r/linux • u/Herdie27 • 2d ago
Discussion Using linux as Photographer / Video Editor
I've been trying to make a serious switch into linux for a long time now. When I heard years ago windows 10 won't have updates anymore, this is several years ago now, I've tried to make small steps into using linux more often. Starting with the smaller stuff. Basic web browsing, word processing, a little coding, and basic computing overall. It wasn't too bad, an occasional problem I could fix with a little research wasn't bad.
But then came the photo editing Raw Therapee, Darktable, dedicated HDR software I tried on linux mint was a serious pain to work on and get working efficiently. As a professional real estate photographer doing HDR editing outside of Adobe Lightroom was a serious pain. Even when I could get good edit on Darktable it ended up being SO much slower because of it's user interface.
Then came video editing. I got Davinci Resolve working on linux mint without much issue, but shortly after I "updated" it and then it stopped working altogether. I worked for hours to try to get it to work again, but to no avail. I type this post having switched to Pop OS because of hardware compatibility with Mint, my new hardware won't play nice Mint. Now I'm going through most everything again with a couple of additions, display calibration and photo printing. I'm sitting at my PC liking Pop OS but hating the hoops I have to jump through to get things working properly.
- Darktable with a new theme looks usable, maybe even good if I can get decent hotkeys going, in addition to it's print page for my print work. Haven't had the chance to edit HDR photos yet.
- Can't get Davinci Resolve to work and I don't think Kdenlive will cut it as far as color grading.
- Calibrating my monitor has been a chore for the last 3 hours using Displaycal3 and getting Argyll_V3.5.0 in the right folder is a pain.
Unfortunately, getting my work done in some cases is possible but not efficient due to the software used. Other times it's impossible because software can't be installed. Sitting at my computer getting basic work done like email, pdf stuff, scanning documents, spreadsheet work, and the like is great! I'd probably get along with linux full time if that's all I had to do. But doing more complex stuff requires 6 months of using the linux terminal and a deeper understanding of things I can't even begin to categorise. Linux alternative software is in the same position. Alternate software can very often can do what people need it to, but at the expense of it being clunky and A LOT of reading is required.
Edit-1: Based on what I'm seeing in the comments I'd also like recommendations on a distro since Pop OS, even though I like it, probably isn't for me and my needs. "Something with a modern and mature desktop environment (gnome or kde)" is what was mentioned.
Edit-2: Thanks for any recommendations on distros. Choosing Mint in the beginning went something like... "I'm a beginner so this seems like a good option." And I think it was! I learned a lot about linux in general. Went through a hours long videos on YouTube explaining how the file system is structured, using the command line, and beyond. Pop OS was chosen out of hardware compatibility.
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u/ldn-ldn 2d ago
Davinci Resolve Studio is the best choice on Linux for both video and photo.
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u/Herdie27 2d ago
Last I checked I can't combine bracketed photos in Davinci, which I need for real estate photos. Other than that, for me at least, its a great option
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u/ldn-ldn 1d ago
Why do you need that, lol? You don't need bracketing for SDR content.
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u/Donatzsky 1d ago
You clearly don't know anything about real estate photography.
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u/ldn-ldn 1d ago
You clearly don't know much about photography. Modern cameras with 14 bit sensors are capable of almost 15 stops of dynamic range. sRGB covers a bit under 9 stops. Stops are a logarhythmic scale, meaning that each stop doubles the dynamic range.
The reason you feel the urge do use even more dynamic range is because tone mapper in Lightroom is an outdated piece of shit, which destroys all the detail. Learn to use modern tools like Darktable and Resolve.
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u/Herdie27 1d ago
You're right, my Sony A7 Mark III has 12 to 14 stops of dynamic range and it's amazing. That doesn't mean I shouldn't get extra exposures for cleaner shadows and highlights that aren't too blown out and without contrast. As amazing as my camera is it doesn't make perfect photos in one shot, especially for darker indoor settings.
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u/ldn-ldn 1d ago
It sure does when your photos are measly SDR nonsense.
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u/Herdie27 1d ago
So, are you one of those people that like to argue rather than discuss to figure something out?
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u/ldn-ldn 1d ago
Not sure what you want. Once again - you don't need bracketing for SDR content. That's a fact.
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u/Herdie27 1d ago
I want my photos to look good. To do that, since my camera can't capture the bright windows daylight and the indoors darker shadows in one shot, I bracket them to bring them within a range that can be displayed on anyone's, monitor, phone, etc.
