I'm trying to play around with RAW image photography instead of JPG, but I've been finding Linux not very cooperative with my Olympus E-510 camera.

Then, I stumbled on a Linux beta version of something called LightZone. This thing is awesome.

Read on for a few sample images and details of my issues.My default was to try to open my RAW images in The Gimp, but I quickly found that every image was garbage, regardless of what raw image library I installed. And when I say garbage, I mean... literally just random noise.

A quick poke around Synaptic package manager presented me with something called RawStudio. Wow, if this thing worked properly, I could imagine it being the be-all end all of open-source RAW management and basic adjustments. Unfortunately this is the best it would produce:

<%image(oss/20080121-rawstudio.jpg|400|300|)%>

That is a screenshot of the image inside of Rawstudio.

I could tweak the colors a bit, but the color channels were all out of whack and it's not very sharp either.

Then I downloaded and tried LightZone for Linux. It's written in Java, so I found it to be somewhat painfully slow. I opened the exact same raw file in LightZone and it produced the following:

<%image(oss/20080121-lightzone.jpg|400|301|)%>

Again, that's a screenshot of the image as it displayed inside LIghtZone. That's how it looks on the camera's LCD. Neither of the two images above were adjusted prior to taking the screenshot - that's before any fixes using LightZone.

A bit of a difference, wouldn't you say? LightZone is an amazing product, and with their soon to be support for Linux, I think it's the product I'm going to buy.

Here's one that I touched up and exported using LightZone: