Open Source Image Processing

One of the most important tasks I do on a PC process photos. F-Spot served me well for quite awhile, as did Shotwell. Gimp in combination with ufraw picks does better in terms of advanced editing, but at the sacrifice of management and ratings functions. None of them is really a direct linux replacement for Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop Elements. I modified my work flow to match the features of the tools available, but a recent update to Shotwell causes exported images to be distorted, either stretched horizontally or vertically. I needed a fix, so off to the search engines ... 

A few hours later, I was up and running with a new photo manager called Darktable. http://www.darktable.org. The included features are pro and performance is quick even on a modest machine. If you're looking for one application to manage and process your photos this is it. Just create your own folder tree as YOU see fit, then import and instead of wasting disk space copying and duplicating files, it only makes a database of the images and any pending edits you're selected. Only upon exporting are these changes committed, this is about non-destructive editing of the original.

Some features found in version 1.2:

• Levels
• Curves
• White Balance
• Crop
• Straighten
• Noise Reduction
• Blending Mode
• Geotagging
• Handles most RAW formats
• Handles 8 or 16 bit formats
• HDR High Dynamic Range
• Releases for popular distros of Linux and OSXand many many more

Be sure to visit their website for instructions on adding to your software sources as the version presented in Package Manager by default is dated.