Photo editing / utilities in Linux

Hi all,

Today, as I was going through the tedious task of going through my last trip trip 850 photos... Not only I had to select the photos I wanted to keep, but I also had to convert them from RAW format to Jpg, edit the exif information and resize them for web usage.This task can seem like a lot of work but it''s actually quite easy using some open source tools available for Linux (not sure how easy it's to do so in Windows).

For converting my images from raw files to jpg, I used a combination of two tools:

• DCRAW that allows you to decode all your RAW files in Linux
• Cjpeg, that will take the decoded data outputted by Dcraw and compress it into a jpeg file

After installing the two applications you will only need to open a command prompt in the folder containing the raw files and execute the following batch command:

for i in *.CR2; do dcraw -c -a -w -v   $i | cjpeg -quality 100 > $i.jpg; done;

And voilà! After a couple of hours I got all my photos decoded from RAW file to Jpeg

I also take the opportunity of this post to introduce two other great photography programs that I find very useful:

• Hugin is definitely a program you want to check out if you like panoramas and don't have the chance (or don't want to use) a fish eye lense. The program will automatically generate a panorama with the images you will give them, pasting them all together. A must try,really! You will see the results in my next post, will upload some panoramas I took from the top of the Empire State.
• Phatch, a program for editing photos in batch (resize, rotate, apply shadows, perspective, rounded corners.. etc).

Although photo editing can seem not user-friendly or hard under Linux (after all, we don't have the support yet from big names as Adobe and their Lightroom suite in Windows or Mac, or Photoshop etc), the free and open source tools we have at our disposal are more than enough for average users and even amateurs users.

I hope this post will be useful for new Linux photography users that want to reduce their editing time with these cool automatic tools!