jamin on March 13th, 2007
After listening to suggestions, reading reviews, and finally realizing that there are a lot of great cameras out there and I shouldn’t stress over the decision so much, I went ahead and got the Canon Digital Rebel XTi (400D)
. Even though a lot of folks said the kit lens sucks (and who am I to disagree?), I decided that for now it’ll be good enough for me. Reading this fantastic review helped me realize that I can take good enough pictures once I realize the limitations of the lens. I plan on also purchasing a 50mm 1.8 prime lens per just about everyone’s suggestion. And somewhere down the line I’ll buy other lenses, for sure. Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I was overwhelmed with the wealth of information you all posted in comments. Seriously, if you’re reading this and you’re looking to learn more about photography and want to purchase a digital SLR, read these comments. Lots of good tips, suggestions, and links.
The camera arrived today and I’ve already taken something like 135 photos, most of which suck. But I’m having fun.
What do you Linux users use for working with RAW files and adjusting levels?
Tags: Photography
March 13th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Bibble: http://www.bibblelabs.com/. Commercial and KDE, but it works and has several interesting plugins.
March 13th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Heh. I did the same thing about 6 years ago: read up on the internet, hear that the kit zoom sucks, and buy it anyway. It must be a rite of passage for new photogs … so no hard feelings. I won’t even say I told you so when you stop using the zoom in 2 months.
Have fun with your new toy. *jealous*
March 14th, 2007 at 12:52 am
I use F-Spot to view and organize my RAWs on the Gnome desktop. For quick-and-dirty raw conversion and adjustments, I use the UFRaw plugin for the Gimp, although I find the quality of conversion (with my Nikon D50) noticeable (even substantially) worse than Nikon’s bundled software (on my Mac).
March 14th, 2007 at 1:30 am
I use Lightzone for levels, Digikam for organizing and Krita for preparing for publication or re-use in other images. Bibble is nice, too, not KDE but Qt-only, but good enough that I wouldn’t need to spend time on Krita making it good enough for use with RAW. Which isn’t what I want
March 14th, 2007 at 1:48 am
Yes, the kit zoom sucks, but for the price its a great general purpose lens. In six months time you’ll know what sort of lens you want to buy next, and then you can get a decent one.
Regarding software, obviously there is GIMP (with the ufraw plugin for RAW decoding) but GIMP’s noise reduction is pretty poor. Bibble is pretty nice, it includes Noise Ninja so has great noise reduction, is aimed at photography rather than general image editing, and is really cheap. I’m currently using the two week trial (cough touch /usr/bin/bibblepro cough) but will purchase it soon.
March 14th, 2007 at 2:04 am
I use RawStudio.
It’s open source and improving nicely. Otherwise, I use some scripts for converting all the RAWs into JPGs which are quite a bit faster to look over than the RAWs, and then I have another script for deleting all the RAWs that corresponds to the JPGs I deleted.
You can write me about the scripts if you want.
I do this in part, I guess, because I have a somewhat slow computer and the RAW workflow is not fit for it, but JPG is.
March 14th, 2007 at 2:17 am
Now I mainly use Rawstudio, but I’m planning to start using digikam (KDE application) to organize all of my pictures, it has good support for metadata and also supports raw files.
Previously I’ve used ufraw and dcraw gimp plugins. They word fine if you have only couple of images to edit, but if you need to browse alot raw files and then pick a few to edit they are very clumsy.
March 14th, 2007 at 2:30 am
dcraw is a small command line tool that can process RAW files from almost every existing digital camera (http://cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/)
The dcraw source code is used by several open-source and proprietary applications.
The one I am using regularly is UFRAW (http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/). It can be compiled as a standalone GTK program or as a GIMP plugin.
There is also Krita, a KDE application. This is a relatively new application. I try it regularly but I still find it unusable with large images (i.e. most plug-ins are painfully slow when using a 1:1 preview). However, Krita seems to be improving fast and it has one huge advantage over The GIMP; it can work with 16bit depth.
Another newcomer is Rawstudio (http://rawstudio.org/). It still lacks some nice features found in UFRAW (curves, black point, …). On the other hand, UFRAW can only process one RAW file at once while Rawstudio provides a flow suitable for processing a large number of images (prioritize, copy of settings, batch mode, …). I just checked the last version (0.5.1) and it looks pretty good to me to so I am strongly considering using it instead of ufraw.
March 14th, 2007 at 3:35 am
I suggest you try UFRaw which is a friendly fork of DCRaw but with a nice interface and a Gimp import plugin.
Moreover, be sure to grab release 0.11 (from last week), it fixes some exposition bugs with Canon SLR like 400D
March 14th, 2007 at 4:03 am
Hey
The 400d is quite nice though I would have taken the Nikon D70s or D80
If I were you I’d buy these lenses (in order of importance)
1.) ~35mm (that is ~50mm without crop. 50mm is pretty standard because it comes close to your eyes view). I would not go for a 30-55mm or something zoom here, a fixed ~35mm is better IMHO.
2.) ~180mm (get a used 180mm 2.8 lense. Costs 300-600 Euro but is worth the money. New it will cost you about 1000-1500 Euro). Do not take a zoom lense, the picture quality is much worse and 180mm is perfect (in my opinion)
3.) ~17mm-~30mm (I think Canon only offers 18mm, not sure).
March 14th, 2007 at 4:45 am
Hi!
You could check the Open Source Photography group in flickr too, good way to post questions etc with like-minded and toolled people
//T
March 14th, 2007 at 7:12 am
You’ll want a custom color profile with ufraw to get that perfect in-between between the exaggerated jpg colors and the bland raw colors.
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~ture/eos10d/
March 14th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Frederic: UFRaw is by no means a fork of DCRaw, in fact it’s built around DCRaw.
Mikael: custom profiles are better done by photoographer himself in different light conditions, for which I recommend LPRof and UFraw — both open source tools. Tutorial is here:
http://lprof.sourceforge.net/help/ufraw.html