Hi Sean,
Agreed on most points...
Agreed. I was a bit sweeping. The MSFT stack has its place it can have very high performance (for a cost) in the mid-market (2-4 socket) systems. I just find the excessive use of the mouse ridiculous and their RAD tools create some really bad sites (i.e., they use a DoPostBack (sic) when the should be using GETs so that people can bookmark pages). And since I use XP I can support friends with it. But I do not have OS X and yet I can support friends with that too as Terminal yields a nice user friendly* bash shell interface. But I broke my teeth on Unix (we will ignore using LOGO and BASIC in grade school).
* Unix user friendly, not novice friendly.
agreed completely on "The GIMP". I am among you geeks-who-code, although I would not boast the cleanest
I got into digital by "public intervention"(read: "CD-QUALITY", and "Increased Productivity" swayed the customer who pushed image prep back on the photog).
I actually find the additional artistic control I gain a real boon. But I came into photography from the remote-sensing/computer vision side so my first real imaging work was in C++ which is not user friendly but yields near infinite control.
I came into using PS late (read PS 4) and truth be told often find the
"simpler"programs rather confusing and complex as they do too much for me without telling me what they are doing. I find it rather frustrating to teach friends and family how to do things as my routes are often too technical and the simple tools do way too much at each step to integrate with my
gestalt of photography. But I tend to way over-study subjects so I can work by intuition.
I would never recommend "The GIMP", nor "Cinepaint", nor other FOSS apps for specialized work; however, imaging is not so specialized to exclude FOSS os, nor utilities... Being newer to digital cameras, yet not to digital imaging and film photography, I count myself lucky to have had exposure and experience with the geeky bits to understand that one must "keep the data intact", which is the stuff of IT work... whether LAMP is applied to a website, or your digital imaging workflow.... Lightroom, C1 and Picassa come to mind.
I might recommend some of these FOSS tools for massive projects where clusters are used and the cost of development is less than licensing costs. But for a single serious user nothing beats PS. I use Dreamweaver, ImageReady, and GoLive for some things like fast and easy image maps and to visually debug machine generate HTML (I can click and element and go straight to the code). But even then, auto-generated results are almost always inferior to what can be done by hand coding for both performance and long term maintainence (sic).
My point is: if you wish to process each frame through Adobe C/PS, then you have both a great tool, and a lot of wrist activity, even applying "actions". I do not wish to spend any time at all on an individual image, per se, unless it really warrants it. I prefer to do my work with the camera and lenses... and the odd month spent(once) collecting and coding my digital processor.
I spend most of photo time either shooting or in cutting room work (getting a better shot or choosing what to work on) rather than working on direct manipulation. But that is the difference between a good and great photographer: it is not what they shoot, but what they let you see and knowing what they should let you see.
But I will also admit to having spent thousands of enjoyable hours tweaking images in PS while I was learning the tool. But that was long before I had developed my current vision and I was still trapped in the remote sensing aspect and spent more time analyzing details than I spent actually seeing the result.
OK, so I /can/ put a "1-hour photo lab" together with BASH and varied utilities... to be fair to the OP, I am in full agreement that FOSS, Ubuntu(sic) or otherwise, will always demand/distract the majority of phtogs from her/his true flow... and system callibration, software updates, and "customer compatability"(Adobe, Quark and Apple/MS). FOSS was never meant to move mountains, but offer another view of them... no less valid.
A lot of FOSS is aimed at hiking the mountain one step at a time rather than riding over the pass on a highway in a Mercedes. At the same time, it is easier to get exactly where you want to go even if it is at times more work.
enjoy,
Sean (who has not had enough sleep, a long week, and now that Friday is over is ready to start the work week on Saturday)
