Managing Digital Images with digiKam

Jana Jaeger

work in progress

$Revision: 255 $

$Date: 2007-05-15 17:18:17 +0200 (Di, 15 Mai 2007) $

This tutorial walks you through the entire digiKam image processing workflow. Once you got your images onto your hard disk, you probably still want to optimize certain parameters about your images before you finally put them online or print them. Learn about the most important criteria to a successful (digital) image and how you can use digiKam to tweak your images to meet them.

Importing Images

download from camera, import folders, scanner

Fixing and Tweaking

hot pixels, red eye correction, some distortion corrections

Managing Colors

Histograms, Color curves, white balance etc.

Applying Effects

Composition and Cropping

Batch Processing Images

RAW Image Conversion

Exporting Your Image Collection

Other Options

While digiKam offers a comprehensive set of image editing and management functions, there are other applications in the market that offer similar or better functionality. Some of these are Open Source, but there are also non-Open Source options available. The following table lists some of functions you would expect of an image management tool versus the Linux applications providing this functionality. Both Open Source and non-Open Source options are included.

Table 1.1. 

Functionality

Open Source Options

Non-Open Source Options

Manage albums

digiKam, f-spot

???

View & manage tags

digiKam, f-spot

Change date and time

digiKam, f-spot

???

View image metadata

digiKam, f-spot (basic)

BibblePro

Manage comments

digiKam, f-spot

???

Import from scanner

digiKam, GIMP

???

Export to HTML and remote galleries

digiKam, f-spot

???

Workflow/queue management

-

BibblePro

Batch processing

digiKam

BibblePro

RAW conversion

digiKam, dcraw, ufraw

BibblePro

Lens distortion correction

digiKam

BibblePro???

Anti-vignetting

digiKam

Chromatic aberration control

-

BibblePro

Perspective correction

digiKam

BibblePro

Hot pixel correction

digiKam

BibblePro

Red eye reduction

digiKam, f-spot

???

Horizon adjustment

digiKam, f-spot, GIMP

BibblePro

Filters & effects

digiKam (several), f-spot (two), GIMP

BibblePro?

Black & white conversion

digiKam, f-spot, GIMP

BibblePro?

Channel mixer

digiKam, GIMP

BibblePro?

Histogram

digiKam, f-spot

BibblePro

White balance

digiKam (advanced), f-spot (basic)

Color curves

digiKam, GIMP

BibblePro

ICC color profile management

digiKam, GIMP

BibblePro


For More Information

Photography in general and composition:

Digital photography:

digiKam related::

http://docs.kde.org/development/en/extragear-graphics/digikam/index.html