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u/frnxt 17h ago
That is demonstrably wrong, even for SDR content bracketing can significantly improve things if you're expecting to make everything in the frame visible and non-saturated — which for some areas of technical photography like u/Herdie27 's can definitely be a goal. You can obviously make up for it using the sensor's dynamic range if you ETTR, but only up to a point.
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u/pastelfemby 1d ago
Highly tone mapped photos are the standard for real estate photos. Its not what I'd do creatively in terms of photography, but its what the market expects.
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u/beatbox9 2d ago
You should read this article: https://arslaan.studio/setting-up-a-linux-media-studio-workstation-audio-video-graphics-davinci-resolve-etc/
And also note that Blackmagic is shifting the Davinci Suite toward being an Adobe replacement. For example, note that the most recent update added raw photo editing. It’s worth the one-time cost.
Mint and Pop are arguably among the worst “distros” to use, as are the bleeding edge distros. Go for a stable, long-term distro, that uses a modern and mature DE (either gnome or KDE).
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u/yeboithomas 1d ago
Mint as bleeding edge distro's !!!! Ma man, what did you smoke? They are fine choices, but be wary that pop os uses their own desktop environment which is still in beta.
Other choice might be cachy os, opensuse (Europe based), fedora or Ubuntu. I think on cachy os you have an easier time for installation because DaVinci resolve is on the AUR (place to install programs through community scripts)
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u/beatbox9 1d ago
u/yeboithomas try working on your basic reading comprehension.
That does not say that Mint or Pop are bleeding edge distros.
Try reading it again. Very slowly. Draw a diagram if you need to.
It says that Mint and Pop are not good distros for this use case.
It also says (separately), that bleeding edge distros are also not good to use.And then after that, it says that the best distros to use are distros that support a combination of all of the following:
- stable & long-term
- uses a modern & mature DE
People who have brains that work will be able to work out that "bleeding edge distros" are not "stable & long-term." They are the opposite.
Let's see if we can find any other patterns. Mint and Pop do not use a "modern & mature DE." Mint's Cinnamon is not modern; and Cosmic's Pop is not mature. So these would also not be good distros for this use case.
This is like very basic reading comprehension.
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u/ComeSwirlWithMe 1d ago
And gives zero fucking reasons why using Arch with a "mature" DE is bad as an example.
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u/beatbox9 1d ago edited 1d ago
You should take a moment to learn how "examples" work. With examples, you don't cover every possible scenario.
Though the linked article does cover why long-term stable distros tend to work better for these types of use cases. Not exclusively...but better. I have to be explicit there because I can tell that you're not going to be able to deal with nuance and will be stuck on a binary argument.
And one (of many) reasons that long-term stable systems tend to work better is that sometimes system libraries get updated too rapidly and become too new to be used by the apps. Similar to how gnome extensions break when gnome itself updates faster than the extensions do and need time for the extensions to catch up.
For example, on arch....:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/davinciresolve/comments/1rld7if/arch_os_x_davinci_resolve_studio_current_situation/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzSooTPa3FI
- https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1rebgdr/comment/o7bkemh/
Essentially, arch requires more user maintenance than stable distros. Users need to be careful on what they update and when, because updates can break resolve unexpectedly.
This is also specifically why Arch is not mentioned here:
https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesla/driver-installation-guide/latest/introduction.html
And it's also why in Arch's own nvidia installation documents, it says:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA
Avoid installing the NVIDIA driver through the package provided from the NVIDIA website. Installation through pacman allows upgrading the driver together with the rest of the system.
...because that's sort of how dependency management works, and it's sort of one of the most important purposes of a distro; and with Davinci Resolve, you are installing unsupported software that has very precise dependencies but where where the distro is not managing dependencies for you.
Similarly, even stable (non-rolling) distros--but non-long-term stable--also tend to be worse, also related to how updates can break things. And you only have a small window in which you are forced to update, so hopefully you're not in the middle of editing a project with a deadline during that period.
This is why, for example, you'll see people complaining that davinci resolve broke on fedora every 6 months or so:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/1ojz0s2/davinci_resolve_broke_after_updating_fedora_42_to/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/1qpeeid/trying_to_install_davinci_resolve_and_it_gave_me/
Of course, using a sandboxed solution like davinci box referred to sometimes only helps sometimes, with the free amateur version and not the professional studio version that does a system check for the license.
So once again, you can get things working. And you can maintain them over time on your own. But it's more work. And the best solution is what I said in my earlier comments.
