OxygenOffice Professionalis an enhanced version of OpenOffice.org. It includes more than 3400 graphics, both clip art and photos, which are integrated into the gallery and can easily be placed into any OxygenOffice document. Several templates and sample documents are included, as well as over 90 fonts. OOoWikipedia, which can search Wikipedia, is also included. An enhanced help menu, additional User's Manual, and extended tips are great to help beginners get started. You can use more predefined gradients, colors, and other useful elements, run VBA from Excel documents in Calc, and import Office Open XML (Microsoft Office 2007), Works, WordPerfect files, and T602 document.

OxygenOffice Professional is free to download, use and distribute for corporate, enterprise, home and non-profit application. It is easy to use, easy to learn. Check out the additional screenshots. Also you can get the latest information in the news section and from the project summary page.

Argyll Color Management System

http://argyllcms.com/

Argyll Color Management System is our link of the week.

Have you ever created an image in Linux and then printed it to find out that the printed image looks nothing like the image you created? What about working with digital photos and finding the colors are too bright or not indicative of the actual image taken? Chances are, if you are taking digital photos or creating digital images, you may find that your monitor does not display the correct colors....or your printers do not print what is displayed on screen, or even viewing the image on a different computer may look entirely different. Color/Monitor/Printer calibration then becomes an absolute must.......

Argyll is an open source, ICC compatible color management system. It supports accurate ICC profile creation for scanners, CMYK printers, film recorders and calibration and profiling of displays. Spectral sample data is supported, allowing a selection of illuminants observer types, and paper fluorescent whitener additive compensation. Profiles can also incorporate source specific gamut mappings for perceptual and saturation intents. Gamut mapping and profile linking uses the CIECAM02 appearance model, a unique gamut mapping algorithm, and a wide selection of rendering intents. It also includes code for the fastest portable 8 bit raster color conversion engine available anywhere, as well as support for fast, fully accurate 16 bit conversion. Device color gamuts can also be viewed and compared using a VRML viewer. Comprehensive documentation is provided for each utility, and a general guide to using the tools for typical color management tasks is also available. A mailing list provides support for more advanced usage.

Argyll is a collection of source code that compiles into a set of command line tools, licensed under the GNU licensing terms.

• Full EXIF support: The long-waited feature is here, RawTherapee is able to import EXIF data from RAWs and export to the output image formats, including TIFF. RT supports Makernotes, and standards compliance is improved.
• EXIF Browser: Browse, edit, delete the original EXIF tags. The possibility to record additional tags (like author, copyright and comment) is also available.
• IPTC tag support
• More input ICC profile options
• A new highlight recovery method ("CIELab Blending"), that promises better recovery of color information
• Histogram now corresponds to cropped area
  
• Runtime theme switching: The look ("skin") of RT can be changed, and you don't even need to restart the program. RT will be packed with new themes, too.
• Lots of other minor (and not-so-minor) tweaks: bugfixes, eye-candy, some new GUI icons, performance improvements, etc...

Requirements:

• a fast processor with SSE support is recommended (but not required)
• at least 512 MB of RAM.
• Windows version: windows 2000 or XP is required
• for the linux version: gtk+ 2.10 series required

Download:

Price:

With point and shoot digital camera's I have owned in the past, both F-spot and Digikam have worked well. Now that I have purchased a new DSLR I am looking into other types of software for photo management (and it will be hard for me to change after using digikam all these years....if I even change at all).

With the above being said, I have found blueMarine. It is our "Link of the Week".

blueMarine is an open source application for the digital photo workflow, the blueMarine project will provide you an all-in-one tool for managing your photos, from the shoot up to the archiving and beyond. blueMarine is an expandable, open platform and includes specific support for different photographers communities, as well as the latest technologies.

blueMarine foundation is very similar to existing applications such as Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture: a photo browser, which can be explored in different ways (by folder, by calendar, by tags, by galleries). This is just a core upon which different modules can be plugged in. The aim of blueMarine is to fully support the photographic workflow, even before the photo shoot (for instance, trip planning supported by maps) and beyond print or archival. For instance, an ornithologist usually manages field notes about the bird observed and photographed: directly binding them to photos and maybe GPS positioning data is much better than keeping a separate Excel sheet.