by Carla Schroder
Managing Editor
Photography aficionados can be just as fussy and
impossible-to-please as audio geeks. Only the most expensive, elite
gear is good enough, and even then there are endless debates over
which is the elitest. Consequently, you don’t find much information
on Linux as a high-quality digital photography platform. In fact if
you can find anything that isn’t Adobe Photoshop-centric that means
you have mighty searching powers because the digital photography
world worships at the Photoshop altar. Books, articles, and
training courses mostly teach Photoshop as though it were
photography itself.Me, I think giving so much as one devalued red cent to Adobe is
equivalent to saying “Why yes, I am for corrupt corporate control
of everything and vandalism of fundamental civil rights” because of
what they did to Dmitry Sklyarov. To this day no one at Adobe has
apologized or admitted error; they stubbornly cling to the “we must
protect our precious IP” party line. Call me a moldy old hippie,
but in my world due process, fairness, and civil rights trump
Adobe’s precious IP. Which wasn’t so precious at all, but closer to
laughable. Which is why we have the fun lovin’ abomination called
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the
bought-and-paid-for refuge of greedy incompetent thieving
rights-holder everywhere. (Everywhere in the US, that is.)Linux Digital Photography Studio
OK then, let’s get back on track, which is Linux as a high-quality
digital photography platform even if Adobe weren’t a gang of
Constitution-trampling thugs. The FOSS world offers an abundance of
excellent digital image-editing applications. Here is a sampling of
my favorites:
- Digikam is an awesome all-in-one photo archiving and
management, editing, and printing application. It’s not an advanced
editor like Gimp and Krita, but its feature set is comprehensive
enough that you won’t need Gimp or Krita for every editing job. It
includes dcraw for high-quality RAW file manipulation, all kinds of
handy batch processes, tags for organizing vast quantities of
photos, and a super-nice composition and cropping editor.- Even though Gimp still lags behind the resolution of modern
digital cameras and supports only 8-bit RGB, it’s still more than
good enough for Web images and darned good printed photos. You’ll
have to compare to very high-end color printing to see the
differences that higher resolution and more accurate color
management make. It’s just a matter of time until Gimp delivers 24-
and 32-bit depths and CMYK; the current release incorporates the
GEGL image-processing framework for the first time, which supports
these higher resolutions and more color spaces. It’s still buggy,
but it’s on its way.- I gave Krita my vote as the real
“Photoshop killer”, and I still feel that way. It supports more
color spaces than any other Linux application, and it was designed
from the ground up to meet the needs of professionals. Though now
that Gimp is moving to GEGL, I can say that Linux will someday have
two “Photoshop killers”. The biggest difference will be the sheer
numbers of plugins available for Photoshop; everyone in the world
writes Photoshop plugins.- Color management is a big issue for professional-quality work.
Everything in your toolchain must have accurate ICC (International
Color Consortium) profiles: camera, monitor, scanner, and printer.
This is how you get predictable, accurate colors without a lot of
trial-and-error. For Linux try the ColorVision Spyder2 with the
ArgyllCMS software.- Printer drivers are still the big PITA for Linux users. Here we
are eight years into the new millennium and Linux is still the
unwanted stepchild. Even when we get good-quality drivers we
usually don’t get the nice management and fine-tweakage software
that Windows gets. Canon and Epson rule the roost for high-quality
photo printing, though beware of Epson’s dye-based inks– they clog
the printer heads and drive you crazy and waste your money. If CUPS
doesn’t include good drivers for your color photo printer, try the
TurboPrint
drivers.I could write a book on this, and probably will. Meanwhile the
short story is you don’t need to mortgage your house to fund a
high-quality digital photography studio. Put the money you save
into some nice cameras that will make you happy. This modern era of
digital photography is wonderful- much less waste, endless do-overs
for free, you get to work with the lights on, and no nasty smelly
chemicals. I learned photography the old-fashioned way in a literal
dark room all full of special papers, chemicals, enlarger, and all
the rest of the bulky, expensive paraphernalia that was needed.
This newfangled digital stuff is better.And now, the obligatory photos: Stash cat on the fence,
and Pups.Resources
Linux Photography
Fred Miranda
The Digital
PictureA Bit of History
A quick refresher on the Dmitry Sklyarov case: Mr. Sklyarov is a
Russian citizen. In 2001 he was an employee of ElcomSoft, a Russian
company that cracked Adobe’s eBook (amusingly feeble) encryption
code and then distributed a software application– Adobe eBook
Processor or AEBPR– that converted the eBook format to other
formats such as PDF, and formats that could be read aloud by
text-to-speech programs. eBook couldn’t do any of that. In fact it
couldn’t do much of anything except annoy anyone who made the
mistake of buying it.When Adobe learned that Mr. Sklyarov was coming to DefCon in Las
Vegas in July 2001 to give a talk on this, corporate officials
pressured the FBI into arresting him on the grounds that he was
committing a flagrant DMCA violation. To their discredit the FBI
went along with it. To make a long story short, Mr. Sklyarov spent
about three weeks first in jail and then a federal lockup, and
after his release on bail he was not allowed to return home until
mid-December, and then only after agreeing to testify against
ElcomSoft. So he was detained and kept from his family and home for
five months. In December 2002 ElcomSoft was put on trial in San
Jose, California, and after two weeks of testimony found not
guilty. Which was a good verdict considering that what Mr. Sklyarov
and ElcomSoft did is not illegal in Russia, and until the DMCA
wasn’t illegal in the US either. Hurrah for freedom and
democracy.There is still a lot of information about the case online, so
anyone wanting more details can easily find them.
