Paudies Photoblog

So it looks like my great Ubuntu experiment is over. I’ve just ordered my new Canon 7D and was planning on shooting a lot of HD footage with it. Turns out no Linux program handles HD very well at all, there are ways to get it working apparently.

But it seems awful bloody difficult. It’ll be hard enough getting my head around editing video never mind having to worry about re-encoding the video and all that craic.

Sorry open source.

You have failed me.

Oh in case any one was wondering I ended up using RawTherapee for my raw editing, it’s little buggy but it mostly works very similar to the raw converter in photoshop, all sliders, which I was very happy about.

It actually gives you more options for tweaking in some areas and has a sharpening tool built into the converter.

One of the main problems with it is that when you straighten a picture the image just goes black. However the small preview image in the corner is still visible.

I might try and run it in Windows when I switch back, see if I have better luck.

Ok So I’ve Ubuntu running for nearly a week now, and I’m getting used to my new tools.

I only managed to get Picasa working this morning as there is a bug in the 2.7 version which nobody seems to be trying to fix since the 3.0 Beta version works fine apparently, so at the moment I’m letting build it’s library of shots.

I also installed digiKam and UFraw while trying to get Picasa 2.7 to work. digiKam seems to be a more advanced version of picasa, with more editing options available. Although right now I’m not too gone on the digiKam interface I’m sure I could get used to it soon. One thing I dislike is that it takes a little bit longer to get to the editing than it does with Picasa where the editing tools pop up as soon as you view the big version of the photo, but it’s only one extra click so not the end of the world. Also in digiKam you have to hit update after making any changes to a RAW file to see the how the change affected the photo, this increases editing time and is a lot more annoying than watching the changes as you play with the sliders.

UFraw works a lot more like Photoshop, you pick one photo to edit at a time and you have a lot more control. Bonus points for actually showing the changes as they occur, even if there is a slight lag. There seems to be a good amount of room to play in UFraw and it’ll probably give me all the stuff I need to edit RAW shots in a way I’m happy with. One thing that got me was the lack of a straighten tool (which was very easy to use in PS), if it is there it wasn’t completely obvious (although I didn’t look that hard). Which meant I had to open the new jpeg in digiKam to straighten, as well as resize and add the watermark. Which I used to do in picasa anyway, so not a huge problem.

Below are

1. An unedited RAW to jpeg conversion.

2. A RAW edited using digiKam.

3. A RAW edited using UFraw and then digiKam.

Thoughts, comments and ideas welcome.

Wow, this is hard.

My PC has been acting up for the past few weeks, hence the delay in posting new stuff.

So I decided to completely wipe the hard disk and install Ubuntu, for those who aren’t aware, Ubuntu is an operating system just like Windows or OSX, except better. I had a good look around before doing this to make sure that there are sufficient programs to meet my requirements.

Namely something that can handle RAW photos to the same degree as Photoshop, a decent photo management program and usable video editing program.
There seems to be plenty of options, so I went ahead with the wipe and install on Sunday.

Things are … interesting lets say. The good news is that you can get an Ubuntu version of Google’s Picasa which is the photo management software I’ve been using for a good while now, basically it lets me flick through all my photos very easily and does some fairly minor editing. However at the moment I can’t get Picasa to run. I had downloaded the latest Beta release and followed their instructions on how to install it, but it didn’t work so I’m currently trying to install the last stable release, which is proving slightly difficult.

The easy of installing it is by doing something with repositories, which I half understand. But that doesn’t seem to work for my version of Ubuntu so I’m trying to do it via the Terminal which is also proving difficult. So I’m taking a break to write this.

All I ever used Photoshop for was to develop my RAW files. This is just pushing about a few sliders relating to brightness, contrast, white balance as well as cropping and straightening. The only reason I ever opened a jpeg in Photoshop was to clone out some dust spots from a dirty sensor. So I knew I wasn’t going to be missing much by jumping ship to Ubuntu.

At the moment I’m trying to figure out how to download the UFraw program that apparently does what I need done. I’ll report back on that later.

My plan for the video editing is to use Cinelerra.

I’ll keep you updated.