where there’s smoke there’s forum fire
I am a long time Linux user, and I have seen posts that some others are too. I thought it might be nice to collect a list of names, and maybe share some ideas. For example, I don't see how to set the sharpening when importing an NEF file into Gimp. In my Kubuntu 9.10 system, I think that should happen in UFRaw, before it is handed off to Gimp.
Or will Capture NX run in Wine? I have not tried it. Maybe we can share some useful tips and knowledge.
Hi ,, I use Ubuntu 9.10. Looking forward to 10.4 at the end of this month. I shoot with Fuji S5pro but I hardley use UFRaw so I cant help you there. I open up RAW files only if I need to recover some highlight details or some specific reasons like creating single capture HDR. Look into Bibble Pro 5 that was just released. Looks really nice and has good Raw support for NEF [ Not RAF though :-( ]
Try Virtual Box and install Windows and captureNX in that? Wine does not work with CaptureNX. Maybe soon. They have almost fully ported the .net framework to wine.
I play around with linux, but I don't use it for image editing (sorry!). I prefer K to gnome. I used to dual boot because GNU Octave with gnuplot was better than in windows, but the recent windows ports have been pretty good, so I haven't had linux installed for a year or so.
Newer used Linux, So far Win 7 have been flawless
Pete
I use linux for work and love it. We use Centos just for the major 3d and video support in it. I really enjoy using linux but trying to get good quicktime support and adobe apps or a decent editing software thats under 50K is the major turn off for me. Seeing what studios have to build to integrate it in the pipelines makes me not really use it much at home, Ive never really liked Gimp either. If there are great raw editors and a good photo suite available it may change my mind though. Anything is better then windows, Im either switching to Mac or linux when my machine dies.
aesnakes said:
I use linux for work and love it. We use Centos just for the major 3d and video support in it. I really enjoy using linux but trying to get good quicktime support and adobe apps or a decent editing software thats under 50K is the major turn off for me. Seeing what studios have to build to integrate it in the pipelines makes me not really use it much at home, Ive never really liked Gimp either. If there are great raw editors and a good photo suite available it may change my mind though. Anything is better then windows, Im either switching to Mac or linux when my machine dies.
Gimp does take some getting used to. However there is going to be a big UI overhaul in Gimp 2.8 which is due at the end of the year. They will also have the new Graphic library fully integrated which will improve speed, provide lots of new UI features as well like dynamic resizing of everything, including fully utilising the multi core CPUs. Its just going to be a major update! very excited about it!.
One of the nice things about Linux is the underlying "unix" mentality where every tool is made for specific functions but also can be linked with other tools that you can combine together to make a system that does what YOU want. and when you have figured out how to do it you can automate the whole thing to do it thousands of times without manual intervention.
I must say that Windows 7 is finally understanding that user need to automate stuff. Their new PowerShell looks great. Finally something that can rival the dozens of shells on linux :-) however the mentality of windows developers still limit the things you can do with it. as the applications are not made to be automated.
I used to be a full time Ubuntu user(gnome). But i needed to switch between Vista and ubuntu 5-10 times a day. Mainly for my MP3 player, but also for lightroom/photoshop as well as games.
last year while installing win 7 i decided to go 7 only for a bit. And since then i have only dabbled when the new Ubuntu release comes out(10.04 looks pretty sweet).
If i used more than 1 PC all the secondary ones would by 10.04 or UNR(very Ipad-esque!!).
but i have need of too many specific apps to use it full time.
I remeber the days when i used to go to winehq.org daily to check up on updated to LR and photoshop compatibility, but it was never good enough. and virtual box has too much overhead for my computer.
I always keep an eye out though
@gelu88 : I was the same as you for many years. I have finally been able to break free from windows last year. I still use wine and dual boot for a game once in a while but I am in Linux 99 % of the time now. (I am much less interested in gaming these days) and I am planning to get a new PC soon with enough grunt to run some of my windows specific applications in VirtualBox.
I used to run linux in a VM in windows. Works better than running windows in linux. as linux has a much smaller footprint and memory requirements.
I just discovered the Hugin panorama creator. I was able to just download it using Synaptic, and it installed and ran fine on my Kubuntu 9.10 system. I used it to combine two photos and it seemed to do quite well. I have not used any other panorama software, so have no means of comparison. I was surprised at the number of different output shapes available, and don't understand the theory behind them.
