Alternative Photo Editors III

Another lesser known way to edit your raw digital photo files is with a combination of open source applications – The GIMP and UFRaw. These apps are distributed under the GNU General Public License.

I originally found GIMP while experimenting with Linux on one of my machines. I thought I would have to run them on Linux and was worried because that is an old machine without much processing power. I was happy to learn that both come in a Windows version.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a full featured image editing application. Photo editing is just one of the things that it does so there are a ton of features in it; most of which I will never use. Even for photo editing there is more stuff than I need – heaps o’ filters, layer functions, plug-ins, clone, dodge, burn – you name it, it’s in there.

GIMP is pretty fast (even on my 1.2GHz machine with only 640MB RAM) and does a really good job of photo editing. As a long time Windows user I’m not real comfortable with an application that uses multiple windows - Windows programs tend to keep everything in one box. It isn’t a problem just not what I’m used to.

One thing that GIMP doesn’t do is support my Nikon raw image files (NEF). That is where UFRaw(Unidentified Flying RAW) comes in. UFRaw supports a whole slew of RAW image formats already and since it is open source, if your camera isn’t supported, you can help out the development by contributing the data needed to get your camera on the list.

You can use UFRaw as a stand alone application to edit raw files and save them out as TIFF or JPG. You can also install GIMP and UFRaw together so that UFRaw acts as a plug-in. When you open a raw file from GIMP, UFRaw pops open and loads the image. When you are done making adjustments in UFRaw, your image drops into a GIMP window for some more tweaking.

UFRaw takes a bit of getting used to. It’s a little rough around the edges. I had to tinker with the settings for a while before I got the results that I wanted. In particular I had to set the highlight restoration to be “film like” and I had to set the gamma level so that my images transferred well to other applications without looking over or under exposed. Follow the user guide to make sure you get off on the right foot.

I mostly use UFRaw to edit my raw files for white balance and exposure and then convert the result to a 16 bit TIFF file for further editing in another application – either GIMP or PaintShop. Currently GIMP (version 2.2) only supports 8 bit TIFF, but since the images are converted automatically and you probably won’t notice any difference in the image, it isn’t a big deal.

UFRaw does not save any EXIF information into TIFF files and it does not embed the color profile that you are using. Both minor points that I think are being worked on for future versions.

Overall I found that UFRaw and GIMP make a powerful image editing combo that can run on just about any operating system. Definitely worth a look before you decide on an image editing application.

MDW

Alternative Photo Editors II

Last time I blogged about using some “built-in” image manipulation utilities for the Vista operating system. Today’s topic is Bibble 4 from Bibble Labs.

I downloaded an evaluation version of Bibble Lite 4.9.5. There is also a version called Bibble Pro. Bibble Pro offers things like work queues, multi-processor support, and tethered shooting – stuff my little operation doesn’t need.

At the time of this writing, Bibble Lite is only $69.95. This seems pretty reasonable to me for a program with such high-end features. Another plus is that you can get it for Windows, Mac, or Linux.

The first thing I found out was that you need a pretty good machine to run this software. Computers don’t get replaced too often around here due to budget constraints so I don’t have the latest and greatest. Bibble ate up my old desktop PC with a single 1.3GHz processor and 640MB of RAM. It was really un-usably slow in my opinion. When I moved it to a slightly newer machine with a 2.8GHz processor and 1GB of RAM (and probably with a lot less extraneous junk running on it) everything ran fine and dandy.

Bibble has many of the same features as Adobe Lightroom – exposure, vibrance, saturation, highlight recovery, fill light, and sharpening. It also has a couple unique features like “Perfectly Clear” and “Noise Ninja”. There is a clone (“healing”) tool that Lightroom does not provide.

Perfectly Clear is sort of an automated “one click” image fixing dealie. It adjusts a slew of parameters at once to give you what it thinks is the best image possible. I does a good job, but as with all automatic stuff it never gave me exactly what I wanted. It gives a nice starting point though and with a couple of manual tweaks the results were pretty nice.

The Noise Ninja stuff provides a way to remove, what else, noise in your pics. It seemed to work well, but I didn’t feel like digging through my images looking for a really noisy shot that could provide a good test so I can’t say much about it.

Bibble supports a whole heap of raw camera formats including my Nikon D200 NEF files. The chances are pretty good that it will handle yours. You can see the list on their website.

Like I said in my first entry, I’m not doing an exhaustive review of these programs – I’m just pointing out some maybe lesser known image editing software options that are available. I especially like companies that supply evaluation versions. That way you can download the stuff and try it for yourself in your particular workflow. Suffice to say that Bibble Lite packs a lot of editing power and flexibility into a reasonably priced package. It is definitely worth a look before you buy anything.

MDW

Alternative Photo Editors

A while back I blogged about how I like Adobe LightRoom for editing  photos taken with my digital camera. At the time I was using a beta version. Well, LightRoom has gone to release and I either need to pony up or quit using it.

I decided to see what other photo editing software was available. This is not going to be an exhaustive list of software nor a detailed review of any of them – just a quick overview of some interesting stuff that I found.

First Microsoft Windows Vista. One commenter on the previous blog mentioned that Vista has many built in features that support imaging. I tried out the Windows Photo Gallery on my Vista Ultimate machine.

The first thing I needed was an update from Nikon to be able to view the raw NEF files. This was no big deal, Windows detected the missing file and took me to the place to get it. Now I could view and organize NEF files.

Photo Gallery is a nice little program for organizing your photos. It quickly displays thumbnails of your photos either within folders or across folders. You can tag your photos with keywords. The search feature is really handy. It can find images by tags or by EXIF data that is embedded in the images.

You can do some basic editing on the images in your gallery – contrast, brightness, crop, red eye, etc. Unfortunately I could not edit the raw files. You have to convert files to JPG before editing them.

Overall this isn’t a bad little utility and it is free (assuming you already bought Vista). If you are taking a lot of family snapshots and you need a way to keep track of them and do some quick edits, then this would be a good choice. I think its simplicity is a plus here. A home user doesn’t want to wade through menus of complex layering tools and histograms just to print a shot of uncle Fred at last weekend’s BBQ.

By the way – I tired connecting my camera to my Vista machine in order to download my photos. This worked very well also. I didn’t install anything. I just plugged in my USB cord and switched on the camera. Vista saw the camera, did some fiddling, and then popped up a dialog that let me download the pics and remove them from the camera’s memory. Very nice.

Although Vista has some handy stuff for image manipulation, I need something with a little more power for the stuff I do. So it is on to another piece of software. Next time – Bibble from Bibble Labs.

MDW