Photo manager Reviews Digikam 1.0 Can ‘free’ compete with Adobe’s and Apple’s wallet-busting pro photography packages? Andy Channelle grabs a horribly expensive camera to find out.

here are three types of image In brief... editing package, and is Twell served in all of them. At one Photo collection end are the likes of , iPhoto and manager for the F-Spot, which are mainly designed to KDE desktop. See manage large collections with a little also: F-Spot, Picasa, Kalbum. light editing thrown in. At the other are packages such as Photoshop and Gimp, which can be used for extensive artistic edits, but are based around individual images. Between these two are professional ‘lightroom’-type apps that can be used to manage large collections and to process – but not necessarily edit – images. These enable you to view and manipulate colour or tonal ranges The Light Table is a great way to compare a RAW image with its JPEG and apply some creative effects, but counterpart. You can synchronise pan and zoom as you inspect the two images. don’t have tools such as brushes, layers and extensive text-handling features. resolution or any other bit of metadata. including sending the results direct to These are often built around the You can also add your own tags. Facebook, or other online concept of whittling down 60 images to Edit mode, where you can make services, outputting to your iPod, or find (or adapt) the perfect one. changes to your pictures, is accessed creating an HTML gallery for inclusion by double-clicking an image. There’s a on a website. We’d like to see a similar nice selection of effects and processes, range of options in the import section, “There’s little lag when from Blur and Sharpen to Spread, such as the ability to use Picasa’s facial applying effects, even to Solarise and Paint effects. If you’re used recognition tools to multiple images to Gimp’s configuration overload when automatically. However, the options your larger images.” it comes to effects, Digikam’s lack of that are available do their jobs well. options may be a disappointment. But Good performance is vital in an If you’re after this last type of that would be to misunderstand the application of this type as you’ll be package, then Digikam is likely to be application’s raison d’être. shifting around lots of high-resolution your first choice. The program is built images. Digikam works quickly when on KDE but also works well in Gnome. Compare and contrast moving around lots of thumbnails and Visually, it ships in standard KDE garb, Even if the processes can be uninspired, the lag when opening an image was but can be reskinned using the theme the available tools in Digikam work well acceptable on a Core 2 Duo with 2GB menu to provide a more Adobe-style and there’s little lag when applying RAM. Digikam is therefore a worthwhile experience. The full-screen option does effects, even to your larger images. up from F-Spot, but what you gain a great job of getting rid of the rest of A key feature of this release is the in facilities you lose in simplicity. LXF Fuzzy Search the interface so that you can focus Light Table – an excellent tool for enables you to purely on your images. comparing pairs of images. It’ll become look for similar It’s swift and elegant in gallery mode, an essential part of your selection Verdict images based on where you can navigate your collection process if you take hundreds of photos colour, shape, or of images or sort by date, camera, and then whittle them down to a few. Digikam 1.0 a rough sketch. As you might expect from a package Developer: KDE/Digikam Web: www.digikam.org that aspires to the ‘professional’ tag, Price: Free RAW handling is exceptional and Features 7/10 Digikam easily dealt with the various Performance 6/10 sub-formats that our cameras provided. Ease of use 7/10 When outputting ready to print or Documentation 5/10 for the web, the software’s processing This release makes a solid start on puts the control in your hands, though lightroom processing, but it could use again finer control over colour balance, a few more options. saturation and tone would be welcome. Once you’ve perfected your images, Rating 6/10 there are plenty of output options,

www.tuxradar.com April 2010 LXF130 23

LXF130.rev_digikam 23 12/2/10 4:55:11 pm