[Digikam-users] Improving photos

[Daniel Bauer]

On Dienstag, 17. April 2007, Mikolaj Machowski wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Some other general digital photography topic.
>
> Not all photos (I'd say minority) is coming from camera ideal.
> Sometimes you need to remove noise, highlight dark areas, improve
> levels.

I use(d?) UFraw to convert the CR2's. I like the control possibilities UFraw 
offers. I must confess that I haven't tried the latest digikam in this 
regard, so maybe this point could change in future...

In 99,99999% of all cases I use 8bit (publishers anyway scale down 16bit 
images to 8 before printing, so what should I grapple with much larger 
files :-)  I use 16bit only, if there are difficult parts in the shadows or 
lights, so I can get out more of it.

Although digikam offers possibilities to scale images I always use imageMagick 
from the command line. I have a text file on my desktop with the commands I 
often use, so I don't have to remember them. I also use imagemagick to strip 
metadata from the images if not needed.

All the rest I do with digikam. It is very rare that I have to treat only 
parts of a picture (then I have to use gimp - a program that can 
do "everything" but is [sorry!] just horrible in the handling). I *love* the 
cropping and the text tools of digikam, they are way more comfortable and 
faster than what I was used from photoshop before (I didn't have the latest 
versions though...). I also like the black-and-white filters of digikam and 
use them quite often. For montages, of course, I need to use the Gimp.

> How often do you use this techniques?

always when working digitally.

> What are you doing with original photos?

- CR2's remain untouched in a folder.
- same for converted raw files.
- same for finished photos (in original size)

these folders are copied on another harddisk in same computer plus on other 
hard disk in another computer plus on CD's that are stored in a fireproof 
save (yes, I am kind of paranoid in this regard...). I never delete any 
originals because I know that years later my opinion about what's good or bad 
can be the contrary of what I thought before.

Then, starting from "finished photos", but always working with copies, there 
are many folders with selections per purpose of use, model, customer, size 
etc.

Although all folders are in the digikam album path, I use a SQL database 
with "home made" php scripts to organize the archive, as I am not happy with 
the current implementation of "digikam-tags=IPTC metadata".... 

regards

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Bauer photographer Basel Switzerland
professional photography: http://www.daniel-bauer.com
Madagascar special: http://www.sanic.ch