Category: software

Open Source Software

I have been a fan of open source software for quite a while now. For those unfamiliar with the term open source refers to the source code of the software being available for download. Most commercial software vendors jealously guard their code but the OSS community makes it freely available.

This has a great many advantages. Here are just a few –

  1. You can trust that it does what it claims. – Those with the appropriate skills have reviewed the code and seen that it does what it claims without doing anything undesirable such as adding spyware to your system.

  2. Problems are easily found and solved. They can also track down and report problems and often solutions. Many OSS developers have got bug fixes out in less time than commercial developers take to admit there is a problem.

  3. Some OSS licences allow the code to be used to develop other applications too. The spirit of co-operation for the common good is alive and well.

  4. Many OSS applications are free too.

     

    Popular OSS applications include FireFox and Open Office. The following link is a list of popular solutions and the commercial packages they replace. I would query some of his choices but would like to know of any alternatives you can suggest. i will add my list later.

    Thirty Pieces of Essential Software.

Photo Editing Tools, Take 2

Recently I have been experimenting with Paint.Net. Paint.net is a free photo editing package which is a step above the basic editors that are available. It has layers and many of the options of Photoshop. It was developed as an university project and continues to be supported. If you already have .net on your computer it is a download of less than 4 meg, with .net it is 46meg. Paint.Net is only available for Windows. See getpaint.net for more info and downloads.

I found Paint.net to be a reasonable editor but not in the same class as Photoshop or the Gimp. While it handle the basic edits well some of the screens were not as user friendly as I was expecting. The auto fixes achieved a similar result as Photoshop Elements which suggests the internal routines are well written.

I have been using Photoshop Elements 4 too. I found it simple to use and effective for most uses. The photo organiser has not been used extensively but I found it more powerful than Google’s free Picasa.

So what was my final decision. While Photoshop is the industry standard there is no doubt for most people one of the free options will provide most if not all of the tools required to edit photos and create works of art. There are of course commercial options. Photoshop Elements is a useful package that uses the Photoshop engine with a simplified interface and options. It includes the most popular options but without the more powerful tools. Another popular editor is Paint Shop Pro. I have used an older version and found it very useful and it deservedly has many fans.

But none of the commercial packages have a great advantage over the free options except in one area. None of the free software mentioned above can handle camera raw. For that you need the software supplied with the camera, a specialised program such as RawStudio or you will need to spend money. Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro handle a varying range of Camera Raw. If this is important to you confirm your camera is covered before you put your money down.

If you intend to work professionally there is no substitute for Photoshop but most users will never use 90% of Photoshop’s power. I use the Gimp most of my editing. Give the free software a try, after all what can you lose it won’t cost you anything.

Photo Editing Tools

I often wonder what software people are using to prepare the photos they post in their blogs. I have seen mention of a couple and so I thought I would list some of my experiences with software.

Initially I used an LE version of Photoshop that came with my scanner. I was never able to find out what made it LE but I suspect it was an earlier version sold to the scanner company at a very good price. Surprisingly there was no option to update to a full version.

I have tried various demo copies but never found anything that was a big enough improvement to part me from my money. OK I am a bit of a miser but when I spend money I want something for it.

In search for something better I have checked out a couple of free tools and must say I was impressed. They are Open Source alternatives to the commercial editors. Many people may dismiss them for this reason but many open source applications are true alternatives developed in line with user needs not corporate agendas.

First was the GIMP. An Open Source alternative to Photoshop. Despite it having most of the options available in Photoshop it was criticised for its quirky interface. This is not a problem if you haven’t used anything else but coming from Photoshop it was quite a change.

This has never bothered me but it bothered some people so much they developed GimpShop. It is a development of the Gimp with Photoshop like interface. This is one of the advantages of open source, anyone with the knowledge can modify, improve and adapt the original program. Both the Gimp and GimpShop are available for Mac and Linux as well as Windows.

The only complaint I have at the moment with the Gimp is that it does not handle Camera RAW. This is not a major problem as the RAW can be converted to TIFF by software supplied with the camera. It can then be edited with the GIMP. All digital cameras that have a Camera RAW option provide a similar facility. Unfortunately these tools often are only available for Windows and often Mac, never for Linux. Linux has inbuilt support for many digital cameras and the list is growing all the time. Check out Rawstudio to see if your digital camera’s RAW format is supported in Linux.

My advice is check them both out after all they are free so what can you lose.

Scanning Film under Linux

When I installed Linux I had a few issues to sort out. One of those issues was that I needed to get the film scanner working. When I finally got around to it, it became a case of 2 steps forward then 1 step back but the final result was positive.

I have a Canon FS2710 film scanner that connects to the computer via SCSI. For those who aren’t familiar with SCSI, it was the standard interface for hardware that required large amounts of data to be moved. It is only recently that ide hard drives have caught up with the speed of SCSI drives. While Macs had a standard SCSI port pcs usually needed a card. I had the original card so that wasn’t a problem.

Setting up the scanner was actually easier under Linux than Windows XP. While Windows 98 SE supported SCSI that support has been removed from XP. So I needed to find and install SCSI drivers before installing drivers for the scanners. Fortunately the Canon website had the details.

Linux supports SCSI and the scanimage -L command reported the scanner. However SANE, the scanner drivers, didn’t find it. I found it was necessary to edit the canon.conf file, I simply uncommented the line with the SCSI device number and changed the number to the correct one, 4 in my case as the card reader had used the lower numbers. SANE then recognised the scanner and I was away.

Remember the step back? Well I scanned a slide and it was fine but when I scanned a negative the result was very poor, washed out and noisy. I tried 2 scanning interfaces xsane and xscanimage. The results were the same.

Negatives are difficult to scan well. When you look at a negative you see the colour of the film and the colours in the picture are the reverse of the real colours. The scanner must “see” past the film colour and each film brand is a different colour. The scanner or the software must then reverse the colours in the picture. This is one reason I mainly shoot slides these days but I have a lot of older negatives. About 80% of pictures I have been posting on my photo blog are from negatives so the ability to scan negatives well is important to me.

I had heard of Vuescan, a commercial program, that had good reports. They provide a trial version so I downloaded that and tried it. The results are very good. It is available for Windows and Macs as well as Linux and supports hundreds of scanners and digital cameras. The trial version puts dollar sign watermarks all over the scanned image but you can see what the results will be. The control of the scan is greater than any other program I have used.

One other test I tried was to see how it scanned slides, some reports I have seen suggest Vuescan outperforms the Canon software. Vuescan also supports the transfer of files from many digital cameras. Those same reports suggest it is superior to the software supplied with many digital cameras to process their raw files. I can’t test this as my FujiFilm digital camera is not supported under Linux at this stage.

My choice was to purchase Vuescan or continue the hassle of rebooting in Windows to scan negatives. After a few days of rebooting I registered my trial copy of Vuescan and am still happy with it.