95% of my photography is in RAW+JPEG (even on my phone) and I find Darktable does pretty much everything I need (mainly Astro and landscape, some portraiture and cityscape). Ignoring Astro, my style is very “film-like”, I often try to copy the “Leica film” style and Darktable is a great tool for this.
I was already a full time Linux user when I bought a decent camera, so I never became “comfortable” with the more sophisticated Lightroom tools, and learning Darktable has been a “hobby” as much as the photography. When I say decent camera, its a Lumix G80, five years old now, but its lightweight for climbing mountains, lenses are affordable and it works well with a 15cm second-hand telescope.
There are also some pretty cool Linux tools for Astrophotography such as Siril for stacking, and I keep promising myself I will spend some time getting to know Astropy.
If you shoot mainly in RAW, then give Darktable a try for a few weeks and you may be surprised by the results as you become comfortable with the software.
I sometimes use Gimp, but mainly phone based editing for quick and dirty stuff, but for the real work, the photos I am most proud of, I use Darktable and I couldn’t imagine using anything else.
Some links to get you started. The Darktable landscape is everchanging, so its worth doing your own searches to find tutorials in a style that suits you
LOL, yeah. I opened a picture I took with my phone to test it, and … a lot of presets scared me.
But… I can take photos in RAW mode and slowly learns the basics.
Thanks!!!
Don’t know if you are Android or Apple, but in stock Android (I use Moto) you can select RAW + JPEG format. I think in Apple you have to install a third party camera app (same for some some Android versions).
Use the JPEG and quick edits on your phone if you want to quickly post to social media or similar, or for “pro” results, import the RAW file and either use a Darktable preset or do the edits from scratch.
I was trying to find the YouTube video that was my eye-opener for Darktable, but I cant find it. If you come across a tutorial that covers masks and is about a New York bridge photo… Thats the one!
I have my own presets for my Leica-like edits, its just a style I like and quite distinctive from the typical, intense color styles that dominate.
You can always message me here if you require help or advice.
Start with the settings that you can easily understand like contrast and then try working with S-curve and color balance. You will soon pick it up.
Hello,
After some time, I can say that I’m using PDF-Xchange Editor with Wine, which works great!
I can manage some minor issues (I think I can solve) like a smaller interface (like other apps in Wine, but it works very well.
It is worth the price of a licence for Windows because I can use it with Linux and Wine.
I stopped using windows as my personal OS when Linux became available back in the early 90’s. I have unfortunately been forced to use it for most of the devices I use at customers sites due to proprietary systems normally. I still have a laptop specifically just for those instances since the hardware I connect to is not used by lot’s of people/organizations. Thus there is no real incentive to develop Linux versions of the software. Plus the OEM’s that make the hardware have invested LARGE in the MS version of their libraries, and don’t consider it a priority to support a Linux version. This leads my customers to not want a linux version, even home rolled, to be used in fear of warranty/support issues.
But that doesn’t stop me from using it for development where I can, and for making CADD drawings or for making technical manuals, or training courses, or designing control systems. The list is long. It also happens to be my electronics test and measurement bench by adding my MSO to it. I miss nothing from the Windows World.
For OneDrive & M365, you can install Microsoft Edge for Linux and then run them both as an Edge app (… > Apps > Install this site as an app) with 100% feature parity.
That link you provided is a list of alternatives to PDF-XChange Viewer, which I’m going to assume is far from equivalent to the Pro version.
PDF manipulation tools on Linux are sorely lacking, and have been for a good decade+. In fact, they’re only becoming more limited as time goes by.
Used to be, if you were willing to really get into the weeds, you could fiddle with the structure of PDF files on a very low level using the old PDFEdit. But that was a Qt4 application that hasn’t been updated in over a decade, and has all but vanished from modern distros. It was also very rough, and far from user-friendly. But there wasn’t, and still isn’t, any tool like it out there, where you could pick apart a PDF file’s internal structure all the way down to the individual characters that make up each page.
Heck, there aren’t any applications with even a fraction of the printing features that Acrobat Reader used to provide, anymore. (Those were, I have to say, absolutely first-class. When printing directly from Acrobat Reader, even on Linux, you could do everything short of having the page fold itself into an origami swan on the way out.)
Yeah, these days dual-boot is just more trouble than it’s worth, who wants to exit all of their work on one OS just to be able to bounce into another?
Even my 12-year-old, 4-core i5 CPU, fortunately-has-20GB-of-RAM desktop is capable of hosting a second OS in GNOME Boxes. I actually have both a Windows 10 install and a Hackintosh 10.15.7 install (the latter took some doing, let me tell you!) for when I need to bang on “the competition”. (For much the same reason, I also have Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 VMs sitting alongside them.)
I understand!