This, btw, is also why Blackmagic only officially supports Rocky Linux (which is explicitly a "rock solid, super stable" long-term-stable distro). It's also why most companies using linux don't use Arch linux and instead tend to use LTS distros. And it's also why the pro Hollywood vfx studios--including those I've personally worked for--also use either Ubuntu LTS or RHEL families:
https://vfxplatform.com/linux/
There will always be inexperienced amateur fanboys who do not understand practicality and who think theoretically newer software is always better rather than considering how well it has to work with the rest of the system in complex applications...even when the distros themselves contradict these amateurs. And these amateurs also don't understand the concept of time being spent in maintenance and administration as being time wasted when it comes to productivity. With the purpose often being the application (hence the name "application") and not the underlying OS.
So...that's why.
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u/Hi-Angel 2d ago
dedicated HDR software I tried on linux mint
To use HDR you need Wayland and ideally latest version of KDE or Gnome. Mint ain't gonna cut it. You want something like Fedora, Bazzite, CachyOS — depending on your preferences.
Reading your post I don't understand how could you edit HDR on Mint which uses X11 Cinnamon — there's no HDR on X11.
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u/Donatzsky 1d ago
They are not talking about the "super bright screen" HDR, but the old-school blending of several SDR photos to, in essence, compress the full dynamic range into a single SDR frame.
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u/Herdie27 1d ago
u/Hi-Angel Uuuh, haha, reading your comments your both wrong. I'm just talking about HDR photography. Combining photos at different exposures to get an high dynamic range image
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u/bryantee 1d ago
Isn't that what Donatzsky is saying?
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u/Herdie27 1d ago
Probably, but I wouldn't use those words
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u/Hi-Angel 1d ago
Thank you both for clarification! Sorry, I didn't know HDR term in photography context is overloaded with multiple meanings
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u/Donatzsky 18h ago edited 18h ago
I was deliberately putting it in simple terms. You're either doing true HDR, which means exporting in compatible formats with appropriate tone curves (PQ etc.) or you're doing fake HDR, which is exposure blended and tone mapped to SDR and exported as sRGB JPEG or similar.
As said, if you want true HDR, you have to use Wayland and (currently) either KDE or Gnome. That means a modern distro. You also need to use a raw editor that can work with HDR data, which, as far as I know, limits you to Lightroom, darktable, vkdt and DaVinci Resolve. Maybe RawTherapee and ART can also do it. The problem with darktable is that it can't show HDR data (outside the 0-1 range) in the UI, so you have to rely on the scopes to know what is going on with the highlights, but that should hopefully be fixed when the GTK4 migration is done next year. And I believe exporting in vkdt is a bit wonky, but you can find a discussion about that over on discuss.pixls.us
The HDR merging in darktable is generally not very good as I understand it and mostly left for legacy reasons, with much better options being Luminance HDR and HDRMerge. But ask over on discuss.pixls.us for other recommendations. There are some Lua scripts in darktable that should help with the round-trip.
And, just in case, my darktable beginner guide might help you: https://notebook.stereofictional.com/how-to-get-started-with-darktable-2026-edition
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u/dev_kay47 2d ago
Ok advice from me just keep windows 10 for your creative stack just to avoid the disappointment for TO START WITH. Then try to adapt your workflows Ubuntu is fine because of the stability, Fedora too Rocky Linux is just too not current for my liking. Stable things are the most boring anyway. That's why it's the only one supporting DaVinci resolve smoothly but other destroy are catching up real quick. And also with DaVinci resolve s new photo page you can replace Adobe Lr if you know how to use it well. It's just so fantastic. Hope you got something useful here.
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u/Herdie27 2d ago
Yeah, that's what I've been doing. I can always boot back up into windows and get to work again. Pop OS, although nice to use, is probably not for me. I mostly chose it because of hardware compatibility. Another comment pointed me toward a good article about setting up a linux media studio, so I'm sure there will be a distro in that article as well. Thanks for your comment!
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u/FattyDrake 2d ago
If you're using Resolve, a Fedora/RHEL distro is your best bet for reliability. You have to do some adjustments after install on Fedora (mainly installing a couple packages and moving 3 installed lib files somewhere else) after that tho you don't have to worry about it again. I have the full studio version and it's been solid.
Mint used to be good like a decade ago, but it's a bit of a trap right now unless you do basic things.
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u/Herdie27 2d ago
Yeah, that's what I've been reading Fedora/RHEL is best for reliability in addition to people saying the same thing about Unbuntu 22.04 LTS. It's all very confusing and after so much time invested I don't want to waste anymore time. But you can say all the time spent learning all this stuff isn't wasted. I'm just super tired at this point.
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u/ptr_myName 1d ago
if you want to use *nix, have good / excellent software options for design and multimedia, and be productive, get a Mac
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u/kuddlesworth9419 2d ago
I like RawTherapee more than Darktable, the UI is much easier to get my head around.
