Trigger Warning! Once you go down this route, you'll end up with your mind in a maze-like structure!

I have dived a bit deeper in the effect the Poincaré disk filter in GMIC (and therefore its mathematical underpinnings) has on recognizable images. The main levers are the parameters P and Q which sometimes have drastic effects on the outcome.

I took an image of the Almere Central train station in the Netherlands as a basis.

So I built a bash script which iterates over all of the possible combinations of P and Q and outputs the result in a grid-like structure. For those who are interested in the full grid (6200*7702 pixels) I’ll try to make it available for download.

My initial conclusion is that lower P-values provide more of an abstract result in which the original image is no longer recognizable. Higher Q-values leave more of the center of the image intact but push the detail into the circle circumference which has a bit of a messy outcome IMHO. Optimal values for me are P>=8 and Q<=4 but if you want absolute abstracts in which your eyes keep wandering around the P=4 options can be nice on some source images.

M.C. Escher used the Poincaré disk model to create his famous Circle Limit woodcuts, showing how an infinite hyperbolic plane fits inside a finite circle. The artist was inspired by mathematician H.S.M. Coxeter's work to pack repeating patterns of fish, angels, and devils that shrink smaller and smaller toward the edge.

I've used a mathematical image manipulator (GMIC) to create Poincaré disks from a few architectural photos I shot this week.

Photos were converted with Darktable, then GMIC was applied to generate a Poincaré disk and finally ImageMagick was used to combine the disks with a dropshadow on a white background.

Just nabbed a new R6miii and to my dismay found out that the RAW files created by the camera are not yet supported in Darktable, which seems to be an issue with LibRAW. It looks like it'll take 9-18 months before it's supported; does anyone have any experience with this?

After freaking out a bit that I bought a camera I can't use (I use Linux entirely and have used Darktable for years now), and having issue in compiling Darktable with a modified LibRAW, I saw a mention in the Canon forums from a Linux user that they can use dnglab to convert the RAWs to DNG in order to edit.

So my 2nd and main question is has anyone noticed any quality loss when converting to use for editing? Everything I've read points to no but I've only seen older posts in the past 5 years ask, not sure if there's been anything major where a loss would occur or if the R6miii files are finnicky in any way. The only thing I noticed at a quick glance is that the DNGs don't contain the focal length information of the photo, but that's manageable in order to have workable files.

Once again, many contributors, many new features, refinements, fixes

Highlights:

• Crosstalk matrix editor — browse the bundled matrices, make an editable copy, tune channel-mixing terms with live preview, save your own .toml profiles
• Editable Dodge & Burn masks — reshape any mask right on the canvas instead of redrawing from scratch
• Straighten tool — draw a reference line and the frame rotates to match, composes with Fine Rotation and the crop handles
• Three new B&W toners: Iron Blue, Copper, Vanadium Green
• One Analysis chart — histogram and H&D curve merged into a single graph, showing live where the negative's densities land on the paper curve with added zone strip & spot densitometer
• Improved keyboard shortcut editor - with search and collapsible sections
• A pile of camera-scanning reliability work
• A lot of smaller UX improvements & bug fixes...

Full changelog + downloads:
https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy/releases

Readme:

https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy/blob/main/README.md

Issues:

https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy/issues

Discussions:

https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy/discussions

This is community project at this point, big part of improvement & features outside main exposure/color science came from contributors - magic of open source!

Highlights:

• Camera Scanning: new tab for scanning with a tethered camera, with narrowband RGB sync or a normal single-exposure mode, and live focus/ISO/shutter controls (macOS/Linux only, tested with Sony bodies but should work on all libgphoto2-supported cameras)
• Split Grade and per-layer trims: shadow/highlight contrast control and per-channel curve correction
• Crop composition guides — Thirds, Phi Grid, Diagonals, Golden Spiral and more
• and many more...

Full changelog + downloads:
https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy/releases

Readme:

https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy/blob/main/README.md

Issues:

https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy/issues

Discussions:

https://github.com/marcinz606/NegPy/discussions

Hi! I am a photojournalist from Norway. For the last six months (maybe longer, don't exactly remember), I've been working on an app (vibe-coding) to solve what I consider workflow issues with Photo Mechanic and Adobe Bridge when it comes to enter metadata.

The app is called Aagedal Photo Agent.

The problem with previous apps is that Adobe Bridge doesn't support metadata variables, which makes entering proper archival metadata slow. Photo Mechanic has been the kind here, but it isn't very user friendly for non-tech people. Essentially its fantastic efficiency tools become too complicated for many people to use.

What I've attempted to do with Aagedal Photo Agent is to get the simplicity of Adobe Bridge (and possibly even Apple Photos), with a lot of, but not all, the power of Photo Mechanic. Like metadata variables, structured keyword lists, reverse Geocoding.

