What software do you use?

I want to learn and play with more photography software that will run natively on my Linux system. Let me know what software is in your workflow and what you are using it for.

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I know darktable is really popular.

Personally I use Krita to slightly adjust my photos, but I wouldn’t even call it “photography”, just taking photos for practical use, like showing something to friends. So my needs are minimal.

I know of Krita but hadn’t heard of someone using it to edit photos. I will defiantly check it out!

My present recurring projects involving photos require only some basic editing steps of cropping and resizing (basically making album covers for podcasts). I just run these though gimp as it’s easily capable and the interface is sufficiently familiar that I can do this without much thought.

Which brings to mind the question of why are mp3 album covers still looking for square (“X by X” e.g. 1000 x 1000) graphics when every camera I’ve had my hands on in the last 20 years produces 4x3 or 16x9 image?

Krita wasn’t really created with photo edition in mind. It’s possible, because application is really well developed and versatile. On some aspects of image manipulations is even doing better than gimp.

However its main focus is still digital art and drawing.

I am not a photo editing expert, but when I need fast photo edit, GIMP always does the job for me.

Regards, Alex

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GIMP is a great program.

I’m not sure why they want a 1:1 ratio. Must be a relic of record/cd album art.

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What things do you feel it does better than GIMP?

That makes sense to me, since CD and Vinyl album covers are square, so there’s several decades worth of artwork that has a 1:1 aspect ratio… so I guess it’s a standard because it’s been used for so long.

That said, even though most players will crop the image, I’ve never actually come across a piece of software that hard-limits the aspect ratio of images embedded in mp3 files.

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Sometimes I use ImageMagick for little edits.

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I like overall looks and workflow better.

When editing color balance, levels and such, Krita allows to keep those changes as a filter mask, so it doesn’t permanently affects the layer, can be copied, applied to different layer, edited, disabled…

On each layer, you can edit “Layer style”, where you can edit properties such as shadow, stroke, overlay as editable, non destructive properties of the layer.

It has much better support for vector graphics. Although still far behind applications focused on vector it is good enough to add some vector elements to otherwise raster work.

2 patching tools. One working just like the one in gimp (available as a brush), and “smart patch tool”. Speaking of brushes – it’s not even a contest. And the brush editor is really advanced too. Might even be little too advanced.

More blending modes (although, they might be more difficult to navigate because of that).

Little more special layer (clone layer changing together with parent and fill layers).

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I definitely have to play with it!

You’re right, I too think the standard goes back to square slip covers for round media. I was thinking that at one time there was a directive in their standards that called for 1000x1000 but then again that could be a limitation of Winamp from back in the '00s. It’s just habit on my part, I guess. Years and years ago if you loaded too large of a jpeg or too many jpegs into the mp3 file and played it on winamp, it would cause the cpu to crawl. I should probably try to keep up :wink:

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I actually have Winamp on my Windows machine. I just tried playing media with a 2560x1440 embedded JPEG and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. I guess it’s been updated to handle those too, or computers have gotten so powerful it doesn’t matter anymore.

I used windows until 2007 last version was XP, WinAMP was music player not photo editor as far as I remember, but on windosw 10 or 11 what ever is the latest winamp could be different app.

regards, Alex

It’s still the same music player. This thread got derailed a bit by a conversation about album artwork embedded in mp3 files… :upside_down_face:

you do that manually? last time in 2019 I updated my music library, you use lollypop it auto updates the album covers it supports a lot of source. I use bash script and EASYTAG to set the music files names correctly and thel lollypop auto fines the album and artist cover photos. I personally use AAC/m4a audio format over mp3, I believe the quality is little bit better then on mp3 at least for unplugged music songs.

Regards, Alex

RPD for importing direct from camera.
Darktable for raw processing.
Gimp for post processing (on occasion I do revert back to Photoshop with wine ).
gThumb for viewing and managing library.

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Just signed up after listening to the podcasts for a while, and was glad to see a photography section.
I’ll add my 2c here I guess:

Rapid Photo Downloader for getting stuff off sd cards and putting in folders where I want at download time.
Geeqie for culling the sometimes 5000 images from an event down to a manageable number.
Darktable for editing raws, or jpegs if you want.

Very rarely, Glimpse if I need more than darktable can do. Because GIMP is an idiotic name.

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I’ve not seen Geeqie before. What about that program do you like for culling?