Is it possible?

Currently I have tried the following;

Rawstudio, Nice intuitive UI.
Darktable, Lots of features, not so intuitive.
UFRaw, Missing a couple of features such as sharpen.

What do you use?
Are there any others I should try?
Should I give up and use Lightroom?

I’m struggling to export a decent jpeg, they look a bit crap.

GIMP ?

How rude!

Hadn’t thought of that.

gimp is excellent, and there are a few good books about for learning how to use it. I use the one by Akkana Peck. here

Gimp won’t process the raw files without a plugin though

indeed ufraw is the baby that plugs right into gimp and it works nicely. Is this an issue?

no.

Have you used the dcraw plugin?

no is it any good?

edit just googled it and dcraw is the program that drives ufraw.

They both do similar things. Dcraw gives you simplified dialog for import where as ufraw displays the ufraw app.

Colour management is still a bit of a problem in linux. It makes any serious photography work a bit difficult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_color_management)

digikam is good for an all round photo manager and simple manipulation and uploader.

rawtherapee is a decent raw processor with sharpening tools

after one day this one looks very promising, not free though:aftershot pro formerly known as bibble

been using ratherapee for a couple of years in linux, but the above feels more intuitive

Why use Linux to run photographic software? It takes a lot of time and money to write top quality demosaicing software and that has to be customised for each camera that is supported. It doesn’t make sense to me (a photographer not weekend warrior) not forgetting the colour managed workflow problems you are likely to encounter.

I’m fairly sure one of my Flickr contacts who was big in Linnux photo processing was persudade to be a proper computer.

Although you can post process with free tools i have found that the ones you pay for are alot better. particularly for RAW conversion. Gimp is Ok as an editor but it does lack 16 bit processing