Ubuntu Studio 12.10 a user review

I have an old Asus 17″ laptop which I use mostly for testing purposes and the other day I installed UbuntuStudio 12.10 on it. UbuntuStudio is supposed to be the complete and all around multi media creative suite. It comes pre-installed with Blender, Gimp, Inkscape, Darktable, Scribus, Ardour and I don’t know what.

But what about me – what do I need?
My main concern from when I installed ubuntu 11.04 has always been in regards to photography and the biggest hurdle in the beginning for me was color profiling the screen and raw conversion for Sigma Foveon files. Well as far as color profiling UbuntuStudio comes with gnome color management and DispalGui and I can even use my Spyder 2 color spider thingy, what ever you call it. So out of the box I could color profile the Asus screen, and jump right in working on photos in Gimp. And after installing Wine, Sigma Photo Pro and Blurb bookmaker. I was in business.

Hands on, how is it?
UbuntuStudio uses the same window management as Xubuntu and it is light and fast on my 2006 Asus laptop. And genaraly speaking I liked it. It is also very convenient to get almost all the programs I use and loads more with just one install. I did however have to install Thunderbird and LibreOffice. It’s emphasis is clearly on visual, audio and video creation so it leaves it to the user to install the office application of choice.

Upgrading to 13.04
When it came to upgrading to 13.04 the upgrade process worked like a charm but for some strange reason the Nvida driver and screen resolution went of the grid so instead of trying to spend time trying to fix it I just decided to install Ubuntu 13.04. Don’t get me wrong I really enjoyed using UbuntuStudio and I would recomend it as you Distro of choice if Unity isn’t your thing, of course you could install any linux distro you like and install these programs yourself. But to be able to install the Os and get all the creative program you could possible need has its own rewards.

Ubuntu 13.04
After installing 13.04 I have come to the conclusion that my old Asus with the Dualcore AMD cpu can’t really manage Unity without feeling sluggish and boring. So I started looking in to an alternative and I wanted it to be a lts version. More about that next time.

Enlarging photos – Gimp vs. Photoshop vs. Qimage – REVISITED

I have decided to revisit my old post about enlarging photos with Gimp vs. Photoshop and Qimage since I found out there is a better way to enlarge photos, albeit more CPU heavy, in Gimp. In my old post I enlarged photos in Gimp using Cubic interpolation but after some reserch I have found out that Sinc (Lanczos3) does a far better job when enlarging. To check this out I decided to revisit the old test and enlarge the photo once more but this time with Sinc interpolation.

As before I started out with the native resolution Sigma file and enlarged them in Gimp, Photoshop and Qimage. Lets see the results, you are looking at a small area in the print at 200% resolution or zoom in Gimp. The first photo is the one enlarged with Gimp using Sinc (Laczos3), then the Cubic in Gimp, then Photoshop and finally Qimage.

Gimp enlarged with Sinc (Laczos3) interpolation.

Enlarged with Gimp

Enlarged with Photoshop – Bicubic sharper

Qimage – Hybrid enlarged

 My conclusions again
Qimage still creates the best version with a cleaner, sharper and less pixalated image. But Gimp using Sinc (Laczos3) interpolation is pretty darn close. Qimage still has the edge but by so little. The final output from Gimp using Sinc looks almost identical to the Photoshop version using Bicubic smoother. Have in mind I am using PS cs2 which is a rather old program and the new Photoshop version probably has something new when it comes to enlarging. But why bother when Gimp can produce excellent result with Sinc interpolation almost rivaling the result from Qimage.

I also did a print test on photographic paper via Epson 1270 printer and from a normal viewing distance it was hard to tell them apart but there is a small difference. The Gimp and Qimage prints are very close and I see no need to use Qimage over Gimp for enlarging photos.

If you want to redo this test you can download the original Sigma file in it’s native resolution.

Now I have no longer a need to get Qimage to work on Ubuntu via Wine. It just no longer is an issue.

Sigma Photo Pro on Linux and color profiling

When I first started my little Linux journey or better say Linux experiment in may 2011, I set a few goals. My intention was to see if I could switch my photographic work entirely over to Open Source programs. I had to be able to process my Sigma .x3f raw files, had to be able to color correct my computer screen and be able to create blurb books. Now almost two years later I can finally say “mission accomplished”.

I can now use Sigma Photo Pro
Yes I can finaly use my very special Sigma photo pro Raw converter made by Sigma. I did try many linux based raw converters like RawTherapee, Rawstudio and Darktable but only RawStudio could process my raw files and did it rather poorly. I did try installing SPP via Wine but to no luck. So what did change. I meet a guy on the DpReview Sigma forum who had succesfully installed SPP via Wine from day one. With his instruction I finaly cracked it. SPP works flawlessly. So far I have proccesed a few files with no problem. So this is truly good news. I am getting closer to never needing to buy another Windows OS. The Last computer I bought I had to fork $160 for Windows 7 Home Edition. But that isn’t all. There are more good news.

