An overcast day is the worst sort of day for a photo guy. The IR and the red tones are obliterated by the water vapor in the sky, and what’s left is a mono-tonish blue that uses only about a third of the pixels in your shiny new camera. The result is often boring, but I’ll admit that creative photographers sometimes manage special photos in spite of the clouds and blue light.
…So, computers should make painting easy, right? That’s what I thought when I went to create a custom color for my truck. But, the truth I found has a different description than “easy”.
I like the 1958 Buick Chieftain’s tropicana turquoise, but wanted a little lighter color than that for my antique 1984 S10 Chevy pickup truck. It occurred to me that I could perfect the color on my computer, and transfer it to a tint mix formula for an automotive paint. Doesn’t that seem like a reasonable thing to be able to do?
| Application | ColorCorrection | Video | ARM Arch | Paint | Description |
| DarkTable | Yes | No | Prelim/Devel only? | Mask only? | Photo edit – Strong CC |
| Gimp | Yes | As Animation | Yes | Yes | Paint/Photo Edit |
| Inkscape | Some | No | Yes | Yes | Vector Graphics |
| DaVinci * | Yes | Yes | No | No | Film Finishing |
| Krita | Yes | As Animation | Yes | Yes | Strong Drawing, Also photo edit |
| Blender | Yes | As MJPEG, others | Yes | Yes | 2D/3D Drawing, Video edit |
| Lightworks* | Yes | Yes | No | Mask only? | NLE for Video edit |
| Natron | Yes | Yes | No | ? | Video clip ed, multi |
Table 1: Some attributes of various linux graphics software entries **
Note that table 1 is not at all inclusive of every known graphics software project, but is an enumeration of a few projects that I am aware of and that have some substantial following of users.
I won’t vouch for the absolute accuracy of the feature list, as I’ve used only one of these packages very intensively, and most of them not at all. I would advise to check out the features of the various projects, and make you own determination as to which may be a good choice to try. For the most part, the items are free, so there shouldn’t be much downside to a trial and error approach to this.
A Storm Of Photons 