FLOSS software and professional use (was "Photoprint")

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 2023-04-27 at 12:43 -0500, Aaron Rainbolt wrote:
> I think that's more of a matter of preference than a matter of 
> suitability. My workflow for website building involves Vim, Nikola, 
> Chrome, GIMP, and Inkscape. All of them are either unrelated or only 
> barely related, and yet they work together extremely smoothly and do a
> fantastic job in tandem.

Hi,

"photo_printing_". You cannot compare building a websites with preparing
photos for printing or to do similar vector or pixel artwork aimed for
expositions, magazines, advertising posters etc.. Time pressure and
demands on quality vary a lot for all the mentioned and not mentioned
work. Photos and other pixel related artwork or vector graphic artwork
aimed for high quality printing require a different strategy, than doing
artwork for 1920 x 1080 or at best 4K resolution, let alone sRGB colour
space. Btw. for what I'm doing I can use sRGB and I can do it without
needing Pantone colours or even a calibrated display, but this is just
where it starts and I'm not making a living from this work.

In short, graphics destined for websites have the lowest print quality
requirements of anything expected in professional photo and drawing
work. Photographers and artists don't usually work exclusively for
websites and they usually don't write code for websites at all.

Designing and coding websites is professional work, but it's a different
kind of work than all the printing related work.

> When I'm packaging software for Ubuntu, I'm hopping around between
> GNOME Boxes, sbuild, Vim, sometimes Kate, and even Qt Creator in some
> instances.

This is unrelated to making a living with photography and/or drawing.

> This is the UNIX philosophy (to some degree anyway). A tool should do 
> one thing and do that one thing well.

C'mon! Are you serious? You are comparing apples with oranges. And btw.
Linux isn't even POSIX. Let alone that for example systemd is an init
system that provides a container feature. But this all is unrelated to
professional photo and drawing suits. Those suits are also different
programs, but those programs provide a consistent GUI and workflow.

> GIMP is awesome at photo editing and even image creation if you use it
> right. It doesn't do anything else  because it shouldn't have to. It
> does its one job (ok, really a whole family of related jobs) quite
> well, and it's perfectly usable for that purpose. I'm fine with having
> to migrate from there to a different app once my image is prepped.

You are talking about the work you are doing. For developing photos,
even when using sRGB colour space, I already would use another Linux
app, if I would insist in using Linux. Maybe Darktable, maybe Digikam, I
don't know.

> Also, since desktop publishing is coming up somewhat frequently, have 
> you ever looked into LibreOffice Draw?

Yes, but I did not consider to test it. You can not seriously compare it
with common used proprietary desktop publishing software from different
companies.

FWIW I used ghostscript by command line to convert a PDF for the final
product. You cannot expect from each photographers or drawers that they
are willing to learn how to convert a PDF to another PDF by using
ghostscript.

Regards,
Ralf