DigiKam is a multifunctional digital photography and editing software tool. As an open source software, it is quite stable application offering many features.
Whether you merely shoot with your smartphone or you’re a professional photographer, you need image editing software to organize and optimize your digital photos. If you are looking for an easy to use, powerful and free image editing software to be included in your photography workflow, then you must try Digikam. We will cover following topics in this article:
What is Digikam?
For any digital photographer having a software that will aid the photography workflow and make it seamless can make a huge difference to not only the quality of your photos but the editing process as well. DigiKam is an all in one digital photography workflow manager that allows photographers to not only categorize files separately on in bulk, but apply many editing effects as well. You can also directly upload RAW images and convert them into DNG without any loss of quality, and supports many digital camera models. As an open source image editor you can also store files either locally or on a remote server. DigiKam provides multiple database support including SQL, MySQL and Mariadb.
Digikam has an easy-to-use interface. It enables you to connect to your camera or preview images. Its layout is very intuitive and easy-to-understand. On the left there are controls to view photos and on the right are there are controls for effects and filters. DgiKam has been essentially a complete and stable application for quite a while now, so it’s going to be a good experience for you.
How to Install Digikam?
DigiKam supports multiple operating systems including Windows, Mac OS and Linux. As a free image editing software, the latest version of digiKam is quite stable and ready to be installed for your preferred operating system.
For Linux here is how to install digiKam:
- Open the terminal and enter the following command to install digiKam’s deb packages:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:savoury1/digikam
- Enter your username and password, and install the FFMpeg package if you don’t have it yet.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:savoury1/ffmpeg4
- Now run the below mentioned two commands to install digiKam:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install digikam
- And you are done, now you can launch the application and setup the File Behavior according to your needs.
It is important to note that the first launch of digiKam will be slow performance wise, as digiKam will be analyzing your collection of photos and creating information for it. This might take a while so it is better to let it run over night if you have a large collection and start using the next day. Now we can move onto image editing with this open source photo editing software.
How to Use Digikam?
DigiKam has a fairly easy to navigate and understand interface that lets photographers and image editors to get started with their workflow immediately. Whether you are uploading images directly from your camera, local server or a remote server, digiKam makes organizing and editing digital images pretty straightforward and quick.
One of the main features of digiKam is the Light Table which automatically show improvements that can refine the quality of your digital photos without any loss of quality. It’s simply touch up and go. Similarly, the image editor of digiKam provides many tools and effects that make editing pretty easy and simple.
Here are all the image editing you can do through digiKam:
- Firstly, digiKam has an in built image editor that allows you to apply touch ups and different effects to enhance the quality of your images. Simply select any image from your library and click on Image Editor on the top left side.
- Once you’re in the image editing interface you will find a whole host of functions to manage and tweak features like color balance, saturation level, brightness, red eye removal, textures and more. Click on the Select Tool and choose the option.
- Similarly, there are other effects that you can also apply such as Distortion FX, Rain Drops, Simply Blur, Noise Reduction and more.
- DigiKam also allows users to add text over a photography, add borders, rotate an image, crop, and Hot pixel correction for images produced by a deficient camera.
- One of the best features of digiKam is how you can apply operations to a batch of images which are processed in queues. You can also convert RAW images to DNG in batch, and parallel process multiple images in one queue.
- Once you are done with your image editing and organizing you can export your digital files to a number of places such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Flickr, Pinterest, Twitter and more. Simply click on Export and get started.
Conclusion
DigiKam is a useful, functional, easy to navigate, simple and free image editing software and digital photography workflow manager. It allows you to organize your images and edit them as well. We hope this guide was helpful in giving you a basic understanding of what you can achieve with digiKam as a new or advanced digital photographer. To read more reviews and guides about useful software applications for your photography and image editing adventures keep your eyes out for new topics on containerize.com.
Explore
To learn about other free image editing software applications, please check following links: