FLOSS software and professional use (was "Photoprint")

Thu Apr 27 19:48:12 UTC 2023

On 4/27/23 14:15, Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users wrote:
> 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.
At this point I thought we were no longer on the topic of 
non-professional photo printing. I was tackling professional use cases 
in general (and the use of FLOSS software in general for that). Perhaps 
that's where the confusion is arising. But at the same time, my mom used 
GIMP for printing photos as well, also with very good results. I have 
the results hanging on my wall and they are beautiful.
> 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.
I am well aware that there are some "catch-all" tools in the Linux 
world, including systemd. My point was that the fact that you don't have 
your photo editor and your desktop publisher as part of the same suite 
shouldn't hinder professional use in general. It may not be the workflow 
that some of us prefer, but it's a workflow that some of us like very much.
>> 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.

Perhaps I misunderstood you - I originally thought you were saying that 
FLOSS software in general was inferior to proprietary offerings by major 
companies, whereas now I think you are talking specifically about the 
realm of desktop publishing and photo manipulation. I still don't agree, 
but I also see where I was getting off track.

As for Draw's usability for professional work, you might want to look at 
it more closely. It has a surprising number of features (more than even 
I realized until looking at it just now) and looks like it might work 
quite well. I will definitely be looking into it more closely for stuff 
I do in the future.

> 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.
Agreed.
> Regards,
> Ralf
>
-- 
Aaron Rainbolt
Lubuntu Developer
https://github.com/ArrayBolt3
https://launchpad.net/~arraybolt3
@arraybolt3:lubuntu.me on Matrix, arraybolt3 on irc.libera.chat

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OpenPGP_0x6169B9B4248C0464.asc
Type: application/pgp-keys
Size: 4853 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP public key
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20230427/4290ff17/attachment.key>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OpenPGP_signature
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 840 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20230427/4290ff17/attachment.sig>