abelits
Leading Member
For years, I used Silkypix RFC, then Silkypix DS Pro 5 to process raw files from my Fujifilm X-Pro1 camera. I do all my processing on Linux, and at the very beginning, high-quality support for X-Trans CFA layout was either inadequate or missing in other software, so Silkypix was the only sane choice, as it ran without any major problems under Wine. Then software with decent support for X-Trans appeared, but was incompatible with my system while promising little or no advantages over Silkypix with Wine.
Doing everything on Linux, I was not bound to Adobe-centered workflow, so I did not want Adobe products with their worse than Silkypix X-Trans support. Aperture and Iridient are Apple-only, and getting a Mac just for photo work, would make no sense for me. Capture One, at least at the time when I tried to use it first, would not work with under Wine, apparently because of its incompatibility with Mono under Wine (I have not checked if it changed once Mono development progressed). Photo Ninja actually worked -- but only 32-bit version because Wine did not properly process exceptions in 64-bit version, and Photo Ninja relied on that feature. That would not be much of a problem for most other software, but Photo Ninja's highlight processing heavily relies on being able to access vast amounts of memory. Trial version worked once all buffers were set to minimal values, to free remaining 32-bit addressable memory, but I was still uncomfortable with committing to using it, knowing that there might be future changes that will require more resources, and will make Photo Ninja again incompatible with my setup.
DCRaw eventually was released with very decent X-Trans support, and I used it as a standalone conversion utility, then as a part of workflow with digiKam (required latest versions of all components). That was the first time I had fully native Linux workflow for X-Trans, and it worked pretty well except for two features -- noise reduction tweaking and batch processing. In Silkypix, noise reduction / sharpness tradeoff seems to be built into X-Trans demosaicing, so I could vary parameters, and combine conversions from the same raw file with different filtering, to achieve greater level of details wherever possible, and noise reduction wherever necessary. DCRaw often produced superior results overall, but left very little control when things went wrong -- sharpening and noise reduction in postprocessing didn't produce results as good as Silkypix. Batch processing in digiKam for some reason did not save/reload custom tone curves, that I like building for scenes, and use for processing multiple images taken in the same condition, so that was somewhat annoying, too, despite all those features working perfectly in interactive editor. So Silkypix (running under Wine) remained being the known-reliable solution that I could rely on when nothing else worked well enough. To be fair, Silkypix under Wine was imperfect -- for some versions of Wine I had to disable color management in display parameters, and Silkypix dialog boxes often had weird layout with fields shifted and partially overlapping -- but tab navigation always worked regardless of layout peculiarities.
Then Silkypix 6 was released. I have downloaded a trial version, and immediately found that things are completely FUBAR'ed. The color management problem was back on all Wine versions, but images were (mostly) displayed correctly once again color management for display was disabled, filesystem tree view scrolling was disabled (not a significant obstacle as long as file/directory chooser works), batch did not work, however one single problem made things completely unusable. On opening an image, sliders in Contrast/Tone controls were always at 0, despite notch for default value being in their usual positions, and moving those sliders caused some random-looking changes to the image, that did not look at all like what those contrast values were supposed to produce.
ISL stopped issuing new licenses for Silkypix 5, but since I already had it, I could update to new releases that ISL continued to produce. Upgrade to 6, however, was out of the question, and I have lost the "reference configuration" that I could recommend to other users who had X-Trans-based camera and Linux as their main environment.
Over the last few days I was working on my [sorry excuse for] home theater setup, specifically support for Netflix and Amazon Video (that now provides the only way to get HBO series without subscribing to cable or HBO's "ISP partners"). While I had both working, the setup was far in the Rube Goldberg territory, so once I have found that Pipelight and Compholio branch of Wine allow running Windows clients for those services (based on Silverlight and Windows-only version of Flash), I decided to install those, and see if they produce somewhat more convenient way to watch TV. The results were pretty good -- configuration based on Pipelight and Linux Firefox running on Gentoo, worked perfectly once I have configured it to not use Pulseaudio (what means, now I can't freely mix sound from all applications to the same speakers while movies are playing), configuration based on the same patched Wine running Windows version of Firefox on Ubuntu, seems to have no problems with Pulseaudio, but Silverlight does not properly switch to full-screen size when I bump the mouse pointer at the top of the screen, so Firefox toolbars appear and disappear -- I have to press fullscreen button on Silverlight panel, to bring it back to normal. Neither of the problems is significant, but both warrant some research and debugging.
However once I had two versions of Wine installed on two Linux boxes, and simultaneously Silkypix 6.0.9 was released, I decided to check, if by any chance, later version of Wine with Compholio patches, supports new Silkypix any better than the regular one.
So this is what I did:
Installed Silkypix under a new, empty Wine prefix, using Compholio version of Wine:
WINEPREFIX="${HOME}/.wine-sp6" /opt/wine-compholio/bin/wine "${HOME}/Downloads/SILKYPIXDSPro6090E.exe"
Started Silkypix using the same parameters:
WINEPREFIX="${HOME}/.wine-sp6" /opt/wine-compholio/bin/wine .wine-sp6/drive_c/Program\ Files/ISL/SILKYPIX\ Developer\ Studio\ Pro\ 6\ English/SILKYPIX_DS_PRO6.exe
I don't know yet, which particular difference is exactly responsible for this, but Silkypix 6 is completely usable in this configuration. I still have to disable color managed display (View -> Display settings -> uncheck "Enable display color management", Silkypix refuses to show images at all otherwise), filesystem tree panel still does not scroll, and dialog boxes layout is still done by Pablo Picasso, but photos are displayed and processed without any problems, in single and batch mode.
