digiKam: The All-in-one Photo Workflow Tool

by Dmitri Popov

We review the key features of the open source digiKam image management tool and show you how to use it to set up your own photo workflow.

Similar to GIMP, digiKam is a free open source package but, while GIMP is a pure image editing application, digiKam excels at managing and processing photos too. In fact, the two applications complement each other, so you can use digiKam to keep tabs on your photo collection and do some basic photo tweaking and leave the job of advanced photo retouching to GIMP. Now that we’ve sorted that out, let’s whet your appetite with a closer look at some of digiKam’s key features.

While commercial tools like Adobe Lightroom and Nikon Capture NX2 are popular choices among serious amateurs and professional photographers alike, they are not the only fish in the sea. And before you splash out serious money on high-end software, you might want to consider lesser known yet powerful alternatives like digiKam. While this open source application reigns supreme on the Linux platform, it still remains relatively unknown among Windows and Mac OS X users – primarily because there was, until recently, no easy way to install and run digiKam on these platforms. However, the digiKam developers made the latest beta version of digiKam available as a Windows installer, which makes it significantly easier to give digiKam a try.

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• Highlights of this issue’s free DVD include a complete eBook, sample images from the articles and tests in the magazine and a special offer discount for a full license of the Helicon Focus software introduced in our focus stacking article. Our additional free software includes a series of FotoTV.com videos on black-and-white photography from the early 20th century right up to today.

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Free DVD, including:

• The Art of Black and White Photography (eBook):
  This 272-page book by Torsten Andreas Hoffmann describes how to compose successful monochrome images
• Helicon Focus (Full Version):
  This powerful program creates one completely focused image from several partially focused images by combining the correctly focused areas from each.
• DeblurMyImage (Full version):
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• Black-and-white Photography (Videos):
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