Linux Photos and Imaging

Linux is great for processing large numbers of images; the command line is perfect when you just got back from a trip and you have 500 images that all need to be resized, thumbnailed and collected into a web page.

I haven't seen a good collection of Linux imaging links (no doubt they exist somewhere -- if you know of one, by all means Let me know and I'll add it here) so I started this page.

Check out my book!

Software I've written:

I've written a little image viewer/slide show program called pho which is primarily intended for use on large collections of images after uploading or scanning, and a set of useful batch image processing scripts for the same purpose (e.g. you return from a vacation and have 600 images to resize and put into web pages). My scripts use the netpbm utilities to do things like resize, rotate and translate between formats. After I wrote them, I found out that ImageMagick also offers a great command-line utility, convert.

Also, I have a GIMP plug-in called Pandora for stitching panoramas, plus a few simpler GIMP plug-ins for making labels and business cards and for making CD labels.

Plus ...

• I gave an online GIMP class in early 2005 via Linuxchix. You can find the lessons archived at the Linuxchix courses site.
• Image Formats for the Web (and Elsewhere).
• Tips on Building GIMP from source.
• Tutorial on using GIMP's quickmask
• Some tips on getting a Wacom graphics tablet working in Linux.
• Some of my photos if you're interested.

Other Useful Linux Imaging Web Sites

• Digital Image Representation, a discussion of different image formats and the difference between raster and vector images.
• Tools on flamingtext.com Lots of weird and neat uses of GIMP.
• GUG: Gimp User Group

Linux Imaging Software and Drivers

• The Gimp The premiere open-source image processing program.
  
• The Gimp Printing (Gutenprint) Project which also provides high quality printer drivers for many printers on Linux and Mac OS X.
• GPhoto supports a huge list of digital cameras, including many USB cameras which aren't yet supported by Linux drivers. (I don't actually use it myself since my camera is serial.)
• S10sh a USB/serial userspace driver for the Canon PowerShot digital cameras
• SANE Scanner Access Now Easy, a Linux scanning protocol. Check here for lists of supported scanners.
• HDR Images and Tone Mapping
• Blank Slate Wacom Graphire USB howto
• Wacom Graphire2 USB, X, and the Gimp
• PfaEdit is a font editing program
• PhotoPrint a new program from the gimp-print developers for printing photos on Linux
• Gdk-pixbuf chapter in Writing GNOME Applications.
• sketch and sodipodi are two vector drawing programs.
• OpenSWF: I didn't know 'til recently that Shockwave Flash was an open format and has free tools available.

Collections of GIMP tutorials

• GIMP.org tutorials
• WinGIMP tutorials (useful tutorials no matter what platform you use)
• GUG GIMP tutorials (this site is down a lot. If it doesn't answer, check back later)
• GIMP tutorials on urveillance-video.com
• Tigert Labs tutorials
• Carol's tutorials
• Gimp Talk: a web forum for sharing GIMP tips

Good Tutorials for Specific Projects

• Changing Sky Color by decomposing into H, S, and V layers.
• How To Draw Cartoons from Scratch
• Getting Started with The GIMP: an informal tutorial
• Video Capture and Editing under Linux
• gimp-perl for animation post-processing
• My tutorial on using GIMP's quickmask to make a fuzzy border

Other Useful Information

• Gimp Cheat Sheet in PDF
• Blending Modes
• Edge Detection in GIMP A comparison of the various different ways to do edge detection
• Examples of parametric brushes
• Graphics Muse all sorts of information on Linux graphics, including GIMP
• Check monitor gamma
• Grokking the Gimp is a good, though somewhat out of date, online book.
• Writing GIMP plug-ins:
  • Start at developer.gimp.org
  • Writing gimp plug-ins, from gimp-plug-ins.sourceforge.net, a community of plug-in developers.
• Writing gimp-perl plug-ins:
  • http://www.goof.com/pcg/marc/gimp.html
  • dov's perl tutorial
  • sburges' site
  • Tutorials on Worth1000 which also has lots of fun "photoshop contests"
• GIMp Script-fu Tutorial
• Photoshop filters in GIMP on Linux

Nifty GIMP Plug-ins

• Resynthesizer, sort of a super clone tool. Some pages describing it: Monash University, Newsforge, Samuel Tardieu, Slacy, Schwarzvogel tutorial.
• Focus Blur, which selectively increases depth of field according to a map.