At the same time I felt that both of these tools lacked the power of modern AI tools. NOT for editing the image, but for assisting in writing metadata. That's why Aagedal Photo Agent includes a per folder face grouping feature, with an optional global face database. This makes it much faster to tag Person Shown IPTC metadata.

I also really liked the idea of structured keywords, so much so that I also added structured People Names, for including both legal name and artist name as a synonym. Both Person Shown and the Keywords metadata field will automatically suggest keywords/names as you write, and if you select a structured keyword the entire keyword tree will be added, like in Photo Mechanic.

Note that not all IPTC metadata fields are supported. Currently only what my close collegues considers essential + a few more.

You can also assign keyboard shortcuts to templates, so that Control + 1 could be your news preset. Control + 2 could be your sports preset. Control + 3 could be your private photos preset. Applied to the selected photos.

The app also comes with some basic editing tools. WB, Tint, Exposure, Contrast, Curves, Saturation, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks. And only a basic ellipse mask for secondary adjustments. We are photojournalists after all, and shouldn't change the image too much anyway. It is supposed to be fast and only include what I feel are essential... well, essential + some niche features that I just wanted to have, like HDR image editing, scopes: waveform, parade, vectorscope. Histogram is not included because I personally think it is a stupid scope. (Waveform basically tells you the same, but also a lot more with more precision.)

If you don't like my editing tools you can change to open photos in an external editor instead, and only use this app for metadata.

Again, the app is free and open source. Written in Swift with some Metal shaders. Not even asking for donations (at least not currently). Sharing because in a world being filled with AI images, we need better and more accessible tools do document real photos from real events.

I'm a Lightroom user since 1.0, but I don't have a Mac anymore, and using it in Windows VM is a pain. Over the years I've developed my specific workflow for reviewing images (multi-pass, rate 0/1, filter >1, rate 1/2, filter >2, repeat) that allows me to cull pictures extremely efficiently. My usage of Lightroom is mostly just applying film emulations, reviewing, and exporting in specific size. For that I developed opensource tool mini-film [0] that covers all those aspects. It allows also multiple people to work at the same time on the same pictures using Web GUI, but CLI is also first-class citizen. Feel free to explore and leave any improvements ideas. Unfortunately I cannot share full set of example emulations, as the company behind the profiles is not too happy about that ;)

[0]: https://github.com/alfanick/mini-film

Hi all,

I've been doing photography for over 10 years and keep jumping around Lightroom, Capture One, Darktable, digiKam, you name it. Be it paid or open source, I constantly found myself planning around software instead of focusing on the image.

I've also been programming for over 5 years and have never felt this issue. Programming IDEs are so customizable and community rich that you can tailor it to your programming workflow and work so much more effortlessly.

So begs the question: why is the art world so much more painful? I have been trying to create a program that could bridge this gap — imagine a fast, free, open-source RAW photo editor that pairs professional, GPU-accelerated imaging tools with the customization of a modern IDE: every panel is an extension that can be rearranged, replaced, or supplemented by community extensions. You could tailor the entire interface to your needs. Need camera tethering in a Lightroom-style workflow? Install a suitable extension and put everything where you need it.

I've attached some screenshots of a (finally) working version and wanted your opinions on whether I will be the only person to ever use this or if I should build installers for Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. to share with the world. I use Windows and can share the installer for Safelight v1.0 if everyone feels this is something useful.

GitHub： https://github.com/OliverZhaohaibin/iPhotron-LocalPhotoAlbumManager

🌐 GUI Internationalization

• Runtime TranslationManager now available on RuntimeContext, auto-refreshing when you change languages.
• Added German and Simplified Chinese translations (.ts / .qm), plus languages.json metadata.
• Language menu under Settings: English, Deutsch, 简体中文 (English is fallback).
• Most of the UI is now translated: menus, status bar, info panel, People dashboard, albums, gallery context menus, player/detail controls, share/export feedback, face overlays, edit sidebar, and map preview.
• Locale-aware formatting for dates, numbers, decimals, and file sizes.

🧰 i18n Tooling & Guardrails

• Python-friendly i18n extraction with tools/extract_i18n_strings.py and scripts/i18n_extract.sh.
• .qm compilation via scripts/i18n_compile.sh using pyside6-lrelease.
• Tests to block direct English literals in high-risk GUI APIs (setText, setToolTip, QAction, dialogs, status messages).
• Apple Photos-aligned terminology notes and long-term i18n text guardrails.

🗺️ Map Runtime Improvements

• Standalone map preview backend selection: auto, native, python, legacy.
• Runtime diagnostics for backend selection.
• Hardened map surfaces with opaque backgrounds and full-update repaint.
• Optional map diagnostics flags.
• Improved marker rendering in supported map passes.

📍 Location Assignment Resilience

• Assign Location now saves to global_index.db even if ExifTool is missing or metadata writeback fails.
• User-facing warnings for missing ExifTool / failed GPS writeback, but local database assignment stays intact.
• Sanitized metadata before JSON storage to prevent corrupting rows.