I read the comment about the upcoming Gimp update. I hope the user interface is not changed too drastically, as I am quite used to it as is.
I am using DigiKam mostly now as my view/manager. I used gthumb before, and still use it some. I have found that I can add geolocation data to my photographs using digiKam, and it is quite easy.
I love Hugin, Sandpiper. There's a windows binary compiled, though, and I use it instead of CS4 for pano stitching because I think it does a better job. It's the 'do one thing and do it well' mentality, and I think in this case it does that one thing very well. I'll have to try out that new version of the GIMP when it comes out.
edit: here are a few panoramas I've stitched with hugin. (Sorry to the regulars. I know I've posted these before)
Pittsburgh, PA handheld 50mm, 7-shot stitch
Salt Lake City, UT 50mm, 13-shot stitch
near Zion NP, UT 170mm, ~27-shot stitch
Thanks jonnyapple! Those are some very nice panoramas. I am going to have to give this a try. I see you used a lot of shots for the stitches. I may have to read the instructions for this one in order to do it right.
Thanks, sandpiper. Actually, I've never read the instructions for it. It is really as easy as selecting all of the photos to be included in the panorama and then, after it automatically aligns them, cropping it where you want it. I guess that's assuming you've done a good job of taking the pano in the first place: enough overlap between frames, all settings including focus and exposure held constant, and avoiding parallax as much as possible.
One more panorama:
My wife running on the bluffs above St. George, UT—this is 4 or 5 shots + 1 where I was panning following her. I did the 4 shot stitch in hugin and then added her from the 5th one in photoshop.
I have been using Linux (Slackware most of the time) from the times when the only installation option was a floppy, and you usually had to compile kernel yourself to make it work.
But I use it extensively only for network server applications and not for graphics.
For personal and most of professional use Windows and Macs are much more logical choice.
PS, Capture NX and most other apps people are used to and love does not run natively on Linux, and I don't like Gimp to much (native Windows version exists though).
I have tried Gimp on windows and on Linux on the same machine and gimp on window is at least twice as slow...
@mb ; Lol I too was using floppies for linux.. how long ago was that! I kind of gave up after it needed over 30 floppies! I too started with slack but i have tried mandrake, mandriva, debian, suse, redhat, fedora, centos, puppy, PClinux, Gentoo and Knopix and a few others i cant remember.. :-) I can hardly believe i have tried so many, geewizz !
I think I have been running Linux since Red Hat 6.2, maybe 6.1. Used that for a while, then Mandrake, then Suse, and now Mint (Ubuntu). There is no going back to Windows for me. The last version I seriously used was 98, and now I get rather panicked when someone asks me to do something on a Windows computer. I just don't remember the workings anymore.
Anyway, I went 'birding' this morning and ran another few hundred shutters click off the camera. In part, I did a handheld series of shots thinking I could try and make a panorama. When I got back home, and started looking at really doing the panorama, I found it was 41 shots. I doubted my computer had enough power to do that, but decided to try the whole thing and see what happened.
Loaded them all into Hugin, and after a bit of manual tweaking between two frames, it was able to crank out a nice panorama! It is about 35,000 pixels wide and 800 high, representing an arc of maybe 150 degrees, shot with a 300mm lens on the D300. It is a shot of about 600 Sandhill Cranes feeding in a corn stubble field. Somehow it seems Hugin "took care of it" when the cranes moved between exposures. It is not great photographically, I should have used a tripod, and the depth of field is inadequate for the subject. But I am still amazed at the resulting panoroma (warning, 6 MB file).
I am writing this from Ubuntu 10.4 beta2 ! ..Just booted it up :-) but the darn live CD does not have gimp like in previous versions. oh well I guess I will have to do a proper install tomorrow...
2 second review ? it feels slicker...
I just put together a basic quad core machine and booted up the new OS, I don't have a hard-disk installed yet!! :-) Coming tomorrow :-) Really amazing what you can do without a hard disk these days! 8-)
PS @ sandpiper : Really cool pano! I must try this software soon. I have some shots I took some time ago that was aimed at creating a pano but never got around to finding the software to do it.
Very nice, Sandpiper! So, are those emus? [edit: Now I see you said they were cranes. Silly me.]
