Episode: 3580
Title: HPR3580: RAW images
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3580/hpr3580.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 01:42:36

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3584 Friday, the 22nd of April 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Royal Images and is part of the series Gimpit is hosted by Ouka
and is about 16 minutes long and carries a clean flag. The summary is how to work within
processed images in raw formats. This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15. That's HPR15.
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Hello, this is Ouka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode in our series on Gimp.
Today, I want to talk about something called raw images. That is something that some people
may want to have some information about and I did say that I would talk about it.
Raw images are images that have been minimally processed from a camera sensor.
Normally, when you take a photo using your smartphone or many of the digital cameras,
you will probably by default be taking your photos in JPEG format. There's good reasons for that,
but there is something called raw format which isn't actually a single format. Basically,
every manufacturer has their own format, sometimes more than one.
Kodak, for instance, has five formats. Canon has three. Any digital camera will take raw photos.
What that means is they're simply recording the data as the sensor takes it in.
No processing of any kind. Now, Android phones can also take raw images along with the usual JPEGs.
Why would you do that? Well, because it's raw data, it hasn't been processed in any way,
there are certain things you can do. You can fix over-exposed and under-exposed images better
when you're working with the raw data. When you're trying to fix this in JPEG because of the
compression algorithms involved, you may find that you're throwing off other parts of the picture.
So why doesn't everyone shoot raw all of the time? Well, the biggest reason is that the file sizes
are much larger. If you're taking holiday snaps on your cell phone, this can be an issue.
And to be fair, for most people, most of the time, cell phone photos are good enough.
And in the last few years, cell phone cameras have gotten quite good, really. So if you're
generally happy with the JPEG photos your phone or digital camera gives to you, I'm not going to
suggest you need to change. I personally don't bother to shoot raw because the JPEGs on my Android
phone are good enough for my purposes. But if you were a professional photographer
and making a living from your photography, like you were a wedding photographer,
you would probably be shooting raw most of the time because it gives you the best control over
the final results. Now, there are a number of free and open source applications that can edit raw
images. And I've got links to all of these things in the show notes. First one I'll mention is dark
table. As the name suggests, this is something that gives you similar functionality to a light table
used in photo processing. Or analogous maybe to the Macintosh program Lightroom.
Then there's a program called DC Raw, which is designed as a Windows program that works from
the command line in Windows. It can also run in Linux, and I've got a link to that in the show notes.
Then there is a program called CRETA, which is very popular as a drawing program and can edit
rest or images. It can open raw images. It's not really designed for processing them.
Then there's a program called Raw Therapy. And that is a really pretty full-featured
photo processor. Then there's DigiCam. Now, DigiCam is similar to dark table,
but it's kind of a favorite among KDE users. And this is the program I have been using for the
last few years to help manage my photo collection. Image Magic is a software suite that edits many
image formats, including most raw formats. It's a cross-platform and has been a favorite of many
years over the years. And finally, Shotwell. Shotwell is similar to dark table in DigiCam,
but where DigiCam is a KDE program, Shotwell is a GNOME program. So you've got lots of options.
There are other programs. I've put a link in the show notes to a Wikipedia page that has a good
list of most of them. Some free and open source, some proprietary. Obviously Adobe Light,
Roman Adobe Photoshopper on that list. But of course, my focus is always on free and open source
software. So I won't say any more about proprietary programs. But as you look at the list, you might
see GIMP is not on the list. And that is because GIMP does not, as I am writing this, support raw
images. Will it at some point in the future? I don't know. The GIMP version that I'm working
with right now is GIMP 2.10.24, which is the current released ready for primetime version.
There is a development platform 2.99, which will when they get all the bugs out become GIMP 3.0,
I don't think it's going to be in there. But in the future roadmap, they may decide to stick
raw capability into GIMP. But if you still want to work with GIMP, there are some options.
If you dig into the technical details, and I found a nice write-up from someone in Cat Landruth,
actually no photo editor edits raw images directly. Instead, what they do is first convert the file
into a format like TIFF, and you can do the same thing using a number of tools.
But I'm going to focus on 2 here because they're supposed to integrate with GIMP in a way that
makes it work pretty well. So I'm not trying to say this is the only way to do it, but it is A
way I have seen a number of GIMP experts recommended. And there are supposed to be plug-ins here
that work with GIMP. They were developed with assistance of the GIMP development team.
And that makes these good choices. Now the comparison is that raw therapy has more features and can
do more than dark table. But dark table is more user-friendly and better suited to beginners.