Imaging Hardware I've used:

Cameras:

See my camera review page for more details of what I like and don't like about these cameras.

The Minolta Dimage Xt and Olympus C-730 UltraZoom work great with Linux. They use usb-storage protocol, so you can mount them like an external disk and copy/move photos off them, or you can use a photo application if that's what you prefer.

All the Canons I've had use the annoying USB camera protocol. Linux can talk to them, but only through an app like gPhoto, and usually only after endless fiddling trying to get gPhoto to recognize the camera. And then all your images show up with upper-case filenames. If you just want to snarf all your latest images onto the computer so you can deal with them there, you're better off using an external card reader.

Printers:

• Epson C86 (parallel/USB)
  I got tired of fighting with Debian, which refused to support the Photo 700, and bought a C86. It's much faster and quieter than the 700, and very well supported (use the C84 setting on older Linux distros that don't list C86). And it uses the Dura-Bright fade-resistant inks. But then Debian flaked out on this printer as well and I gave up and switched to Ubuntu, which drives the C86 just fine.
• Epson Photo 700 (parallel)
  I know, it's ancient now, but it worked well and gimp-print supports it wonderfully. Debian-based distros sometimes don't; try the new "printconf" package (not to be confused with the old printconf print spooler which was the default in Redhat for so many years).
• Lexmark Z52 (parallel/USB) My husband tried this because they falsely advertised Linux support. Ick! Don't buy Lexmark. Here's why.

Scanners:

• Epson Perfection 2400
  Well supported by sane-epson, including the slide attachment. Slides tend not to focus very well, unfortunately, and the preview in xsane doesn't show enough detail to tell whether it's focused or not, or how good the exposure is. Some day maybe I'll write an app for scanning slides.
  Sane installations tend not to see this scanner automatically. You'll probably need to edit /etc/sane.d/epson.conf and uncomment the appropriate line depending on whether I'm running a kernel with the scanner module, or using libusb outside the kernel. If using the kernel module, also make sure it points to the right device for your system, /dev/usb/scanner0 or /dev/usbscanner0.
• Microtek Scanmaker 3600
  Was supported as a SANE backend (but not the transparency adaptor, which is moot because it doesn't seem to be possible to buy the transparency adaptor anyway). Trying to get it working was quite confusing: don't bother trying to download and apply the patch, just go to the SANE site and get the latest release (anything after 1.0.5) and the sm3600 driver will be built in. (Strangely, it isn't built in to the sane-backends 1.0.5 Redhat RPM.) The instructions on the sm3600 page for setting up hotplug to recognize the scanner work fine. Once I did that, the Microtek worked fine, but I replaced it with the Epson because I wanted a slide-capable scanner.
• Umax parallel scanner
  Ick. Umax scanners use a proprietary protocol and won't release specs, so there's not much linux support. Avoid.

Flash memory readers:

I've removed this section because basically they all work now.

Other

• Wacom Graphire 2 tablet
  I've found this quite hard to set up on Linux. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. See Wacom tips.

EXIF Manipulation

It turns out that there are quite a few open-source programs to manipulate EXIF information.

• Jhead EXIF Jpeg camera setting parser and thumbnail remover. This is the EXIF reader I use. Small, neat and simple. Command line, Linux and Windows.
• libexif on Sourceforge
• MetaCam Camera Image Meta-Information Reader. Primarily Nikon and Olympus. Bigger than jhead, C++, but works nicely.
• Exif-Tools I couldn't build these -- they require some include files that I don't have. Anyway, they're meant for cameras running "Digita", mostly HP and Kodak cameras (not my Olympus).
• dphotox Uses Exif-Tools.

Optical illusions

• Lottolab
• Greyscale illusion
• Optical illusions (Optinen harha) a good collection even if you don't speak Finnish