On photo software in Linux and Windows

It's been over a year since I posted last, and, to be honest, it's a year that I would prefer not to repeat. But back to photography. This post is about photo software (in a way).

As some of you know, I am a big proponent of open source for content and software. Most of my photographs are posted under Creative Commons license with little or no restrictions on their use. In my company, we use almost exclusively open source software including applications such as OpenOffice.org and many others.

However, I have been loath to give up Adobe Photoshop, which is truly an excellent piece of software, and I value paying for good technology. But I have continued to search for good alternatives. For my serious editing jobs, the GIMP offers a very solid alternative, but it still lacks 16-bit color depth support. For casual family snapshots, I often use Picasa, but I never liked its interface very much. Recently, I found a application called Fotoxx that is absolutely wonderful. It's designed just for photo editing, but it is easy to use, yet very powerful, and it even supports 16-bit color depth. I find myself using it almost exclusively these days.

One big caveat: it only runs on Linux. Personally, I want to switch to Ubuntu Linux full time, but I am stuck with Windows for the time being for only one reason: Netflix. I love streaming movies, and Netflix only works under Windows because it uses Microsoft's Silverlight platform for video delivery and digital rights management. Arghhhh!

But I found a great solution: I run Ubuntu in an Oracle VirtualBox (also open source!) and then I run Fotoxx. I can set up shared folders so that my Ubuntu "window" can access all my photographs on my Windows computer. Fast, easy and it works wonderfully. And, let's face it, Ubuntu is downright awesome.

Well, that's it for now. I hope to post more photos soon. I have some great photos from Germany that I want to share with you.

Radzfoto