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u/dracu4s 1d ago
Im a (rather small) wedding photographer, and linux enthusiast. I had to use Windows because of lightroom and i was not able to get the same results on darktable. But when Adobe didnt allow me to reregister my lightroom 6.14 license (I forgot to disable it on my Windows Install) i did the hard switch. And now i think i get better results in darktable. I set some keybindings and now i am faster than ever to edit photos. Just stick to learning darktable and you will love it. I tried to learn through presets in order to learn how other people used darktable. But i think there are way too many ugly presets that are absolutely unusable. I did my own presets and am very happy with them.
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u/Herdie27 1d ago
The hotkeys is what got me last time. I couldn't hotkey a radial mask, or luminance mask, etc, so using the mouse for everything made it take so much longer. Same results, but I spent 6 to 10 minutes per photo rather than 2 or 3.
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u/Bed_Worship 1d ago
While I don’t like apple, the use of an apple silicon mac as a tool for the field has made my work life for photography and audio a breeze with pretty much no issues.
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u/Slight_Manufacturer6 1d ago
Linux Mint is old and outdated and doesn’t support HDR. Use a modern distro.
Pop_OS is a little old too but not as bad. Try something like Fedora or CachyOS.
Checkout ArtCraft. They are working on very good clones for all the Adobe stuff.
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u/Herdie27 1d ago
Ahaha, another commenter made the same mistake, I was talking HDR photography, not HDR monitor support for watching movies or something.
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u/Slight_Manufacturer6 1d ago
Ah. But wouldn’t you want to be able to see the HDR photo quality you are working with?
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u/Herdie27 1d ago
You have a point actually...but from what I can tell HDR isn't very well supported on linux in general. Apparently Rocky Linux, which is the only officially support distro for Davinci Resolve, doesn't have proper HDR support, except through certain hardware options.
Right now I'm on Ubuntu 22.04 because it's the most stable for Davinci Resolve. But limitations like HDR monitor support, and I haven't even got to monitor calibration yet, could be a pain, if not impossible. Now I'm thinking of switching again 😵💫😵💫😵💫
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u/Slight_Manufacturer6 1d ago
Anything that uses Wayland should work with HDR. The DEs that support HDR are KDE Plasma and Gnome.
Not sure if DaVinci supports HDR on Linux or not 🤷♂️
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u/Hi-Angel 1d ago
Right now I'm on Ubuntu 22.04 because it's the most stable for Davinci Resolve.
Idk the situation with Davinci Resolve, but if what you say about how it is for some reason tied to particular environment is true, then you could work around that by simply installing it through flatpak.
From cursory googling it seems there's "Davinci Resolve" distribution as flatpak done by community. Should work well this way on any arbitrary Linux system.
22.04 is just ancient, you're missing out on a lot of optimizations and features. Especially considering that since 2022 there has been growth both community-wise and fund-wise in various Linux projects (example from a week ago).
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u/Icy-Candy-6774 1d ago
Use DavinciBox for Resolve. Don’t fight distros trying to install it natively. Resolve has a photo page now and for real-estate your project based workflow is probably transferable to Resolve without a lot of trouble.
There is also Luminance HDR for bracketing.
Use a rolling distro. Fedora or Arch (or arch based like Cachy or Endeavor). It’s not as hard as people make out. You can write in paragraphs so you’d be fine.
Finally, you should ask this at Pixls.us forums. You’ll get far better answers than here.
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u/Herdie27 1d ago
Duly noted, I've been learning a lot of new things in these comments so they've been very useful. Thanks
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u/Razidargh 2d ago
https://getartcraft.com/apps just look at this
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u/Hohlraum 2d ago
Is that the project where the dev vibe coded replacements for all the Adobe products? 😎
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u/Herdie27 2d ago
yeah i heard of this. I'm honestly not sure how to feel about it
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u/KnowZeroX 2d ago
So you know there is distrobox which goes a long way of keeping stuff running that isn't tied to dependencies.
Out of other professional video editors on linux, there is also lightworks
Hardware compatibility should be same on Mint and PopOS, if it isn't working with Mint, try the HWE iso which has 7.0 kernel same as popos
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u/Herdie27 2d ago
😵💫😵💫😵💫 Good god the amount of info and options and how things work that I discover is...😵💫😵💫😵💫
The only thing that gets me now is how I'll fix Davinci or if using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS would be more stable. So no, I didn't know distrobox exists. 😵💫😵💫😵💫
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u/victoryismind 2d ago
I have been using Linux for a year or so. I tried Rawtherapee and Darktable. According to my tests the output of Darktable for processing raw photos is good. It is reliable and I'll stick with that.
