FOSS & Photography What is FOSS, and how does it relate to photography? FOSS stands for Free/Open Source Software. Not free, as in price, although this is also often the case, but free, as in freedom. You are free to run the program for any purpose you choose, be it personal or commercial. You are free to make copies and share with your friends and family. You are free to inspect and modify/improve the source code, and share the results. I discovered FOSS many years ago, and as a philosophical decision, my digital equipment is run by almost only free software. My OS (GNU/Linux), web browser (Firefox), office suite (LibreOffice), RAW development (RawTherapee), photo editing (Gimp - GNU Image Manipulation Program). The entire system I am writing this on is run by free software. OK Nick. How does all this help me as a photographer? We all know how expensive this passion of ours can become. Between camera bodies, various lenses, filters, supports, lights, and the software to develop our creations, the expense can become extreme. As most people don’t know about FOSS, or any of the interesting projects that have been developed for the photographic community, for those with my philosophical disposition, or those who wouldn’t mind saving some money, I thought I could present a couple of FOSS options for photo editing....RawTherapee, and Gimp. With RawTherapee, and Gimp, you have two very powerful tools to develop your photos. Both are FOSS, and as such are free to download and update. Both are in constant development and improvement by dedicated teams of individuals, who are as passionate as we are about photography. Best of all, both are multi-platform, and will run on Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux. I’m not arguing that these are better than other commercial software. But they are very capable, and are suitable for almost anybodies needs, and help lower the barrier of entry to an already expensive hobby. RawTherapee: https://rawtherapee.com/ RawTherapee is a tool to develop your RAW files, and is capable of saving files as JPG(8-bit), PNG(8-bit/16-bit), and TIFF(8-bit/16-bit/16-bit float/32-bit float). It also works in batch mode allowing you to process similar images very quickly. One of the best features of RawTherapee is that its completely non destructive. All of your modifications are saved in a sidecar file in the same directory as the RAW file. There are too many features to list, but almost anything you might need is included. Colour management, exposure, shadows/highlights, tone mapping, sharpening, noise reduction, haze removal, white balance, channel mixer, curves adjustments, film emulator, wavelets, crop, resize, perspective, and many many more. An image could be developed from start to finish in RawTherapee. Documentation for RawTherapee is excellent. You will want to pay closer attention to the Tool Description section, but anything you may want to know is in the following link. http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Main_Page RawTherapee may seem daunting at first but its interface is very intuitive and just by playing around with it on a few photos, you will quickly become comfortable with its controls. Gimp – GNU Image Manipulation Program: https://www.gimp.org/ Gimp is a general purpose image editing tool, very similar to Adobe Photoshop, and anyone who has experience with PS will feel comfortable using Gimp. Although the interface is somewhat different, and tools and filters do not always share names with PS, it is often described as a PS clone with good reason. While Gimp does not implement adjustment layers as does PS, and is therefore not non destructive, there are plans to add this powerful feature in a future release. In the meantime, layers, layer groups, layer modes, and masking are implemented very well, and allow for very refined manipulation of images. Gimp can open, and export almost any file type you can think of, and will also work with 32-bits files. All the regular tools one might need are present. Selection tools, paths, colour picker, clone, heal, paintbrush, perspective, transform, dodge/burn, and many more. Gimp implements a large selection of filters, including various blur filters, enhancement/distort filters, noise filters, artistic filters, etc. Colour balance, colour temperature, hue, chroma, saturation, curves, can all be adjusted. Colour management is available, and changing profiles is simple. A channels pallet is available to store custom selections/masks. There are also many plug-ins available to enhance and extend Gimps capabilities, one of which is Heal-Selection, very similar to PS’s content aware fill. Documentation for Gimp is very good, but also large and difficult to navigate. This is mitigated by the fact that many amazing tutorials are available on YouTube, that can show you how to do almost anything with the program. Being so similar to PS, many Photoshop tutorials are directly transferable to Gimp. In short, many resources are available to learn the ins and outs of Gimp. The Gimp documentation is in the following link. https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/ BONUS G'MIC-QT: https://gmic.eu/download.shtml The G'MIC plugin adds over 500 filters to Gimp. Many of the filters are useful. Many are not. I still havent had a chance to try many of them, so I'm no expert in G'MIC, but I find myself useing a number of them frequently. If I find I need something specific, I look through G'MIC and usually find something appropriate. The filters are well named, and organized in a sane manner. The sliders and controls usually make sense, and if they don't, simply playing around with them yeilds clarity on their purpose. G'MIC is a great plugin, and I think everyone would benefit from having it. The documentation for G'MIC is terrible for the average user. It seems to focus on the command line arguments, and not the graphical interface, so anyone not comfortable with the command line should ignore it. Just play around with the filters, and see how they work. In closing, I'm not trying to convert anyone to the FOSS philosophy. I wish only to show that very good, high quality software for photographers exists in the ecosystem, and that it is freely available for anyone to use and share. Maybe you are young, new to photography, or dont have alot of money to spend on software. Maybe you don't like the idea of not owning the software you use, or having monthly payments to use it. It doesn't matter. Amazing options exist, and you have choice. Choice is always good. Nick Samios.