Raw development on Pandora/Pyra

[benoitb]

Hi !

Is anyone developping raws (photos not compressed from your camera's sensor) on the Pandora already ?
What do you use ? Is darktable working, not too slow ?

I'm currently running my desktop on Windows and very rarely shoot in raw because I don't know how to properly develop and don't want to invest too much time learning it and doing it. However if I had the possibility in the field on the Pyra, I think I might get into it and develop right away during transportation times while I'm traveling.

Any feedback from Pandora users is appreciated.

 

[sulu]

I'm not a Pandora user, but besides Darktable I'd also recommend to have a look at Rawtherapee and Fotoxx. All three of them are available in the Debian repos and run reasonably well on an older netbook, which should be comparable in terms of performance to the Pyra.

Darktable currently is only available in Debian for the x86 architectures. But that seems to have no good reason as there are apparently working packages for Ubuntu/armhf. So a bug report should be able to fix that in the long run. The program's biggest pro (and maybe con) is, that it tries to be similar to Adobe's Lightroom, which is kind of the standard software for RAW editing. So the similarities might help you if you already know Lightroom, but the expectation of being similar might cause problems in situations where it's not (kind of like when transitioning from MS Office to Libre/Open Office). It's GUI doesn't work well on small screens. On the Pyra it should be fine, but the Pandora lacks the resolution.
Rawtherapee has a quite unique, and configurable GUI, which helps to make it usable on small screens. But it might also be confusing to find elements.
Fotoxx tries to be simple. It has a limited set of highly automated functions. It's relation to Darktable or Rawtherapee is like that of a simple painting program compared to Photoshop or Gimp.

All that being said, I'm no expert in any of these programs. I just wanted to have a look at RAW editing when I bought a camera some years ago that happened to be able to output RAW.

 

[elw3]

Hehe, i asked in their channel once. Darktable appears to be partly written in ASM.
It will also need at least a widh of 1280 pixels to display properly.

Fotoxx on the other hand appears to be buggy on my pandora.

 

[sulu]

Hehe, i asked in their channel once. Darktable appears to be partly written in ASM.

No arm then? Seems you're right. I don't remember where I found info about Ubuntu/armhf packages.

It will also need at least a widh of 1280 pixels to display properly.

The version in Wheezy worked ok on my netbook's 1024x600 screen. Maybe that has changed.

Fotoxx on the other hand appears to be buggy on my pandora.

In what way is it buggy?

 

[elw3]

Properly working is not the same as working.

You should try fotoxx yourself, it has been a while since i tried. It was a gui error, the convert libs behind it should work.

 

[sulu]

I have no Pandora, so I can't try it there. I can try in a Debian chroot on my Nokia N900, which has a pretty similar SoC. But that neither tells me what to look for, nor if the problems I might find actually exist on the Pandora.
Fotoxx was working fine on x86, last time I tried.

 

[levi]

The dcraw command line should work, and it's quite easy to use if you can trust either its auto exposure/white balance or the camera's settings, but applying colour curves and so on is awkward. Personally on my netbook I use UFRaw as a plugin to GIMP as a gui, which is a front end to dcraw, but it could do with a few more lines vertically, so I'm planning on trying it on my Pyra ; 720 lines should help the GUI a lot.

 

[benoitb]

Just tried darktable on a 32bit linux pc: I get messages whenever I click on a tool saying that using a 32bit build is a mistake, the program crashes, etc...
So I think we can forget about this one on the Pyra.

I'll have a look at Fotoxx, I didn't know about this software.
Edit: Fotoxx doesn't provide 32 bit debs anymore it seems.

Rawtherapee works fine and seems to be our best bet.

 

[elw3]

Bit has nothing to do with that. You can in fact just switch bit on the fly. Using the 64bit version on your OS is no problem.
ASM means that this code is specially written to ONLY work on desktop computers.

 

[Bosbeetle]

you can use imagej to dabble with raw images I've used it on images from microscopes that are also raw (but from a black and white camera) when the images are not too big it works pretty well.

 

[sulu]

Just tried darktable on a 32bit linux pc: I get messages whenever I click on a tool saying that using a 32bit build is a mistake, the program crashes, etc...
So I think we can forget about this one on the Pyra.

