Digital photography is hot, just look at all the different sites where people can share their photos. However, when you get a little more serious about photography you quickly run into an expensive area of software packages. Just do a search for image organizers, image manipulation programs (Adobe Photoshop being by far the most popular). So, what if you just bought your nice little camera and you want to experiment without making all the costs?
Here is my setup which is very usefull and most of all free:
- An free operating system, I suggest Ubuntu version 7.04 or higher
- Install an image organizer F-Spot which already has a lot of features, including a Flickr upload feature.
- You will want to use The Gimp to perform image manipulations, it is similar to Adobe Photoshop.
- If you shoot in RAW mode you will want to install ufraw and gimp-ufraw (a gimp plugin) which allows you to load a variety of RAW formats (my Nikon D50 raw files are perfectly supported).
You now have a full setup to work with digital photographs. While you are at installing software, make sure you also install a backup program to ensure the safety of your digital photographs.