This month’s meeting featured a wide ranging discussion of recent and upcoming events. The passing of Steve Jobs prompted a discussion of the importance of aesthetics of form versus utility and functionality of interfaces. Naturally the meeting’s proximity to the release of Ubuntu 11.10 led to a somewhat onesided appraisal of the merits (or otherwise) of Unity. The distributions dabbled with recently were discussed, including Bodhi, Lubuntu and the Openbox window manager. Different calendar and ‘to do list’ software was discussed, and circuit diagrams of single electrode voltage clamp equipment (a biophysical technique of some repute) were presented. Some interesting intricacies of getting complex written languages like Chinese from a Roman-charactered keyboard were discussed, along with facets of LaTeX and the functional properties and uses of a re-configurable class of smart chips.
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Our 6th meeting was our first multimedia jury-rigging of the Grad Club TV to show a presentation, which worked surprisingly well.
Ian made a presentation of his Windows photographic workflow, and its nearest equivalent in Linux. Although the particular idiosyncratic style from the Windows routine was (not surprisingly) tricky to reproduce, the Linux programs acquitted themselves well at doing their jobs, and would allow a Linux-based photographer to work with their photos to their heart’s content.
A list of photographic tools for Linux worth looking at are:
Raw Therapee – RAW converter (makes JPGs or other bitmap files from RAW). Very useful if you want to try to rescue burned highlights and so on.
Qtpfsgui – High Dynamic Range processor. Takes three different exposures (3 separate shots, or 3 differently exposed developments from the same RAW file) and re-tonemaps the HDR into a tone curve for the human eye. Lots of hugely over the top effects, lots of normal looking effects (But good luck getting something subtle in between the two!).
Image J – Scientific image processor. Good for performing mathematical functions on your images, or measuring them in various ways. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll need to ‘convolve’ your image 
Fotoxx – SO much better than I realised earlier. It can develop RAW (although with default settings only), does some really clever arty filters including warping or converting to line art, can do HDR and also panoramics. The way it iteratively produces the panoramas and HDRs before yer very eyes is both intuitive and kind of entertaining. With a simple and really nicely-thought-out user interface, a very intuitive ‘hands on’ click-and-drag approach to various histograms for user input and a good ‘hit rate’ of useable outputs from its various functions, this little program is a great one-stop shop for a Linux photographer looking for a simple and effective tool. Check out their website, this is a nice little program!: http://kornelix.squarespace.com/fotoxx/
GIMP – As well as being the closest thing to Photoshop in Linux, GIMP can do RAW too via plugins such as UFRaw. C2G in GEGL is a great function for creating line art. Use the layers with different modes and opacities to try some different ‘look’s for a photo.
Hugin Panorama Creator – Gives many more projection and alignment options than Fotoxx, (although the latter does a similarly good job of the compositing of panoramas, and is much easier!)
Of course, as ever, many other programs are available in many of the categories here, especially RAW developers and general editors, so have fun and give them a try.
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