As a Journalist by day, and awesome cave dwelling Linux nerd by night, I take a lot of photographs with my Nikon D3300.

That said, there are the obvious tools by Adobe that one can use, such as Photoshop, but there are some pretty awesome tools available for free to GNU/Linux users I thought I might share.

With the three together, I’ve got basically everything I have needed.

GIMP

Every list that talks about GNU/Linux and photos / editing, will undoubtedly include GIMP.

It’s a powerful alternative to Photoshop, that while lacking some features that users may be used to, it certainly qualifies as a full featured application.

I won’t delve super deep into this one.

digiKam

If you were only able to have one photography related tool on your machine at a time, you’d want to pick digiKam; it’s great as an organizer for your thousands of photos, but also has the ability to edit RAW images, allowing for fixing problems with things like exposure or white balancing.

One of the things I love about digiKam is that I can quickly import files off an SD card into a new album (or existing) and then make very quick touch ups to exposure and shadows/highlights, before I save the file and open it in GIMP to make other modifications or fixes, if needed.

Metadata, various image modification tools, clean interface and easy importing and managing of files makes digiKam absolutely great.

Top features

Import photos, RAW files and videos.

Library management

Auto-import operations such as rename or rotate.

Plugin support

UFRaw

UFRaw is a small tool for editing RAW files. Yes, digiKam does this, and so does the mighty Darktable, but UFRaw has quickly started to become part of my arsenal due to its incredibly simple interface, and no frills features.

It doesn’t do anything fancy besides make edits to RAW images, but it does it super easily and efficiently. I find it easier to make the touch ups I need, in UFRaw than I do in digiKam really.

If you don’t like the idea of having to use a third program, you can simply stick to digiKam+GIMP and be fine, but if you’re like me, I don’t mind opening the third program if it means being able to do my work as simply or effectively as possible. UFRaw is great, and I highly recommend it.

Top features

Available as a standalone and GIMP plugin

Color Management support

Now you: What tools do you use, for photography (not digital art), let us know in the comments!

Summary Article Name Three essential tools for the GNU/Linux Photographer Description That said, there are the obvious tools by Adobe that one can use, such as Photoshop, but there are some pretty awesome tools available for free to GNU/Linux users I thought I might share. Author Mike Turcotte Publisher Ghacks Technology News Logo

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