So they're both good solutions. Step one, of course, is to install either dark table or raw therapy,
which I did using my package manager, Mewon, on my Kabuntu 20.04 desktop.
Note that both programs are cross-platform applications that also run on Windows and Mac computers.
So you can go to their websites if you are interested in installing on one of those operating systems.
So the first thing I needed to do is to have a raw image to practice on. So I'm going to continue my
practice of finding public domain image sites and letting you know about them. And I found one for
raw images. It's called SignatureEdit.com and it offers public domain photos in raw format.
Link, again, in the show notes, in their license says, all files published on SignatureEdits can
be used for free. You can use them for commercial and non-commercial purposes. You do not need to
ask permission from or provide credit to the photographer or SignatureEdits, although it is
appreciated one possible. And by the way, I should note here, I try to always credit the source
of any of the photographs that I use. So continue with their license. More precisely, SignatureEdits
grants you an irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy,
modify, distribute, perform, and use raw files from SignatureEdits for free, including for commercial
purposes, without permission from or attributing the photographer or SignatureEdits. This license
does not include the right to compile photos from SignatureEdits to replicate a similar or competing
service or to misrepresent the authorship of these photos as your own original work.
And I put a link to the license in the show notes as well. This reads to me like a pretty good
license. I don't have any problem with it. It's mostly free except, you know, you can't scrape the
site for all of the photos and set up your own version of it and you can't claim that they
were your photos when they aren't. I'm okay with that. And I certainly have no intention of
compiling photos to create a competing service. Now, the file I downloaded as the title SignatureEdits
FreeRaw's PhotoDesk5.NEF. Now, the NEF part tells me the photo is a Nikon raw image format.
So, I have an image downloaded and I went to give to open it, but nothing happened.
Sad Trombone Q here. And a little Google searching showed me a lot of people are having this problem.
Now, one of the people I've mentioned before that I follow, who is kind of a Gimp expert as a
fellow named Michael Davies, he said that he thought raw therapy worked better with Gimp and Linux,
but it didn't for me. I tried uninstalling dark table and just leaving raw therapy in place and
still didn't work. So, then I tried it in Windows using Gimp in Windows and using raw therapy,
and it worked just the way it should. Oh, I guess that's good to know. Now, what do I mean?
It worked the way it should. When you try and open a raw photo in Gimp, Gimp should automatically
detect that it's a raw photo and hand it off to either dark table or raw therapy.
And you can make the modifications you want to make there and then close dark table or raw therapy.
And the transformed picture will then open up in Gimp and at this point you will be in a TIF format.
So, I've put links to the dark table and raw therapy installation in case you're interested,
and that's in the show notes as well. So, I got this image.
So, I wanted to work with this. So, what I did is I found you can download an image and just
open it directly in dark table or raw therapy and then save it as a TIF file and then open the TIF
file in Gimp. So, it's not quite as easy, but it does work.
So, you've now got a couple of different options here.
You know, if you have a Windows computer just open the raw image in Gimp and you know,
it'll take a minute. All right, you're going to be sitting there watching the
spinning circle. Then you can make your edits in dark table or raw therapy.
And when you're finished, you just close it. Again, there's a little bit of a pause while the
hand-off happens and an image will open in Gimp. So, I took this particular image is,
looks like it is some kind of castle in the Mediterranean or something like that.
So, I made a change in dark table to brighten up the image by adjusting the RGB curve,
which is one of the things you can do and then exported it as a PNG file
from Gimp. So, open it in dark table, adjust the RGB curve, save it as a TIF,
open in Gimp, rescale, set it the way I like it and export it as a PNG file, and then that is
what goes on my website. Now, the thing I'd keep in mind is that by the time you get this particular
episode in your podcast feed, the situation might be completely different. All right, now I
struck out using Gimp 2.10.24 on Cambunto 20.04 for this particular exercise. Maybe the next version
of Gimp will fix this or maybe it would work better in Fedora or whatever. I just hope I've given
you enough information to work out how you will do it if you need to add it raw images. Now, as I
said, despite the potential advantages of working with raw images, I suspect I'm going to stick to
JPEG photos in the photos that I take. And many of the photos I want to edit are old photos I
scanned in from pictures and slides I took years ago. So, that kind of leads me to my next topic,
scanning in old photos. And from there, we can continue our explorations. So, for now,
Vamos, and this is a hook-up for Hacker Public Radio signing off and as always,
encourage you to support FreeSoftware. Bye-bye!
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