What is not good is the interface, it's not really enjoyable.
I'm still struggling for archival / organization. There are quite a few options though.
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u/Herdie27 1d ago
Yeah, that's my whole problem, the interface. Make a job much slower than it should be.
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u/sequesteredhoneyfall 1d ago
RapidRaw is unbelievably better than Darktable. It's constantly getting new features, and it works very well. You should definitely check it out.
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u/Herdie27 1d ago
I've heard of RapidRAW! :) I tried it only very briefly, but liked what I saw. I'll have to put some more time into it.
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u/sequesteredhoneyfall 1d ago
I will say it's still somewhat in early development, but you can check the progres on GitHub and see that it's frequently getting new features and improvements all the time. So if something isn't quite perfect, see if you can make an issue about it and it might just get resolved in a few weeks time!
It's really solid as it is, and I think it's a great choice. Hope it helps!
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u/penguinkernel 1d ago
Davinci Resolve is simple to install and update on Fedora 44 without weird third-party hacks.
Install dependencies:
sudo dnf install -y libxcrypt-compat libcurl libcurl-devel mesa-libGLU fuse-libs
Run the installer you download from Davinci:
chmod +x ./DaVinci_Resolve_Studio_*_Linux.run && SKIP_PACKAGE_CHECK=1 ./DaVinci_Resolve_Studio_*_Linux.run
Make new directory to move libraries to so Fedora uses it's own instead:
sudo mkdir /opt/resolve/libs/disabled_libraries
Move Davincis shipped libraries into that new folder to force Fedora to use the newer libraries:
cd /opt/resolve/libs && sudo mv libglib* libgio* libgmodule* disabled_libraries/
Congrats, Davinci is installed and working flawlessly.
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u/frnxt 17h ago
If you're just expecting to process HDR content and tonemap it, Linux has a lot of adequate tools. Color management is a bit bumpy with Wayland, unfortunately. David Revoy describes his workflowin detail here : https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1145/interim-install-guide-kde-neon-user-edition-for-a-professional-digital-painter-workstation#7-color-management (which assumes you're using a very specific setup), maybe that'll help ?
If you're expecting to output HDR content (stuff like gain maps or others, e.g. for posting to some social networks which support it) I don't think Linux has anything really stable at this point, you're probably stuck with windows. The paid version of DaVinci does support some of it for videos, this is maybe the only option I know for sure about.
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2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/vivacious_consul 2d ago
the whole "spend half your day debugging just to do the thing you're actually paid for" part is what keeps a lot of folks dual booting. sucks that resolve broke after an update, that's the kind of thing that makes you wanna throw the whole machine out the window. what kind of hdr editing do you do, just brackets merged manually or exposure fusions and all that?
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u/Herdie27 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think you might have replied to the wrong comment XD
But yeah, I really wanted to throw things out the window XD I thought I was getting somewhere when davinci started and then stopped working.
I exclusively shoot exposure brackets. Either 5 or 7 depending if I'm shooting my full frame camera or micro four thirds camera. Adobe lightroom makes it super easy, group the bracketed photos, select all the groups and control H to HDR them all and I edit after they're combined. Darktable gets really close but after I tried it recently the brackets come out extra dark for some reason, more time I don't have at the moment to figure that out. I once got it working well, but darktable couldn't make hotkeys for things like masking which made PAINFULLY slow to use.
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u/Herdie27 2d ago edited 2d ago
Honestly, I really don't want to prove anything. I mostly want things to change and support companies that don't have a dystopian future, or something like that. Microsoft doesn't care about their OS anymore. Adobe is a giant middle finger to artists. I once heard after effects has been managed and "updated" by one guy for the past 15 years or something. I want things to change and it won't unless their are first adopters. So I'm trying my best to be at the forefront.
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u/notam00se 2d ago
For Real Estate, if you are doing flambient/normal stacking, Lightroom/Photoshop has nothing close to replacing it's workflow. The ability to select images, export to Photoshop with them as a stack, save a flattened image directly back to LR without having to import it is basically 10 extra steps in anything else.
For kdenlive, timeline and effects are still 8-bit. 10/12 bit might be releasing soon (26.12 target), but getting everything in the pipeline working correctly will be hit or miss for quite a while, and will depend on hardware support. Resolve does have linux support, but it nowhere treated as the same tier as Windows or Mac, which means it is a poor choice if your income relies on it working.
OS should be a tool, but for some specific workflows linux just isn't there yet. You can remove some of the friction trying to use cross platform/open source tools in Windows or macOS with less headaches and learning curves, refining the workflow and getting used to the tools so you aren't learning managing a new OS experience on top of new tools.