I can color profile my screen with Spyder 2
After playing around with a few Linux distros I decide to try UbuntuStudios and I must say that Ubuntu Studio is great. It has all the programs I need along with a bunch of programs for audio and video editing which I would really like to learn. But the suprise came to me when I was using my Color spyder 2 and trying to install the windows Spyder color profil program with wine and I just for the heck of it tried running the spyder 2 instrument in DispalGui. And to my surprise it worked. I could color correct my 2006 Asus 17″ laptop with the Spyder using DispalGui. The profile didn’t look perfect and I am going to try this also on my new System76 laptop but the future looks bright. I also plan on buying the ColorHug from Hughski which I hope is going to work better and faster. It took DispalGui 70 minutes to go through its process.

Blurb books
What about the photo books. I installed Blurb with Wine and it is a bit buggy but it is operational, I can make books and send them to blurb for printing. Hopefully Scribus will do the same for me since I am not very happy with Blurb since I am stuck with there program to print my books. In other words I am locked in, Books I make with the Booksmart Software have to be processed with Booksmart and there is no option to expert as pdf to print somewhere else.

Closing
The bottom line is I can say goodbye to Windows. Just need to convince my wife.

System76 vs Apple IMac: price vs specification

yes yes they look cool but are the as powerfull?

A friend of mine talked to me the other day about buying a computer for professional video editing and was just wondering about how accomplished Linux is in that regard. Although I am more confident to talk about Linux and photography I would still say that video editing programs on Linux are of professional grade. At least there are a few advertising company that use Blender and Cinelerra. Video editing has been pretty much dominated by Apple to some extend but after our little

The System76 Sable complete. Is it more powerfull then the Imac?

talk I sat down and looked at the

specification of the IMac and compared it to the System76 Sable Complete.

IMac or System76 Sable Complete
In regards to video editing the IMac with the 21″ screen has an Nvidia Card which helps with 3D rendering and should also help with video editing to some extend. But the basic Imac 21″ in Iceland is about $2118 (the dollar is at 127 Ikr). But if I would buy the System76 Sable Complete and boost up the computer’s specification it would cost $1944. Not that much of a difference but have in mind the System76 specification after my tinkering had 200% more RAM, 23% more efficient CPU (i7 vs i5), and a hard drive which run’s 33% faster (7200 in stead of 5400). The only  thing the IMac had over the System76 was a Nvidia card while the System76 had Intel HD4000. But looking at the specification alone I would choose the system76 (of course, I am a freedom loving Linux Nut not an Apple religious fanatic).

but in closing it is worth mentioning that as part of my new job I will be provided with a new System76 Gazelle Professional. Stay tuned for a review.

Enlarging photos – Gimp vs. Photoshop vs. Qimage –

 

One thing I have to do more often then not is enlarge my digital prints for printing. Unlike with traditional film which you can scan on a flatbed scanner and get incredible resolution for printing, I have to use Gimp or Photoshop to enlarge my prints for the final print size. Most of the time I am not enlarging my prints by that much but since I am using the Sigma Sd-14 Digital camera with the Foveon censor and it only has 4.6MP I have to enlarge most of my prints by some degree for printing. The Sigma Foveon digital files do enlarge extremely well and outperform other cameras with higher Megapixels count. But what if I wanted to make a print 63x42cm? Enlarging a digital SD-14 file from 2640×1760 pixels (4.6mp) to 7500×5000 pixels (36mp) is no problem for Foveon but I need a program to enlarge the print. How well will the open source Gimp performe up against Photoshop CS2 and Qimage (version. 2010.210)? Well lets find out.

I started out with the native resolution Sigma file and enlarged them in Gimp, Photoshop and Qimage. Lets see the results, you are looking at a small area in the print at 200% resolution or zoom in Gimp.

Enlarged with Gimp

Enlarged with Photoshop – Bicubic sharper

Qimage – Hybrid enlarged

 My conclusions
Qimage creates the best version with a cleaner, sharper and less pixalated image. Gimp comes second and then Photoshop. But have in mind when I enlarged the file in Photoshop I used Bicubic sharper setting instead of Bicubic smoother. When I enlarged the file in CS2 via bicubic Smoother it created a better photo than Gimp. But not by much. Does this mean Gimp is crap? No not at all, the difference was minor and hardly visable. When I printed these files on photographic paper via Epson 1270 printer and from a normal viewing distance it was hard to tell them apart but there is a small difference. The Gimp and Photoshop image look the same while the Qimage program clearly does a better job.

