To 'shop, or Not to 'shop?

That was the question today as a fellow photographer and I discussed the merits of photo retouching.

It came about because I had shared a proof-of-concept for a scene that's coalescing in my head. I expressed concern over how I'm going to hide some rigging in the photo, and my colleague said, "Just clone it out."

I was immediately repulsed by the idea of "just cloning it out", and this reaction surprised me, to be honest. After some thinking, I realized that I don't have a problem with post-production retouching; rather, my beef is that I don't want to do it. It's my personal preference, rather than a rejection of all retouching. (So don't start hating on me just yet!)

Currently I'm doing all my post work with Darktable, because it allows me to smoothly move from shooting to sharing with minimal middlemen. (Try saying that five times fast!) While Darktable does have a spot removal tool for minor blemishes, cloning out a C-stand is beyond the limits of its capabilities.

Darktable also strokes my OCD nature. It never actually modifies the original RAW file; it writes all its changes to a database and a sidecar file. This means that I only have one file, and the entire chain of modifications is applied each time the file is loaded. No change is ever permanent. It's an elegant solution. However, if I export the file to the Gimp to do serious retouching, I've either changed the original file, or made a duplicate. This has long-term scalability implications to my workflow, so I'd need a darn good reason to do it.

The second problem is one of flexibility. If I find solutions to problems during the shoot, before the shutter opens, then I know the problem is solved. If, on the other hand, I say, "I'll just fix that in post," I run the risk that for some reason, I won't be able to fix it in post. (For example, what if the background is too complex to allow me to clone something out?) That means a reshoot. And the idea that I might have to set up and schedule an entire shoot a second time because I didn't take five minutes to fix something on the day makes me sad.

And finally, I personally think it's more clever, in this world of high-tech, to find a low-tech solution to a problem. For example, instead of supporting something on a stand and then cloning out the stand in Photoshop, what about suspending the object using fishing line? The trick is to keep the line from showing up in the photo, but that's just another challenge to solve. In this world where we see so much retouching (and over-retouching,) I want to point to my work and say, "See that amazing thing? That's not 'shopped."

So there.

Adventures with Darktable

As you may know, I rely heavily, almost exclusively, on Linux and open-source software for my day-to-day stuff. I've been very happy with Darktable for managing the workflow associated with having to post-process RAW photographs.

However Darktable, like any other software product, is not without its quirks. For example, I use one of Darktable's export plugins to upload files directly to Flickr, and the other day it stopped working. Normally, Darktable spawns a browser window in which the user must sign into Flickr and authorize Darktable to upload photos to your account. However, recently the plugin stopped spawning the browser window.

After a little digging, I discovered that Darktable uses the gtk_show_uri library call to invoke the browser window. This call invokes the gnome-open binary to actually spawn the browser. When I tried to run gnome-open myself I got an error that Epipany wasn't found.

That was kind of a forehead-slapping moment for me. Recently I'd done a dist-upgrade on my computer, which replaced Gnome 2 with Gnome 3. Like most other people out there with a less than state-of-the-art computer, I hate Gnome 3 for it's inability to stop wasting resources and just get out of the way so I can do my job. So, I've been running Xfce for a little while. It's like all the features of Gnome, without all the bloat. But I digress. What was wrong was that the gtk libraries still thought epiphany was my browser.

I fired up gnome-control-center and, under System Properties, is a section to allow the user to change their default applications. I changed "Epiphany" to "Chromium", and now when I use the Flickr export plugin in Darktable, I get a Chromium window with the Flickr login prompt.