters

- Darktable

Darktable is a photography workflow application: a virtual lighttable and darkroom. It enables you to develop raw images and enhance them. All editing is fully non-destructive.

Website: http://darktable.sourc​eforge.net/
Documentation: http://darktable.sourc​eforge.net/documentati​on.shtml
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- UFRaw

UFRaw is a utility to read and manipulate raw images from digital cameras. It can be used on its own or as a Gimp plug-in.

Website: http://ufraw.sourcefor​ge.net/
Documentation: http://ufraw.sourcefor​ge.net/Guide.html
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- Rawstudio

Rawstudio is a program to read and manipulate RAW images from most digital cameras. It will convert your RAW files into JPEG, PNG or TIF images which you can then print or send to friends and clients.

Website: http://www.rawstudio.o​rg/
Screenshots: http://www.rawstudio.o​rg/screenshots.php
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- RawTherapee

Raw Therapee is a RAW converter and digital photo processing software. It offers ICC color management, thumbnails browsing and numerous post processing in 16 bit / channel mode.

Website: http://www.rawtherapee​.com/
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source (since version 3)

- Corel AfterShot Pro

AfterShot Pro is a fast, flexible photo workflow solution that combines robust photo management, advanced non-destructive adjustments and complete RAW processing.

Website: http://www.corel.com …index.jsp?pid=p​rod4670071
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: closed source, $100

Image Manipulation & Photo Retouching

- GIMP

GIMP is a popular free software for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer or an image format converter.

Website: http://www.gimp.org/
Screenshots: http://www.gimp.org/sc​reenshots/
Documentation: http://docs.gimp.org/
Tutorials: http://www.gimp.org/tu​torials/ http://www.gimp-tutorials.com/
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- Krita

Krita is a painting and image editing application for KDE. It contains both ease-of-use and fun features like guided painting and high-end features like support for 16 bit images, CMYK, L*a*b and even OpenEXR HDR images.

Website: http://www.krita.org/
Screenshots: http://krita.org/scree​nshots
Documentation: http://userbase.kde.or​g/Krita
Supported color depth: up to 32 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- Cinepaint

CinePaint is a deep paint image retouching tool that supports higher color fidelity than ordinary painting tools. CinePaint is used to retouch feature films and in pro photography. CinePaint opens high fidelity image file formats such as DPX, 16-bit TIFF, and OpenEXR, and conventional formats like JPEG and PNG.

Website: http://www.cinepaint.o​rg/
Screenshots: http://www.cinepaint.o​rg/pix/index.html
Documentation: http://www.cinepaint.o​rg/docs/index.html
Supported color depth: up to 32 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- digiKam

digiKam does not limit itself to photo & album management; it also provides extensive photo manipulation options (color management, exposure, levels, lens distortion correction, noise reduction, etc.). A true one-stop software solution for your photography needs.

Website: http://www.digikam.org​/
Screenshots: http://www.digikam.org​/drupal/node/323
Documentation: http://www.digikam.org​/drupal/docs
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- Fotoxx

Fotoxx is a small application to edit or enhance image files from digital cameras. It includes the usual tools for color and contrast enhancement, red-eye removal, sharpen, etc. plus HDR and panorama image compositing. Unlike similar applications, Fotoxx focuses on ease of use through a restricted set of options.

Website: http://www.kornelix.co​m/fotoxx.html
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- Tintii

Tintii is a small application that does only one thing, but does it well: it takes full colour photos and processes them into black and white with some select regions highlighted in colour. The technique is known as colour popping or selective colouring - tintii makes it easy.

Website: http://www.indii.org/s​oftware/tintii
Licence: open source

HDR

- Luminance HDR

Luminance HDR is an open source graphical user interface application that aims to provide a workflow for HDR imaging.

Website: http://qtpfsgui.source​forge.net/
Screenshots: http://qtpfsgui.source​forge.net/?page_id=35
Documentation: http://qtpfsgui.wiki.s​ourceforge.net/
Supported color depth: up to 32 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- Exposure Blending (standalone or as plug-in for digiKam)

Exposure Blending fuses bracketed images with different exposure to make pseudo HDR images. It can also be used to merge focus bracketed stack to get a single image with increased depth of field.

Website: http://kipi-plugins.org
Licence: open source

- Exposure Blend (plug-in for Gimp)

exposure-blend is a GIMP plug-in for contrast blending 3 bracketed images.