If you want to make your own print and download my A4 test print which I used for evaluation. The test print show the three version at print resolution of 7500×5000 but only the area I was looking at. Also if you want to redo this test you can download the original Sigma file in it’s native resolution.

Now I only need to get Qimage to work on Ubuntu via Wine.

I have been buzy

Yes it has been a long time since I bloged and the reson for it is a happy one. My daughter was born june 29th. So running a home with a new born and a 2 year old is full work. But many interesting things have happened. Ubuntu 12.10 has been released but so far I haven’t upgraded. Why you ask? Well Eee I just haven’t seen any resaon to so far. The difference between 12.04 and .10 seam minor.

But however I have noticed something strange going on with Libre Office 3.6 which I manually upgraded on Asus running 12.04. It seams when I open a .xml excel document, did a few changes and added comments to explain my changes and after saving the comments disappear! Very strange. Maybe I just should have stayed with 3.5.

The other day I was talking to a big company about Free Software and one of the things which always get’s mentioned is compatibility issues between  LibreOffice and Microsoft Office. And I get ghost story’s about documents which people were recording changes (track changes) and adding comments and then púff, gone like my money in the special stockmarked saving account. Educating people about LibreOffice is clearly the most important thing to do when company’s migrate to Free Software.

Parliament in Iceland

There was a report in Iceland not long ago about how much cost the Icelandic parliament spends on paper printing and copying, which is about $236.000 a year. The report asked the question why not buy an Ipad for every member of parliment which would kost about $48.000 in the first year and then saving after that. As the report did say we can never just drop printing and zerox copying paper in the parliment of Iceland but I wondered why on earth is everybody so fixed on Ipad as the solution for everything. Why should they lock them in using proprietary devices when they could have bought Asus x101 netbooks for $21.990 and install Ubuntu on them and have a far better keybord and a much more functional device that does not lock the Parliament of Iceland with proprietary devices.

Now who do I have to sent this letter to?

(All prices are taken from items available in Iceland, prices converted to US $ and I expected they would need 70 Ipad or Netbooks. Preferably netbooks.)

Is Gimp a functional replacement for Photoshop in the technological infrastructures of modern society?

I got a bit carried away with the title. Basically the question is can Gimp do everything I need? Since I started looking in to free and open software and reading more and more about the Free software foundation and there take on software and how it should be free forever for everybody and to do with it what they please. I have since then started to embrace the same philosophy. Therefore as a photographer I would have to consider Gimp as a replacement for Photoshop. So how is Gimp?

About a year ago I installed Gimp on my main working machine and forced my self to work on Gimp instead of the other leading proprietary software. Working on Gimp took me longer and it did take me a while to understand the difference and how to utilizes Gimp at the same speed as PS. Another issue which was of great important to me and that is the final image quality. I have always used 16 bit files when possible and save all my work as 16 bit tiff files (but I do save the tiff files as JPG for printing at Blurb) so the question is will Gimp produce quality prints to my liking since it can only do 8bit?

More then a year has past and I now have done my first professional photo album and only used Gimp. Before I had made albums which have a few photos processed via Gimp. I can not see any difference between the Gimp photo and Photoshop photo when processes with the same final image in mind. However when you look at the histogram you can see there is a difference between the 16 bit PS processed file and the 8bit Gimp file. This difference does not translate to better or worse photo quality. And as I became more confident, and quicker, using Gimp I did my first completer photo book using only Gimp. So how did it turn out? Did it meet my level of standard? The customer is happy and the photos meet my standard of quality. I do admit some of them I would redo after seeing the book but most of them turned out excellent.

Mother and daughter: Gimp Photo

Black and white Gimp photo

So Is Gimp a replacement for Photoshop? Yes it is. But it isn’t perfect. I can not work on 16 bit files which I would like to be able to do. I can not convert pictures to Cmyk (something I rarely use these days but is probably important). Printing Super A3 prints on my Epson 1270 printer will not work but A4 printing is good.

Gimp Processed wedding photo

I can produce the same visual quality prints and photos from Gimp as in Photoshop. So far I can not see any difference between prints made in 16bit file space compared to the same photo worked in 8 bit. But since the work flow in Gimp is a bit different I sometimes have processed the same photo in both programs and made slight different final prints as you can see below. The final result can be duplicated by either program and the difference is just because of the different view I had in mind while working.

One photo processed with two different photo processors

One photo two photo processors

I would recommend Gimp to everybody and I will continue to us Gimp as my main work program. There might be times I will have to use something else but when Gimp evolves I am sure I will have no need for anything else.

