Linux for Designers

The commercial and fast RAW convertor Bible 5 is available for purchase or as a trial. Bible 5 ships with a bunch of new features. Soon a light version of Bible 5 will be available too.
A first alpha of RawTherapee 3.0 is available too and is now official anounced as GPLed software

F-Spot is my favorite photo management software at all. Now it is available as version 0.6:
* no longer depends on libeog
* fighting against deprecation, on the path to gnome3
* new viewer widget
* new widget showing folders organisation
* new Preference dialog
* db and config moved to .config (or whatever is pointed by xdg config)
* tons of bugs fixed (really)
* updated translations

Check out Ruben Vermeersch blog post about this release too! To bad there is no Ubuntu Jaunty built at the moment (please can some build it )

UPDATE 090810
Now a Ubuntu Deb package of F-Spot 0.6.0 is available (thanx to Carnophage for the hint).

After some weeks of the release candidate RawTherapee 2.4 reaches now the final state. The changes since 2.3 are:
* Exif/IPTC support
* Theme switching
* Improved GUI layout
* Improved filebrowser
  - Ranking support
  - Basic file operations possible (delete, remove, rename)
  - Filtering based on Exif data
  - Configurable thumbnail caching
  - Live thumbnails (showing the images in the processed state)
  - Resizable thumbnails
  - Configurable thumbnail layout (left - right, top - down)
* Basic batch processing
  - Controllable workqueue
  - Copy/Paste processing profiles (or only parts of them)
  - Direct sending of images to the workqueue
* Improved auto-exposure and spot white balance
* "Send to Editor" feature (Gimp, Photoshop, custom editor)

RawTherapee is not open source but it is your assessment what you like to donate to the author. The development of RawTherapee is healthy a first alpha of 2.5 is promised in a month.

Rawstudio 1.2 hit the streets. The developers described it as "adds a lot of small incremental improvements like sorting photos based on various photo data, more verbose tooltips for thumbnails and threaded loading of thumbnails and the usual swarm of bugfixes."
Rawstudio is an open-source program to read and manipulate RAW images from most digital cameras. If you are using Ubuntu Linux you can grab a Deb at Launchpad too.

I know that isn't a fresh news: RawTherapee 2.4 is available as a release candidate:
* crash on closing the progress dialog fixed
* confusion when pp2 files of both the old and new naming convention found
* less tall "Preferences" dialog to fit the small screen of netbooks
* a new option in the "Save As" dialog: put to the head of the queue
* fixed non-working image saving when path contains international characters
* much fewer maze artifacts for Olympus raw files with hphd and ahd demosaicing methods
* more keyboard shortcuts (see the popup menu in the file browser)
* dcraw updated to 8.90/1.417
* updated rawzor support (now for 64 bit linux version, too)
RawTherapee is not open source but it is your assessment what you like to donate to the author.

The third beta ofRawTherapee, a imageging software for photographers, is now available. This beta brings again various bugfixes:
* dcraw updated to version 8.89
* improvements in internalization
* an exif saving problem in jpeg output
* corrupted saving of large tiff files
* problems with preview zoom when images of the same size are opened
* corrupt output color profile in the saved images
* incorrect permissions for the "converted" directory under linux
* auto and spot wb for sRaw and linear dng fixed

RawTherapee is not open source but it is your assessment what you like to donate to the author.

With some smaller fixes F-Spot 0.5.0.1 is available:
* workaround a bug in gdk-pixbuf
* some new translations
* .desktop fixes
Since a while i use F-Spot 0.5.0 which adds a lot of nice features and brings great speed improvement. For me anything works very well and again F-Spot is my favorite photo management software at all. For those may having some trouble you should check out the the F-Spot posts at the Init 7 blog.

Light Crafts has released Lightzone 3.6.1, a professional photo editor supporting 16bit image depth editing for RAW and HDR images, for Linux. You can download a trial too.

After the first step ahead to RawTherapee 2.4 now 2nd milestone is reached:
* Caching of thumbnails: file browser is now faster than ever
* Ranking in file browser
* Filter by EXIF
* Move to trash/ delete permanently/ rename functionality in file browser
* Separating the core and the GUI for a better future development
* Several bugfixes

The bad news: no download available this time, just a status report.

With Niepce Digital a new tool simliar to Adobe Ligthroom or Apple Aperture is in development. Hm, i don't know if this really a great news or just another project start.
I'm more a fan of supporting and improving existing projects like F-Spot, Gimp or UfRaw instead of have another half finished peace of software. Anyway, we will hope the best