I am not a professional by any means, but I like to know I can get the most out of my tools if the need arises. That means shooting in RAW along side JPEG so I can take control of image processing settings or correct little mistakes such as under-exposure or incorrect white balance. RAW files contain raw sensor data from the camera (duh) and must be processed by special programs before they can be printed or shared. My camera came with the Canon Digital Photo Professional software which I’ve heard is pretty good. There are other (expensive) commercial options such as Adobe Lightroom. Obviously none of these work in Solaris (though they might work in Wine), so I decided to explore the open-source offerings.

Fortunately, this is a good time in the open-source world for RAW processing. Tools like UFRaw and LensFun are maturing rapidly and beginning to give their commercial counterparts a run for their money. I spent the past week porting them, and the color management software, Argyll, to OpenSolaris.

Argyll

Argyll is a suite of color management tools for Unix and Windows. It can be used to calibrate displays, cameras, scanners, and printers. When all of your equipment is properly calibrated, then colors should appear the same on all devices. So if I were to photograph a stop sign, it would appear to be the same red on my monitor as in real life.

Color calibration requires special equipment. For your monitor, you need a colorimeter. I already had an X-rite i1Display to calibrate my TVs, and it works just fine with Argyll and Solaris (using libusb). Following these instructions I was able to calibrate my monitors in a few minutes. It was so easy I did my work monitors and laptop too!

Camera calibration was just as easy following Pascal de Bruijn’s instructions. I picked up a very affordable IT8.7 target from Wolf Faust. It arrived from Germany in about a week.

Argyll can be installed from my software repository by typing pfexec pkg install SFEargyll.

UFRaw

UFRaw with lens correction support using LensFun can be installed from my repository by typing pfexec pkg install ufraw. I went through hell trying to port this and its dependencies. LensFun was particularly terrible with its crazy Makefiles (please use Autotools!) and non-standard C++ which Sun Studio choked on.

I don’t have much else to say about this yet, I’m still playing around with it.