From Bottleneck.org
| The main photo editing software I use is The GIMP, which despite its odd name (GNU Image Manipulation Program, GNU being a free software movement) is a rather fully-featured piece of software, which dare I say owes some of its workflow and features to Photoshop.
For conversion from RAW format (in my case, Nikon's NEF format) I use UFRaw, which has the advantage that as well as being usable stand-alone, can also act as a plugin to The GIMP. UFRaw is based on DCRaw but is much friendlier to use. Below, I'll detail how to get hold of this software, and how to install it. |
Download the Software
The first job is to get hold of all of the software you'll need. We'll start with The GIMP. The GIMP builds upon another piece of GNU software called GTK+ and there are no officially supported Windows builds of The GIMP. Fortunately, this being the free software movement, someone has stepped into the breach, providing a good and stable version of the software for Windows, along with a normal Windows installer process, which will take care of pesky dependencies like GTK+. I suggest you visit the official GIMP download page, just in case the Windows installer ever moves home. At the time of writing, you could visit the gimp-win download page at Sourceforge to get hold of the Windows installer.
So, step 1, download the current, stable, GIMP for Windows release (I am downloading and writing these notes for version 2.4.5, approximately 16Mb). I also downloaded the current English-language help files (approximately 21Mb).
Next we will want to acquire a copy of UFRaw for our RAW conversion process. You should visit the official UFRaw download page and scroll down to the Windows section, which will direct you to the Windows installation process for UFRaw. At time of writing, the Windows installation for UFRaw is available from the UFRaw Sourceforge page, so, step 2, download the current UFRaw for Windows (I am downloading and writing these notes for version 0.13, approximately 1.4Mb)
That's it - now we'll get on with installing it all.
Installing The GIMP
This is pretty simple with the Windows installer. Start off the process, and when asked choose to customise the install. The only change I made to the defaults was to remove the translations, since I can't imagine I'd ever want to use the software in a language other than English. I also placed the icons into a different Start Menu folder, and chose not to create a desktop icon, but that's a matter of personal preference.
A few moments later, The GIMP is installed and ready to go. I opted not to launch The GIMP at the end of the install, as I wanted to move straight on to the UFRaw installation.
Installing UFRaw
There is a slight dependency bug in the install process which causes the UFRaw installer (based on the versions of the software I was using) to overwrite the bzip2.dll file from The GIMP install with an earlier version. Therefore, start by copying the bzip2.dll file from The GIMP to a file called GIMP-bzip2.dll In my installation, this file is found under C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\bin
Launch the UFRaw installer, and choose to install it into the same folder as The GIMP - this will enable the integration between UFRaw and The Gimp. I went on to accept all other defaults and proceeded with the install.
Now, restore the original bzip2.dll Copy the existing bzip2.dll to UFRaw-bzip2.dll and copy the GIMP-bzip2.dll back to bzip2.dll
Hopefully this little issue will be fixed in a later installer.