Gimp 2.8.
God I love the changes in Gimp 2.8 but it seams 2.8 isn’t multithreding the CPU (or something) since it only uses about 35% max of my CPU power. Which makes my Gimp 2.8 work far slower then Gimp 2.6. So far I haven’t been able to fix the problem. I have tried it on my old Asus A7m computer and the same problem appears there. Running on the Windows XP side on the Asus A7m, Gimp 2.8 is only using one core of two and it feels REALLY slow. Using the same computer in Pear OS 4 and running Gimp 2.6.11 processing the same picture is fast and the computer is using the full potential of the CPU. If I do not find a solution for it I might have to stop using it and switch to 2.6. If anybody knows anything about this issue I would like to hear about it.

Wish list for next versions of Gimp
16 bit files
Cmyk (not that important for me)
Super A3 Printing
Record my work and do batch processing for files or folders (I know this can be done in some way with a script but I don’t know how).

A short story about Proprietary software
I heard a story about Photoshop when they released CS 6, there was a bug in the program making it vulnerable to attacks and attackers could take control over the computer. Of course Adobe fixed the problem when they found out (which would probably have happened sooner if the code had been open) but they wanted to charge something like 100$ for the fix. If I would have bought a car and there was a design flaw I would not have been happy having to pay for the fix. But since Adobe is the leader in this field and you might say monopolizing the market they can do this without regards to the user and only think about there own benefit at the expense of the user of course. For this and many other reasons I am going to support free and open source software. Adobe did give the fix for free since everybody went crazy and complaint when they wanted to charge for the bug fix. I am sure Adobe regret doing it and will try to exploit us in some other way later.

Gimp article and Pear Os

Well folks. What have I been up to these days? Well I have been battling with my Asus A7m laptop to get it working with Pear Os for a few days. It seams to be unstable with all effects running and I had many weird issues. For instance my touch pad stops working when I sometimes start LibreOffice and from time to time the computer stops just completely. After downloading the correct drive for the nvidia card the computer started to run more smoothly but I still had the touch pad problem. But when I logged out and logged back in and had no effects turned on then the computer became totally stable. It appears my Nvidia card is for some reason making my system become unstable. I have no idea why but it is running smoothly now except many of the cool effects I had are now gone. For example the mission control is gone. But I suppose that is a small price to pay for stability.

I have been using Gimp for some time now and doing all sort of tests but I have been having problems with Gimp 2.8. It won’t use the full potential of my CPU. Processing the same photo in Gimp 2.6 the program is fast and responsive. Opening the same photo in Gimp 2.8 it is slow and boring. But the new layout is outstanding in Gimp 2.8 and I wish I could use it but it looks like I will have to stick with Gimp 2.6 for a little while longer since 2.8 isn’t working on my AMD laptop and AMD desktop (no I haven’t tried it on a Intel computer.

Soon I will publish the Gimp article so stay tuned.

Ubuntu 12.04 lts review

Well folks I finally got my Asus A7m 17″ laptop back from repair after having the mother board replaced. Everything workes fine except I haven’t been able to access the hidden partition to restore my Windows XP operating system which was starting to behave a bit abnormally. But so far no luck. The XP OS is working on the Asus A7m but I was anyway starting to use Linux a lot more so I decided to install Ubuntu 12.04 as dual boot. The installation worked well and I had a working 12.04 in about an half an hour. With Color management working (didn’t work when 11.10 was installed). So how are my first impressions? Well Unity feels more functional and fun to use, more mature I could say. I prefer it to the feel of Windows 7 and the computer appears to be generating less heat then when 11.10 was installed on it. Which is a good thing since battery performance should also improve. I installed Gimp 2.8 and I like the changes that have been made in Gimp (more about that in another post) but I couldn’t get Ekiga to work. It works on windows 7 but I haven’t been able to call anyone via Ekiga since nobody I know use it and my friends haven’t been willing to switch from Skype (which is owned by Microsoft). But on Linux I have not been able to get it to dial the echo test call.

But back to Ubuntu 12.04. Having Gimp, Firefox, file folder, ekiga, Skype and a ODF document open the computer was using about 81% of the 2gb memory. At start up the Asus A7m is using about 460mb of RAM.

My Asus X101

Final words.
God I love Gnu/linux and Ubuntu. Yes I love it. As much a human can love a dead thing. Ubuntu feels fast on my on my laptop, boots up in 50 sek (after bios test and choosing OS from the purple menu thingy which starts first) and it just looks beautiful. I do have to do some changes and ad a script so I could get suspend to work since the Bluetooth seams to interfere with it. But Ubuntu 12.04 feel’s mature and I like it. But it doesn’t work as well on my x101 Asus netbook which feels fast with Lubuntu my current favorite.