Website: http://turtle.as.arizo​na.edu/jdsmith/exposur​e_blend.php
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel (GIMP dependent)
Licence: open source

Panorama Stitching

- Hugin

Hugin is panoramic imaging toolchain based on Panorama Tools. With it you can assemble a mosaic of photographs into a complete immersive panorama, stitch any series of overlapping pictures and more.

Website: http://hugin.sourcefor​ge.net/
Screenshots: http://hugin.sourcefor​ge.net/screenshots/
Documentation: http://hugin.sourcefor​ge.net/tutorials/index​.shtml
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- Pandora (plug-in for Gimp)

Pandora is a GIMP script which helps in stitching together multiple images to make a panorama.

Website: http://shallowsky.com/​software/pandora/
Supported color depth: up to 8 bit/channel (GIMP dependent)
Licence: open source

Batch Processing

- Phatch

Phatch is an easy-to-use Photo Batch Processor and Exif Renamer with a nice graphical user interface. It can batch resize, rotate, apply shadows, perspective, rounded corners, ... and do much more actions in minutes.

Website: http://photobatch.stan​i.be/
Screenshots: http://photobatch.wiki​dot.com/interface
Documentation: http://photobatch.wiki​dot.com/tutorials
Supported color depth: up to 32 bit/channel
Licence: open source

- ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a software suite to create, edit and compose bitmap images. Use it to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.

Website: http://www.imagemagick​.org/
Documentation: http://www.imagemagick​.org/Usage/
Supported color depth: up to 32 bit/channel ?
Licence: open source

- digiKam and GIMP also provide extensive batch process capabilities.


Color Management Profiler

- dispcalGUI

dispcalGUI is a GUI frontend for the Argyll CMS, which helps to calibrate and profile your display using a measurement device.

Website: http://hoech.net/dispc​alGUI/
Licence: open source

- Argyll CMS

Argyll is an open source, ICC compatible color management system. It supports accurate ICC profile creation for scanners, CMYK printers, film recorders and calibration and profiling of displays.

Website: http://www.argyllcms.c​om/
Licence: open source

- GAMMApage

GAMMApage is a small gamma-adjusting utility for your monitor. Able to adjust gamma on the fly and save settings to be used at each login (on a per-user basis. GAMMApage will only write to the user's home directory.)

Website: http://www.pcbypaul.co​m/software/GAMMApage.s​html
Licence: open source

Backup Tools

- Déjà Dup

Déjà Dup is a simple backup tool. It hides the complexity of backing up the Right Way (encrypted, off-site, and regular). It supports local, remote, or cloud backup locations (e.g. Amazon S3), compresses and encrypts your data, provides incremental backups and schedule options.

Website: https://launchpad.net/​deja-dup
Screenshots: http://live.gnome.org/​DejaDup/Screenshots
Licence: open source

File Recovery

- PhotoRec

PhotoRec is a data recovery software tool designed to recover lost files (including JPEG & CR2) from digital camera memory, hard disks and CD-ROMs. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.

Website: http://www.cgsecurity.​org/wiki/PhotoRec
Licence: open source

Print

- PhotoPrint

PhotoPrint is a utility designed to assist in the process of printing digital photographs. It allows you to print photographs 1-up, 2-up, 4-up or with any user-selectable number of rows and columns, create posters, split over several pages. PhotoPrint sends 16-bit data to the printer, to avoid "contouring" problems in smooth gradients.

Website: http://blackfiveimagin​g.co.uk …02Software%2F01​PhotoPrint
Supported color depth: up to 16 bit/channel
Licence: open source

Using Windows-compatible applications on Linux

It is possible to run some applications written for Windows on Linux through Wine*.

The following softwares have been reported to work well:

- Adobe Photoshop version 7 to CS2
- Noise Ninja Standalone version 2.1
- Adobe DNG Converter
- Google Picasa

While Wine gets frequent updates and the number of supported applications grows with each release, most softwares written for Windows are still unusable on Linux.

(*) Wine is an emulation software that provide a compatibility layer to run Windows applications on a Linux system. The Windows operating system itself is therefore not needed.

Get the softwares / installation

Most of these applications are available from your distribution software channel and requires no manual installation. Select the applications you want from your package manager and click the install button. You may have to enable extra repositories to access them all. Please refer to your distribution manual for more details.

For softwares not available through your distribution software channel, refer to the application's website and follow their instructions.

Further Reading

- Linux Photography (blog)

Linux Photography is a blog dedicated to digital photography on Linux. Its author, Joel Cornuz, discusses color management, workflow, photography techniques, printing and much more. Think of it as a giant tutorial.

