Ada

Came here to make this joke. Was an hour too late…

Yeah, it does look great.

But in terms of tiling WMs, I have high hopes for Cosmic! It’s coming along really well (though not as pretty as Hyprland)

I’m curious, did it solve your problem?

Vanilla arch is nothing like the manually installed arch of old. It’s as easy to install and use as any other distro. I started with arch too, and my now permanent distro is arch based

The Hyprland dev is enough to make sure I never use Hyprland

I had high hopes that I could make them work that way, but no luck :\

Upscayl isn’t much use to me, because I don’t need upscaling, only noise reduction.

Aydin appears to only work on PNG files, not my RAW files

Not quite. I’m talking about high ISO images. Most of my photos are not high ISO, so most of my photos don’t need this.

For a professional, they generally don’t shoot in high ISO, because it degrades the image quality. They use external lighting, flashes, reflectors, fast lenses etc, anything and everything they can, to avoid shooting high ISO. So a pro, on a pro shoot, won’t need dedicated noise reduction software, and can use the profiles built in to apps like darktable

I take pride in capturing the image, not relying on software to recreate it the way I wish it had been shot

Unless you’re shooting flat JPGs with no photo modes enabled, and not doing any post processing, then you’re not getting that result. And even if you do that, two cameras shooting the same scene will produce different images, because the process of converting RAW sensor data to the reduced colour palette and bit depth of a JPG image, involves an algorithm deciding how best to recreate (not capture) what you saw with your eye, and no two cameras do it the same way, and neither produce a “true” capture of what you saw.

Ultimately, it’s a meaningless distinction. My camera does in body image compositing, allowing long exposures that updates the original frame, but only with light sources that have changed since it was taken, meaning in body software stacking that ensures point sources don’t blow out on long exposures, but moving sources get tracked. It uses AI subject recognition to drive its auto focus. It has a 120frame buffer than records records directly the buffer whilst holding the shutter button half down, and then writes them all to the card when you press, effectively letting you capture moments that you would normally have missed, because human reflexes are imperfect. And the RAW software that comes with the camera literally uses AI noise reduction.

So for me to draw the line and say that AI (non generative AI) driven noise reduction is a problem would be a bit hypocritical of me.

As it is, the camera hardware itself does solid noise reduction on the JPGs it produces (using algorithms built in to the firmware) giving really nice results even at high ISOs. But the only way to replicate that with a RAW file, is using the camera supplied RAW software (which doesn’t work on linux), or by using a 3rd partyAI noise reduction app (which don’t work on linux). If I don’t use them, then I’m in the strange situation where my high ISO JPG preview photos look better than an end to end post processed RAW file.

If I was “embracing the flaws that my camera creates” I would be shooting in JPEG mode, using images mostly straight out of the camera, and they would be less noisy than what I can achieve with current linux tools.

I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and using m43 (or four thirds before it) for most of that time. I know what I want from my photography, and I know the tools that give it to me. What I want is for the image to look like the scene that I saw. I don’t care if it’s a pixel perfect match for it. I don’t care about embracing the flaws that a camera introduces, flaws that don’t exist when viewed through the human eye (reduced dynamic range, sensor noise etc), out of some sense of “purity”. Purity that was lost the moment I pressed the shutter on a digital camera that has to encode the image in software to make it visible.

Dedicated noise reduction software like Topaz and DxO rely on the GPU. And because of that, they don’t work on Wine or VMs (unless you have a dedicated GPU and can get GPU passthrough functioning).

I use darktable and digikam for every other step of my workflow, but that one step, I just can’t do with Linux

Unless you have very peculiar hobbies.

Or you take your photography a bit too seriously! Good noise reduction software is next to impossible to do on Linux. It’s the only reason I have a windows box in my house

I’m a hobby photographer. I have to keep a windows machine in my house just so I can run some of the software I need for my photography.

I’ve transitioned what I can to linux equivalents, and digiKam and Darktable are my daily drivers now, but Darktable is a HUGE learning curve for someone who hasn’t used it before. You are literally starting again with learning how to edit your images. It’s not simply a case of learning “how to do the same things in a new environment” but “learning a new paradigm, almost from the ground up”. I love Darktable, but it took a dedicated desire not to run windows software and then months of practice before I could start to reproduce things that I could do in Lightroom in minutes with little experience.

And on top of that, dedicated noise reduction software (which requires a good GPU) basically doesn’t exist on linux, and is next to impossible to run with wine or even VMs, because of the reliance on a GPU. And that means I have to keep a windows machine around to run my noise reduction. Dual booting doesn’t even work, because that means my photo workflow suddenly needs a reboot. So, a second machine, which is not ideal…

Which is a lot of words to say that it’s not always about being resistant to change or accepting alternatives. Sometimes there are no alternatives, and sometimes the “change” is a HUGE change. Unless a photographer is driven by ideological reasons to move off Windows like I was, it’s not going to be worth the hit for most people. And even then, I still have to run a windows box too…

Image noise. For photography

Really good image noise reduction software.

That’s pretty much the only thing I miss, and I don’t miss it enough to suffer through Windows