Our Broken Workflow

My digital workflow is broken. I can still process photos, but only just. How this happened is a salutary story regarding the pitfalls of relying on free software.

A few years ago, I got fed up with Adobe and their business practices. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a freetard. I fully accept that Adobe has every right to make a profit on it's intellectual property. But…

I shoot in RAW format because I've read all the magazine articles telling me that it's the Right Thing To Do. I used to use Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) as a Photoshop plugin, to perform the conversion. This worked fine until I upgraded my camera. Then, I needed a later version of ACR and guess what? To run the new version of ACR I needed a later version of Photoshop.

Now, there is no technical reason for this; Adobe has hardcoded a check to stop later versions of ACR running with earlier versions of Photoshop simply to force users to upgrade. And that was a big ask when I'd just spent all my hard-earned cash on a new camera. This is especially true because, as a photographer, I don't get much out of the newer versions of Photoshop. The version I was running was fine for my needs, but I was being made to buy a costly upgrade.

But what could I do?

Well, what I did was to opt out of the Adobe consensus and adopt GIMP as my photo editor.

For those of you who don't know, GIMP is a fully featured photo editor which is free to download. If you haven't tried it, I recommend that you do, and then try to justify your next overpriced Photoshop upgrade to yourself.

But what about RAW conversion? Wasn't that the deal breaker with Adobe in the first place? Fortunately, there is a GIMP plugin called UFRaw, which works much like ACR with Photoshop.

So, for a couple of years Ive been happily working away using freeware throughout my photographic workflow. All the images that I've posted on this blog have been processed in this way.

However, two things happened recently that disturbed this halcyon situation. Firstly, I bought a new camera. Then I upgraded to GIMP 2.8.

The second of these issues bit me first. As soon as I'd taken the upgrade, UFRaw stopped working. I was without my usual RAW conversion facilities for a couple of weeks until I had chance to surf for a solution. Happily, the GIMP user community came up trumps and a quick reinstall of UFRaw later, I was up and running again.

But not for long. When I imported a file created on my new camera, I realized that it had a nasty colour cast and was actually unusable.

To be fair, I had an idea that this might happen before I bought the camera. UFRaw hasn't been updated since April 2011 and uses an old version dcraw, so I wasn't all that surprised, really.

OK, I thought, I'll install RAWTherapee. I'd auditioned it a few years ago before choosing UFRaw on the basis of its integration with GIMP and I knew it was a good piece of software.

But no! RAWTherapee won't install if you have less than 2Gb of RAM on your PC. I'm using a five year old machine, and only have 1Gb, so no joy there. I have to say, as an ex software developer, I find this to be a very strange choice. Normally, you state the minimum system requirements for a piece of software and then let the user take the consequences of ignoring them.

So, I've been forced back on the conversion software that comes in the box with the camera, which is a bit of a let-down to say the least.

I'm left waiting for an upgrade to UFRaw (come on, guys!) to solve the installation issues and incorporate the latest version of dcraw. In the meantime, I'll probably audition some other freeware converters, Scarab Darkroon being the most obvious choice. If anyone has any other suggestions, they'd be most welcome.

PS: the title for this post is a weak pun around the name of Icelandic miserable-ist beat combo Our Broken Garden. Check them out if you're in need of a wallow.