I just tried on Jessie/i686 and got the same message (which sounds pretty offensive btw). But I had no crashes so far.

I'll have a look at Fotoxx, I didn't know about this software.
Edit: Fotoxx doesn't provide 32 bit debs anymore it seems.

Debian does, so does Ubuntu.
Why are you trying to use the upstream binaries btw?

Fotoxx works fine on my N900 as far as I can tell. So I guess it should run on the Pandora as well.

Bit has nothing to do with that. You can in fact just switch bit on the fly. Using the 64bit version on your OS is no problem.

Running an x86_64-compiled binary on an x86_32 system does not work. It only works vice versa.

 

[benoitb]

Debian does, so does Ubuntu.
Why are you trying to use the upstream binaries btw?

Fotoxx works fine on my N900 as far as I can tell. So I guess it should run on the Pandora as well.

Well I tried to install fotoxx from my Xubuntu 16.04 installation. I couldn't find it in the software installation tool supplied by Xubuntu. So I had a look at alternative sources.

 

[sulu]

I'm not sure what GUI tool Xubuntu uses these days, but because Fotoxx is available in in 16.04/i386 [1], this terminal command should work:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install fotoxx

[1] http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/fotoxx

 

[TrashyMG]

I'm not sure what GUI tool Xubuntu uses these days, but because Fotoxx is available in in 16.04/i386 [1], this terminal command should work:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install fotoxx

[1] http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/fotoxx

Well it's actually in the armhf Debian Jessie that is currently running on the Pyra too. same command will work. https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=fotoxx

 

[sulu]

Well it's actually in the armhf Debian Jessie that is currently running on the Pyra too.

Did you just give away, that you're one of the secret prototype owners?

 

[comradekingu]

Raw development:

https://www.digikam.org/
https://rawstudio.org/
http://www.rawtherapee.com/
http://www.kornelix.net/fotoxx/fotoxx.html
http://lightzoneproject.org/
http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/
https://github.com/ddroom/DDRoom
http://gtkrawgallery.sourceforge.net/src/en/home.html

Viewing, organising:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Shotwell/

Exif:

http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

Something with FLIF support would really be nice.

 

[TrashyMG]

Did you just give away, that you're one of the secret prototype owners?

Nah, I've been playing with an OMAP5 EVM development board for sometime though. But anyone can buy some random arm board and run Debian Jessie on it. you can also use the current development debian image on the Pandora, although it's a bit raw to use on it.

 

[valhalla]

darktable announced that they are working on removing the ASM from their codebase, so that ARM support may be available in a future release. They do believe that RAW development should be done on a fairly powerful machine, however, so I don't expect it to be able to run on Pandora, ever. I do plan to try it on Pyra when it's available in Debian, however.

I second the suggestion to try rawtherapee: on my PC I usually alternate between it and darktable and I still haven't decided what I like best. I have a vague feeling that I like darktable more when I want to get more fancy artistic results, but rawtherapee is just fine, and possibly even better than darktable for basic editing of regular pictures.

Since Pyra also has a small screen (in inches/cm) I think that it will be more suitable for this latter usecase, and thus a good platform to run rawtherapee on.

I've never tried fotoxx.

 

[levi]

I think I tried darktable once, and didn't really get on with the GUI hiding things from me. What's wrong with UFRaw other than its name is beyond me. It has all the development options you want in a series of tabbed panels. It couldn't be much clearer.

I don't really need RAW development factored in to my photo viewing app. I only RAW process my photos each once most of the time, while I can view them any number of times.

 

[Grench]

For photographers, the Pyra should work great for:
1. Consolidating photos (copying the contents of multiple SD cards onto one).
2. Transporting/transmitting the raw images to cloud storage or back to 'base'.
3. Previewing images to makes sure you 'got the shots'.
4. Presenting same-day slide shows. Think wedding photos on a ballroom projection screen during the reception.

What the Pyra would not be great for:
1. Editing and touching up photos. Screen is small, no guarantee of the screen's color calibration, layers of RAW get huge.

Right tools for right job. If you're going to touch up RAW images, do it at a desktop with a big color calibrated monitor. Expecting a device that fits in your pocket to do this job just as well as a desktop with a 24" calibrated screen and commercial quality software is simply silly.