Website: http://jcornuz.wordpre​ss.com/

- Gimp 2 For Photographers (book)

GIMP 2 for Photographers" has evolved from the classroom materials which the author developed and taught in courses and workshops on image editing with the GIMP. It covers the basics of image editing and guides the reader through the functions and tools of the GIMP from simple adjustments to more advanced techniques of working with layers and masks

Website: http://oreilly.com/cat​alog/9781933952031/

Good idea - you missed gimpshop though under image manipulation etc. I'd also recommend xnview and irfanview for inclusion in the photo manager section. Might not be bad to mention dcraw in the RAW section, since it's the daddy of them all

Dave

dpastern wrote in post #5795005
Good idea - you missed gimpshop though under image manipulation etc. I'd also recommend xnview and irfanview for inclusion in the photo manager section. Might not be bad to mention dcraw in the RAW section, since it's the daddy of them all
Dave

IrfanView.. well, it's a Windows application, so it doesn't really belong here, and I'm not fond of adding all "wine-compatible" apps here either.

Gimpshop? I'm only worried that is not actively developed anymore. It's still using Gimp's old code base and I saw no mention that they would re-sync it with the current Gimp tree. Do you have any news?

I added xnview.

dcraw... yes... but it it's mostly used as a library which other applications depend on. I prefer to opt it out to keep the list readable (not going to list imageMagick either for the same reason, we would end up with a 3 pages list if we go this path).

Fair enough. I was unaware that gimpshop was no longer being actively developed, that's a bit sad. That said, I think Krita is only going to keep continuing to eat into the GIMP users portion. I was sure that Irfanview offered a Linux version, but it seems not. xnview it is then.

Dave

Thanks... This is a useful thread for me. I guess not too many other people are interested, but at least you'll get a free bump.

bomberman wrote in post #5807511
Thanks... This is a useful thread for me. I guess not too many other people are interested, but at least you'll get a free bump.

Thanks bomberman.

I just added Fotoxx and PhotoPrint to the list, as well as a quick description for each softwares. Enjoy!

both GNOME and KDE programs will also work with either desktop as long as their supporting libraries are installed. more choices.

digiKam has batch RAW conversion

Based on the link I would not call Fotoxx an image editor on par with gimp or krita. An Image editor should have brushes or pens or something similar. with the exception of HDR and panorama stitching digiKam can do everything shown in that Fotoxx link and more.

Never used Fotoxx... is the HDR processing any good? Comparable at all to Photomatix?

V. useful thread - thanks a lot

javaprog wrote in post #5826846
digiKam has batch RAW conversion

Based on the link I would not call Fotoxx an image editor on par with gimp or krita. An Image editor should have brushes or pens or something similar. with the exception of HDR and panorama stitching digiKam can do everything shown in that Fotoxx link and more.

I wasn't quite sure how to categorize Fotoxx, it doesn't fit well in any of these categories, yet it's not specific enough to have a category of its own. "Image Manipulation" is probably the "less worse" match.

digiKam can indeed do a lot of things and a better description of it would make it better justice for sure. I may also add it to the "Image Manipulation" category, or just review the categorization altogether. I put this list up pretty quickly and tried to keep it brief. Feel free to provide some copy

TTGator wrote in post #5827217
Never used Fotoxx... is the HDR processing any good? Comparable at all to Photomatix?

I've never used Photomatix, so I can't tell.

As for Fotoxx, I added it to the list mostly because of its originality. The user interface is weird and doesn't match the rest of the desktop, but it's a no brainer to use: all tools are a click away. Very different from the traditional image manipulation softwares (Photoshop, Krita, Gimp...).

I haven't tested Fotoxx enough to tell about the output quality. Try and let me know, ok

Alright, quite a few more updates...

- removed XnView from the "Photo Viewers" list (development stalled 3 years ago).
- added Cinepaint under the "Image Manipulation" list.
- added digiKam under both "Photo Management" & "Image Manipulation" list
- improved description for some of the applications
- added new category "Further Reading"
- added supported color depth information to all application (please help me correct any error).

and a few more goodies will come later...

Just because something isn't actively developed doesn't mean that it's not usable.

Dave

dpastern wrote in post #5883357
Just because something isn't actively developed doesn't mean that it's not usable.
Dave

I've never said so. I'm compiling a limited list of applications best fitted for the job, not an extensive one. I see no point listing all possibilities for the sake of it.

In this context, I prefer to promote up-to-date applications over oldies any day. Especially when these recent applications do everything the old ones did and in a more pleasant way. Xnview's main interest is its large support for eclectic formats, but in a photography-related environment it's close to useless. Not to mention the lack of updates poses security concerns.