$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/bibblelabs/bibblepro/libs bibblepro
bibblepro: /usr/lib32/libstdc++.so.5: no version information available (required by bibblepro)
bibblepro: /usr/lib32/libstdc++.so.5: no version information available (required by bibblepro)
AppPath: /usr/bin
SysHome: /usr/lib/bibblelabs/bibblepro/
Userhome set to /root/.bibble
Log
Late init
... messages deleted ...
Speicherzugriffsfehler (Segmentations Fault)

Apparently it has something to with the libstdc++.so.5 (libstdc++.so.5.0.7). Checking the compilation date of the binary package showed, that it was recompiled around the middle of February 2009. With that recompilation something must have gone wrong (newer compiler or whatever). Once I replaced the libstdc++.so.5.0.7 with a version compiled on a native 32bit Gentoo system, Bibble was working just fine again.

BTW, I noticed that there is now a public preview version of Bibble 5. This version is in the making for quite some time now. Bibble 4 is really getting long in the tooth. I hope, they can release something sometime soon.

So, I guess the optimum would be Adobe Lightroom for Linux, but Linuxer’s let’s face it, this will never happen. For really professional digital darkroom work you’ll need to be running either Windows or MacOS X.

Anyway, I still would like to stay with Linux or use a mixed Linux/Windows approach. What functions do I need? The software should allow me to walk through the photos very quickly and make the selection about the keepers, the maybe’s and the files to delete. Apart from the basic raw development functionality, some basic image editing should be possible (cropping, rotating, possibly conversion to black and white). This are the functions, which would be needed to process 90-95% of my photos and which would mean, that for these photos I wouldn’t need a full blown graphics package like Photoshop.

He is a list of packages, which I’ve used.

• dcraw and ufraw as plugin of Gimp. Well, they get the job done to convert the picture from camera raw to something else or load the picture into Gimp, but that’s it. There are no options to walk through the photos quickly and if you want to do some basic image editing, you’ll need to load the image into Gimp. There are still more options for Linux like digikam, but I haven’t used them enough so say something about them, but i.e. digikam has a very active community and new releases appear frequently.
• RawShooter Essentials. The company was bought by Adobe. RawShooter Essentials is no longer available and I guess features from RawShooter Premium have found their way into Lightroom. Anyway, I found that the reviewing system of RawShooter Essentials worked very well for me. This basically worked by providing the rating of 1 to 3 stars, a general- and a delete flag all bound to key for quick selection Judging from the Lightroom screencasts, which I’ve seen, this system is one of the features, that made it from RawShooter into Lightroom. Apart from the basic developments adjustments RawShooter Essentials provided no further basic editing capabilities or any means to rename the raw files according to a pattern.
• Digital Photo Professional. This is the software, which comes with the camera and is not too bad, somewhat similar to RawShooter. Renaming of raw files is possible, although the provided pattern could be somewhat richer. Editing is only possible in terms of cropping. The review system is also a bit more limited compared to RawShooter Essentials in that only 1 to 3 stars can be awarded to a picture. Deletion is only directly possible. DPP provides a side by side comparison of before/after result.
• LightZone Linux Edition, which recently has been updated to version 2.4. The Linux edition is available for free, at least at this point in time. At home I can also only use the older version 2.1, since 2.4 requires a processor with SSE2 extensions, which my old AMD2800+ doesn’t provide. From this whole bunch of raw converters, I think Lightzone offers the best image editing capabilities. Uwe Steinmüller of Digital Outback Photo is pretty enthusiastic about Lightzone. What sets this program from the others apart, is the capability of non selective photo editing. It is similar to Photoshop in that multiple non-destructive editing layers are stacked, but the definition of the areas, which there changes are applied is not defined by masks, which operate on a bit by bit level, but by regions. These regions are defined by drawing polygons or through bezier or spline curves. Within the region you define a graduation area, where the particular effect is applied from 0 to 100%. After defining the regions, you can very easily move the control points of the region with the mouse. Another aspect, where Lightzone is pretty unique is the application of Ansel Adams zone system. While you would use a “Curves” adjustment layer in Photoshop, you use the Zonemapper or the Tonemapper to improve the tonality of the image. The Zonemapper creates a new layer, which is sectioned into 12 zones as defined by Ansel Adams. You can then move the zones with the mouse to improve contrast and tonality. With the Tonemapper sliders allow you operate on the highlights, shadows or details. With version 2.4 they also introduced a new black & white conversion tool. This is the best I’ve ever used. With other picture editors most of the time, you will probably use the channel mixer to create a black & white rendition of your picture. You move the red/green/blue slider until you reached a pleasing conversion with a combination of all three sliders. I found this pretty painfull. With Lightzone you have a color circle, where you can freely move the cursor. Depending on the postion of the cursor, the percentages of the base colors are used for the conversion. I found this a lot more intuitive and could produce a better result than with ordinary color mixers. With 2.4 a rating system was introduced as well, I haven’t used it yet. The Windows/Mac version already reached version 3.0.1. Hopefully this version will be also available for Linux some time in the future. So, to sum it all up, Lightzone is a very interesting tool, which makes a full blown picture editor redundant most of the time.
• Bibble The cool thing about Bibble is, that a native Linux version is available. If you purchase the Pro license, you can use the program on all three platforms. Bibble has everything I need, except selective editing. A rating system is there, cropping and rotating tools, a black & white conversion tool, a nice highlights recovery tool, a powerful queueing system for you work flow, the ability to output the result into more than one format during final conversion. Bibble also supports a plugin system for third party tools. There are a number of add-ons available. The renaming of the camera files during operation of the “Download” queue is also supported. All in all, a very nice package. The only things, that could be a bit better is the panel and views management, which I haven’t yet completely understood or mastered. And the redisplay after some changes could be a bit quicker.
• Adobe Lightroom And then there is Lightroom. If you surf the Web then you very quickly get the impression, that Lightroom is the tool of choice for the Pros. But then these Pros will also have Photoshop. And Pros will have a lot more pictures to process than me. And for them any second saved pays off. I’ve seen some video tutorials on the Web and Lightroom does indeed has the best review/rating system off them all, allowing quick side by side comparison, organizing similar pictures into stacks and so on. The introductory price of about 200 Euro is also affordable for an amateur. Unfortunately some time ago I already invested into IMatch, so the library module of Lightroom would be somewhat useless for me or I would have to transfer the data somehow, but I actually don’t want to do that work. For those times where I need IMatch it works good enough me through a VMWare virtual machine, but Lightroom would be used much more frequently and it bother me a lot to boot into Windows either in a VM or the complete PC.

