Linux for Designers

Light Crafts has released Lightzone 3.5, a professional photo editor supporting 16bit image depth editing for RAW and HDR images, for Linux. You can download a trial too.

After a very short period of the release candidate now Rawstudio 1.0 final is available. New in this release are:
* new sharpen-tool
* exporting to GIMP for further editing
* a nice in-window directory selector with optional recursive loading
* GUI has been spiced up to look much more modern
* Rawstudio has been translated to more than 10 languages
* a ton of bugfixes and minor enhancements
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 package for Feisty, Edgy, Gutsy and Hardy too.

Linux Photography did an interview with Anders Brander the author of RawStudio.

Besides Lightzone a very fine imageging software for photographers is RawTherapee. It's now release as version 2.3 with new features like:
# Image resizing tool
# Vignetting correction tool
# Local contrast enhancement tool
# Auto Crop and Fill option in the rotation tool
# Multi-language support
# Channel mixer
# Deconvolution based sharpening
# VNG-4 interpolation of dcraw to reduce maze on Olympus raw images
# Selectable guide lines when cropping
# Enhanced auto and spot white balance
# Support for new cameras (DCRaw 8.82/1.398)

RawTherapee is not open source but you can specify what you like to donate to the author. Besides the new version a new website is online too.

Rawstudio 0.7, an open-source program to read and manipulate RAW images from most digital cameras, is available for download. This release get's more Cairo-based graphics and a ton of bugfixes as usual.
If you are using Ubuntu Linux you can grab a Deb package too.

Qtpfsgui a GUI app to work with HDR images is released as version 1.9.0 now. Besides bugfixes and improved features a HDR creation wizard and a commandline interface were added.
Since 1.8.12 Qtpfsgui is available for Mac and Windows too.

The most famous RAW tools UFRaw and Qtpfsgui are updated again.
UFRaw 0.12.1 (based on DCRaw v 8.77) is just a bugfix release. A Deb archive is available.
Qtpfsgui 1.8.12 brings a lot of smaller enhancements and is now available on MacOS X too. Grab here your Deb archive for Ubuntu.

My brother got a brandnew very, very powerfull Nikon digital camera and ask me how to work with Gimp and RAW images. There are several plugins in the Plugin Registry of Gimp but UFRaw looks best at all.
On the project page they got binaries for several systems too!
Here is the list of supported cameras. UFRaw is available as a standalone application too.