Curious about the stability of using Photoshop with Wine or a VM. Photoshop and Marvelous Designer are the only apps I use that aren’t on linux. I wonder if using Wine for Photoshop would be simplified if people try a version like m0nkrus that doesn’t require the creative cloud.
I recently went through a process of trying out all the options for photo processing on linux. I dont do drawing, just raw Nikon files for processing, so I have a slightly different set of criteria.
Darktable and RawThreapee produce reasonable results, but the UI’s are a mess and far far too complicated. They’re on the right track, but I felt like I was being asked to enter every parameter in to a complex API function with no idea what anything meant. For some people they’re probably fine, but you really don’t have to look far before the complexity is in your face and you’re just entering random numbers and crossing your fingers.
Nikon Studio NX in Wine is dog slow. Better in a windows VM on linux, but the results aren’t great.
GIMP isn’t targeted at raw photo editing.
Photolab in a windows VM is slow but excellent otherwise.
I ended up creating a dual boot windows setup and buying Photolab 7 Elite. I didn’t want to set up a windows disk as I’d been free of it for maybe 7 years now, but for this use case it’s definitely justified imho. The fact Photolab isn’t subscription based means its better than Lightroom. The noise reduction algorithms are outstanding, the workflow is nice and not tied to a database or a weird import process. The controls are logical and easy to use. And it reads the camera and lens used for each photo and applies the correct corrections to tour image automatically.
So not what I wanted to end up with as a solution, but the results are so good its a no brainer in the end.