The only thing that bothers me now, ISL changed the names (and apparently meaning) of noise filtering settings again, so I now should get accustomed to them.
Doing everything on Linux, I was not bound to Adobe-centered workflow, so I did not want Adobe products with their worse than Silkypix X-Trans support. Aperture and Iridient are Apple-only, and getting a Mac just for photo work, would make no sense for me. Capture One, at least at the time when I tried to use it first, would not work with under Wine, apparently because of its incompatibility with Mono under Wine (I have not checked if it changed once Mono development progressed). Photo Ninja actually worked -- but only 32-bit version because Wine did not properly process exceptions in 64-bit version, and Photo Ninja relied on that feature. That would not be much of a problem for most other software, but Photo Ninja's highlight processing heavily relies on being able to access vast amounts of memory. Trial version worked once all buffers were set to minimal values, to free remaining 32-bit addressable memory, but I was still uncomfortable with committing to using it, knowing that there might be future changes that will require more resources, and will make Photo Ninja again incompatible with my setup.
DCRaw eventually was released with very decent X-Trans support, and I used it as a standalone conversion utility, then as a part of workflow with digiKam (required latest versions of all components). That was the first time I had fully native Linux workflow for X-Trans, and it worked pretty well except for two features -- noise reduction tweaking and batch processing. In Silkypix, noise reduction / sharpness tradeoff seems to be built into X-Trans demosaicing, so I could vary parameters, and combine conversions from the same raw file with different filtering, to achieve greater level of details wherever possible, and noise reduction wherever necessary. DCRaw often produced superior results overall, but left very little control when things went wrong -- sharpening and noise reduction in postprocessing didn't produce results as good as Silkypix. Batch processing in digiKam for some reason did not save/reload custom tone curves, that I like building for scenes, and use for processing multiple images taken in the same condition, so that was somewhat annoying, too, despite all those features working perfectly in interactive editor. So Silkypix (running under Wine) remained being the known-reliable solution that I could rely on when nothing else worked well enough. To be fair, Silkypix under Wine was imperfect -- for some versions of Wine I had to disable color management in display parameters, and Silkypix dialog boxes often had weird layout with fields shifted and partially overlapping -- but tab navigation always worked regardless of layout peculiarities.
Then Silkypix 6 was released. I have downloaded a trial version, and immediately found that things are completely FUBAR'ed. The color management problem was back on all Wine versions, but images were (mostly) displayed correctly once again color management for display was disabled, filesystem tree view scrolling was disabled (not a significant obstacle as long as file/directory chooser works), batch did not work, however one single problem made things completely unusable. On opening an image, sliders in Contrast/Tone controls were always at 0, despite notch for default value being in their usual positions, and moving those sliders caused some random-looking changes to the image, that did not look at all like what those contrast values were supposed to produce.
ISL stopped issuing new licenses for Silkypix 5, but since I already had it, I could update to new releases that ISL continued to produce. Upgrade to 6, however, was out of the question, and I have lost the "reference configuration" that I could recommend to other users who had X-Trans-based camera and Linux as their main environment.
Over the last few days I was working on my [sorry excuse for] home theater setup, specifically support for Netflix and Amazon Video (that now provides the only way to get HBO series without subscribing to cable or HBO's "ISP partners"). While I had both working, the setup was far in the Rube Goldberg territory, so once I have found that Pipelight and Compholio branch of Wine allow running Windows clients for those services (based on Silverlight and Windows-only version of Flash), I decided to install those, and see if they produce somewhat more convenient way to watch TV. The results were pretty good -- configuration based on Pipelight and Linux Firefox running on Gentoo, worked perfectly once I have configured it to not use Pulseaudio (what means, now I can't freely mix sound from all applications to the same speakers while movies are playing), configuration based on the same patched Wine running Windows version of Firefox on Ubuntu, seems to have no problems with Pulseaudio, but Silverlight does not properly switch to full-screen size when I bump the mouse pointer at the top of the screen, so Firefox toolbars appear and disappear -- I have to press fullscreen button on Silverlight panel, to bring it back to normal. Neither of the problems is significant, but both warrant some research and debugging.
However once I had two versions of Wine installed on two Linux boxes, and simultaneously Silkypix 6.0.9 was released, I decided to check, if by any chance, later version of Wine with Compholio patches, supports new Silkypix any better than the regular one.
So this is what I did:
Installed Silkypix under a new, empty Wine prefix, using Compholio version of Wine:
WINEPREFIX="${HOME}/.wine-sp6" /opt/wine-compholio/bin/wine "${HOME}/Downloads/SILKYPIXDSPro6090E.exe"
Started Silkypix using the same parameters:
WINEPREFIX="${HOME}/.wine-sp6" /opt/wine-compholio/bin/wine .wine-sp6/drive_c/Program\ Files/ISL/SILKYPIX\ Developer\ Studio\ Pro\ 6\ English/SILKYPIX_DS_PRO6.exe
I don't know yet, which particular difference is exactly responsible for this, but Silkypix 6 is completely usable in this configuration. I still have to disable color managed display (View -> Display settings -> uncheck "Enable display color management", Silkypix refuses to show images at all otherwise), filesystem tree panel still does not scroll, and dialog boxes layout is still done by Pablo Picasso, but photos are displayed and processed without any problems, in single and batch mode.
The only thing that bothers me now, ISL changed the names (and apparently meaning) of noise filtering settings again, so I now should get accustomed to them.