I'm glad I wasn't just making up what I was saying about hugin. ;-) I once did a full 360-degree pano at a funeral in a cemetery where people were moving between frames and hugin chopped some of them in half (but, to be fair, it was version 0.7.something). It ended up a lot more disturbing than I had intended, but at least I got a good laugh. Another tip (which you may have done anyway) is that you can get a taller pano if you shoot in portrait orientation instead of landscape. It would have also made this one 60 shots wide, though. ;-)
heartyfisher, one of the decisions on 10.4 was to remove Gimp, I think it allows space on the live CD for other more mainstream apps. Once you are booted with the live CD, you should still be able to add Gimp with the package manager. But that is sort of wasted effort. I am not sure how far you can push things with no swap partition. You probably have enough memory in the new machine that you don't need it. When you get the system running, add hugin, it works amazingly well, IMHO.
jonnyapple, thanks for encouraging me to give it a go with hugin on a real pano. I know I could have used portrait, but it would not have added much, as the depth of field is just too shallow for foreground and background to matter much. Plus I don't think I could have handheld it in portrait mode and got the overlap accurate enough. It is hard to keep track of just where you are doing it handheld! I'm not a pro, just an old guy with new toys.
Still trying to learn to operate the D300s and 80-300 kit zoom with these birds.
@Sandpiper
I'm still rocking my Fedora install. (:
Ok my Ubuntu 10.4 beta2 is up and running !! Yay! Its almost twice as fast as my old machine but it can at least do 2 of the same thing at twice the speed!! having quad cores is fun! I think I am set for the next 3 years :-) Might upgrade to the new 6 core CPUs later this year :-)
Installing hugin as I type :-) should be fun...
I've been on Linux since Redhat 5.1 myself. I barely used Windows 2000 after it came out, and switched to using Linux full-time once USB support came into Linux with the 2.4 kernel.
I can't believe no one has mentioned Raw Therapee yet. I think Raw Therapee is by far the best raw image processing software on Linux (although Bibble is nice too). Raw Therapee was just open sourced, though the 3.0 release will be the first official opensource release. It runs on Linux and Windows, and actually does a better job with raw decoding than Photoshop. If you haven't used it yet, give it a try. 2.4.something is the latest stable release, and there's an alpha release for 3.0 that shows a little bit of the updates to the user interface, though the algorithmic updates aren't in there at all yet.
The only issue I have with Linux for photo editing is that the monitor calibration support could be better, though it is improving (slowly). I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 daily right now on my core i5 laptop because it's the only version that supports the GPU built into this new CPU. Otherwise, I've been using 8.04 LTS on my desktop since it came out, and 6.06 LTS before that. Ubuntu works great, and is nice and stable. I used to use Redhat, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, SUSE and Debian. I still use Debian for my servers, but Ubuntu is the best for the desktop. It's much better than its derivatives like Mint, too. You can get everything that's on Mint in Ubuntu, but since Ubuntu is much more popular, it's maintained much better. BTW, you wouldn't believe how much trouble I've had trying to post this and the previous message. For some reason, the website kept silently dropping my posts.
LOL sorry to hear your troubles.. This forum is not the most stable.. nor the most full featured.. but it kind of grows on ya :-) I think its the people...
After a few more days with 10.4 beta 2 I find that its really much slicker esp with the Video compatibilities. Been trying out chromium web browser too.. its nice and fast but not compatible with some stuff i use which uses a lot of JavaScript so I am still on Firefox mostly. However The new Gimp that I installed on 10.4 is annoying the heck out of me at the moment. as it does not show a status bar for some of the long running tasks.. sigh.. I am using the history window to show me that the task is finished.
I will have a look at Raw Therapee. Thanks for the tip solid_liq.
I think I may have tried in install RawTherapee in Mint and it did not install. I do need a good raw input app. I suppose I could try it in another distro. I think I have about 4 installed, maybe only three. Not sure. Think I have Ubuntu 8.10, Kubuntu 9.04, maybe something else. Might still have UbuntuStudio 8.04 installed.
I never used 2000 or ME. After 98, I tried XP. They were just starting to implement a multi-user system, if you have the grace to call it that. But it was such a mess I could not understand what they were trying to do. Real corporate networks are multi-user, so I don't understand why the standalone version was such an amateur job. Well, I should not be bashing Windows; to each his own. Linux has had its own problems since Ubuntu 8.04, nothing has measured up to that for use and stability. KDE is just starting to get back to where it works after the 4.0 nightmare; I still can't set different backgrounds for different desktops. :(
But I love my D300s, and am looking under rocks everywhere for an extra 10 grand so I can get a great birding lens. :)
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