So, what I did I want to achieve with this lengthy article? I think while writing this and trying some of the described tools, I finally found my personal solution. When I started I was nearly on the verge to order Lightroom, but all things considered the situation on Linux is not that bad as I wrote at the beginning. My solution therefore will be, that I’m going to purchase BibblePro. The Pro license allows the usage on all platforms and it is cheaper compared to Lightroom (129 Euro). What could make the picture processing on Linux even more feasible is the availability of a color control solution. I’ve learning in an interview (pushlished in a Happyshooting Podcast with Christoph Gamper, European General Manager of Colorvison, that the Spyder2 solution, either the Spyder2express or the Spyder2 Suite, are available for Linux on request. This fact is not advertised on their Web site.

I made a quick and unscientific comparison between the Tamron and the Canon kit lens. I’ve been reading about the occasional quality problem of the Tamron lens in some forums and I wanted to check, if my copy was ok. It’s very obvious from the picture (top row Tamron, bottom row Canon), that the Tamron is indeed a very good lens. The shots were taken at the telephoto end with a distance of about 1m from the keyboard and a flash on a tripod left to the keyboard with no processing of the raw file, only converting it to JPG.

When I searched through bloglines, perhaps some other fellow European had found something equivalent, this flickr link turned up. After having seen this and some more googleing I found the Spannflex, which appears to be the very same thing as in the before mentioned flickr link. The “Spannflex” expression lead me finally to the online store http://www.thomann.de and in particular to this (in white) and this (in black). €0.65 per piece. This webshop lists quite a number of country banners in their header, so this shop might be usefull to people in other countries.

As a last resort, it should be possible to build the Ball Bungees yourself. I found elastic rope in a local DIY store and it should possible to obtain appropiate wooden balls into which you drill a hole. Another source for elactic rope I found along the way is http://www.estoma.de/.

Anyway, during the vacation I stitched them with Canon Stitch 3.0, which is included in the software delivered with the 350D. This produced indeed a picture consisting of of all the pictures, but it didn’t look very good. In particular the areas, where the pictures overlapped was very visible.

