[svlug] Any other photo geeks?

[Larry Colen]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 01:48:40PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
# Quoting Bill Ward (bill at wards.net):
# 
# > I have root on a hosted box, but I don't want to run up our bandwidth
# > cost by hosting images there.  I like letting Flickr eat that cost
# > while making my high-res pictures available.
# 
# This would be a good point if you had serious traffic.  I host quite a
# few high-res photos on home aDSL, and it's not a problem.  If any of
# those _did_ start becoming a bandwidth problem, I'd move them to, e.g., 
# a Linode virthost (but not Flickr, et al.).

You must have much better bandwidth than I do. 

# Anyhow, IMVAO, people who are serious about open source _use_ it to the
# extent practical.  Picasa isn't.  Flickr isn't.

I like to use the best tool for the job. More often than not, that
tool is open source, and it is often the fact that it is open source
that makes it the best tool for the job. 

To tie this back in to the original point of the thread.

What tools do you people use for your photographic workflow?

My preference is to keep with lossless formats until the final
compresion into jpeg. I'm not yet doing that.

I shoot in raw format (pentax .pef).
I use ufraw-batch, playing with the switches
--wb=auto --wb=camera and --exposure=auto 
to get a jpeg that I like.

I use gthumb to rotate, crop and sort the pictures. I may also use it
to adjust the exposure, contrast, saturation a little bit.

I use kflickr to post them to my flickr account.

I also have a simple script to normalize the sizes and make a brute
simple thumbnail page for pictures I host on my home system.

There is a dcraw plugin for gimp, but gimp is only 8 bit, so even
keeping things in a nominally lossless format, I lose 4 bits of
resolution just bringing them into gimp.

I've heard good things about rawtherapee, but haven't yet tried it.

I'd like a tool that worked well with my raw files, so that I can look
at them, and delete all the bad and blurry raw images when I'm sorting
things out. Unfortunately, I haven't found a good organizer tool that
works well with the pentax raw files.

If I modify a file, I would also like to easily store the modified
file without modifying or overwriting the original.

-- 
         "I just can't fathom how far light would travel in 6nSec"
Larry Colen             lrc at red4est.com            http://www.red4est.com/lrc