Comments on: Darkroom 1.0 and Import Raw in Krita

By: Carlos

Carlos — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 04:05:00 +0000

Being you a Krita developer I think you might be interested in several open source projects a small group of photographers and programmers are developing, and which code, or some parts of it, perhaps could be included in Krita in some future version or at least may be you can get some interesting ideas.So even if I don’t know a word about programming, nor I am any expert in digital photography either, just an aficionado, let me post some info:“Zero Noise” aims to be another HDR images making program, but not only increasing dynamic range but also reducing noise. There’s some HDR script for GIMP, but I don’t know for Krita (I haven’t been able to open a single jpg in 2.0 beta without a crash :-/ ), and as far as I know Gimp script only composes high dynamic range images, without any noise reduction. Despite I think “Zero Noise” is a name a bit too optimistic it seems a neat piece of software.“Histogrammar” makes 16 bit histograms in logaritmic scale, which in authors’ words represents “the scene’s real luminic distribution”, at least much more real than the common 256 level histograms. It also allows to use Ansel Adam’s and 16 aperture stops extended zone system to measure the scene’s distribution besides some useful statistical data.“Perfect Raw” is another RAW developer (based in dcraw as well) but, developers’ words, “not implementing any functions which don’t strictly concern RAW developing, leaving additional adjustements in Photoshop hands”. Very good in my opinion for simple and precise RAW developing, and absolutely nothing else (sharpness, contrast, whatever “extradeveloping” action), which could be a great RAW import plugin for Krita (yes I know Krita can import RAW, but could be “Perfect Raw” a better importer?.They have a couple more of programs related to photo edition, but I think these three are really interesting as components/comlements for an image editor.If you are somehow interested you can read more, and from their own words, at http://www.guillermoluijk.com/software/index.htm. The site is in spanish; being yourself a french speaker I suppose you can understand some written spanish, but for deeper and more detailed info I guess you can email them in english. Guillermo Luijk’s e-address is at the bottom of the page. I think he’s a photographer, not any of the programmers, but I guess he can provide you all the info you might want.Well, excuse me if this has sounded like spamming or something like that, nothing farther from my intention. I just honestly believe they are very interesting projects and in a decent degree of development which would make Krita a very singular program.Regards, and keep up the good work with Krita. Version 1.6 was very nice and 2.0 seems even better, at least that’s what people who can use it whithout continuous crashings say, hehe, ;p.Salut.

By: jramskov

jramskov — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:22:00 +0000

Looks promising! A good tool for handling the workflow @ taking pictures in RAW is missing in the open source world. Digikam is great, but it is not particularly good for RAW pictures.

By: Gilles

Gilles — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:14:00 +0000

There is no major problem to use libpng to write metadata to PNG. You save it at the same time than you write png image chunksFor tiff image, libtiff lack all Exif photo tags and all makernotes. Yes it's a shame, but it's a wrong conception of the library. It will be never fixed...To be universal, I recomend you to use the same way than digiKam : you write image file using dedicated library, and after you update all metadata (comment, Exif, makernotes, iptc, and xmp) using Exiv2. In digiKam we use libkexiv2 wrapper for that. It's for fine, no need to re-invent the wheel...Gilles Caulier

By: Cyrille Berger

Cyrille Berger — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:40:00 +0000

I used digikam as a refernce for PNG writing Now my problem is reading, but I guess I will use imagemagick as a reference.As for by-passing libtiff (or libpng) it’s more a problem to me than an advantage.

By: Gilles

Gilles — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:28:00 +0000

For metadata writting in krita, the code from digiKam image loader can be used as reference especially for PNG and TIFF.Note that current implementation of Exiv2 is able to write metadata to TIFF on the fly. No neef to use libtiff for that, which lack Exif and makernotes support.About PNG metadata writing, i'm curenttly re-factoring Exiv2 PNG parser to be able to support writing on the fly. Gilles Caulier

By: Cyrille Berger

Cyrille Berger — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 07:15:00 +0000

@raipsActually that was on my TODO for yesterday, but while working on it I blocked on a bug that ate four hours so I was only able to complete support for writting metadata to PNG.There are two bugs to follow how metadata are evolving in Krita:http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160446 http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138923I am still unsure how well (if at all) metadata will be supported for TIFF in the next release. But for PNG and JPEG it should be ok.

By: Raips

Raips — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 06:25:00 +0000

Does Krita now preserve and support photos metadata? Last time I checked, it removed them and that’s why Krita is not suitable for editing photos.I do all the photo editing on the digiKam (http://digikam.org) what keeps up that libkdcraw, because it has every option what photographer needs. I hope you krita guys would work more together with it, because it is greatest photo software available for Linux.

By: Gilles

Gilles — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:53:00 +0000

Tobias, Cyrille.No. Libopenraw is not a suitable alternative for the moment. it’s an uncomplete library compared to dcraw interface.The good way is libraw (http://www.libraw.org) which provide already a full compatible and suitable api against dcraw. i will use this library in the future into libkdcraw to replace dcraw.Note than libraw already use last stable dcraw implementation…

By: Cyrille Berger

Cyrille Berger — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:09:00 +0000

Yes libopenraw is a nice alternative to dcraw, up to one detail, it can convert a raw file to an image. Currently, it can only extract the preview, and most likely the raw data.That said libopenraw is a nice project, I wish Hubert good luck with it. And hopefuly someday, we will be ablel to replace dcraw with openraw in libkdcraw.

By: Tobias

Tobias — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:28:00 +0000

Have you looked at libopenraw? I think it’s a nice alternative to dcraw.