So, back at home I tried PTAssembler and these are the (very good) results. PTAssembler produces a Photoshop PSD file, each picture on it’s own layer. Following the tutorial from the PWAssembler site you can place the seams at the best locations. The final step is the color/brightness adjustment. This was done with the Gimp under Linux. I guess, if I knew the Gimp better I could have completely removed the still visible differences in brightness. In this particular area the advantage of Photoshop is very obvious. In particular, many of the techniques I’ve learned about in the RadiantVista tutorials are not directly transferable to the Gimp.

This final picture was again stitched with PTAssebler, but this time installed in Wine under Linux (this means, that it works under Wine/Linux). The final corrections however were done in Photoshop. I’m pleased to say, that I’m really pretty happy with the result. The seams could still be handled a notch better.

I guess the 39 bucks will be well spend considerung the $20 discount on the Panosausrus Panoramic Tripod Head.

Since VMWare released the player and the former GSX server (still beta at the moment) for free, I decided to check the feasibility of using a VMWare virtual machine for any digital darkroom and cataloguing work.

The Windows VM was quickly created after having installed the necessary VMWare software. The VM is run on a AMD 2800+ with 1Gb main memory of which is 512Mb assigned to the VM. The Windows installation was extended with these tools from Microsoft:

• Alt-Tab Task Switcher Powertoy for Windows XP
• CmdHere Powertoy For Windows XP
• Tweak UI
• Windows Defender

Additionaly these free utilities were installed to make the operation of the VM reasonably safe and comfortable.

• AVG Free Edition
• CCleaner
• Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer
• Notepad++
• TUGZip 3.4

And now, most importantly the tools, that I wanted to check out within the VM.

• IMatch 3.5.0.14
• IrfanView
• Neat Image v5.4 Home+
• RawShooter essentials 2006

Of course, all of these programs run perfectly within the VM. The question was, how much am I slowed down for my typical work because the software runs within the VM.

Imatch works very well. The importing of many pictures into the database is slowed down due to the fact, that the pictures and and the actual database reside in the Linux native file system and are accessed in the VM through the networking layer and SAMBA. However, this not much of a problem. In my other scenario, where Imatch would be running on a real Windows system the access of the picture would still be over the network. Once the pictures are imported the tagging and categorising of the pictures works without any noticable delays, very smoothly. Only if you want to look at the picture in the native resolution with Irfanview, there is a distinct delay until the image appears on the screen.

Basically the same can be said about RawShooter Essentials. It works quick enough for me. It would be snappier running natively, but it employs so clever algorithms, that the slow down from the VM is very acceptable. Anyway, I’m not so quick in deciding if I want a certain picture or not.

Now, Neatimage benefits from every CPU cycle it can get. If you only want to de-noise the occasional one or two pictures, it is ok to run it in the VM, but if you have many pictures, that you want to treat with Neatimage, it is definitely better you used it natively on a Windows host. Or since Neatimage runs within Wine, this might be another option.

In the end the VM solution is very usable for me. Even some Photoshop work is possible, if you’re only doing some cropping or some colour and contrast enhancements. However it is completely impossible to do any work, which requires colour calibration. The Linux/VM combination doesn’t provide the required setting to actually calibrate the monitor. The best, what you can do is to set the monitor to a colour temperature of 6500K and use this diagram to adjust the monitor so that black and white levels are displayed correctly. And you need to stay in the sRGB colour domain.

And since I was at it, I also checked, if I could use my Canon Pixma 4000 printer from within the VM and if I could connect to my recently bought used Nokia 3660 phone through Bluetooth. For this I additionally installed these packages:

• Belkin Bluetooth Software (from the F8T012 Bluetooth dongle)
• Canon Utilities Easy-PhotoPrint (from my Pixma 4000 printer)
• CD-LabelPrint (from my Pixma 4000 printer)
• PC Suite für das Nokia 3660

I’m happy to say, that this worked flawlessly as well. I loaded some new pictures onto the phone, so data transfer works. However since I don’t use any of the synchronisation targets like Outlook or Lotus Notes this is somewhat useless for me, but it would work.

The driver for the Konica Minolta Dimage IV apparently isn’t build cleanly enough. Installation work fine, but when I tried to access the scanner with the scanning software this resulted in a Blue Screen of Death.

The Radiant Vista is definitely “the” website to visit, once you’ve mastered the basic technical skills of photography and you want to really “make” great photos as opposed to just snapping away. Highly recommended