A new member of Opensuse forum here. I would like to share a solution I found for installating a 3rd party HDR photography tool called Photomatix on RPM based distributions. I do not work for this company nor is this an advertisement in any way or form. This thread is purely for educational purposes and to perhaps start a dialogue on a the few interesting things I have found along the way. There are debian packages available for this tool on the websites but no rpm packages are provided. Question for thought, Can one really describe a software as ‘for linux’ when only Debian based distros can use it ;)? For a long time I tried the idea of converting the .deb to .rpm (using alien et.el) but it did not work due to dependence issues. I know others out there also wished to use this software on Fedora/OpenSuse. Here is the way I got it working on OpenSuse Tumbleweed, I hope this will help others out there.
The first step in this process is to install fpm (which is a converter package managing tool that can convert debs/pythonfiles/gems/rpm etc and more ) find it here:
Download the PhotomatixLinux1.1_<>.deb from vendor web page.
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3.a Install rpm build packages on your machine, i.e. zypper install rpm or apt install rpm (this provides rpmbuild which is required for the next step)
3.b Now we can convert the .deb to .rpm through fpm. In the Photomatix.deb download folder, open terminal and run the command as sudo, ‘fpm -t rpm -s deb <Photomatix…>.deb’. If successful it will print ‘Created package {path=>“photomatix-1.1-1.x86_64.rpm”}’
If you try to install the rpm right away you will get a dependency issue like: Missing libimage-exif-perl, libopenexr’. So we must install packages that provides those libraries next. On OpenSuse Tumbleweed I did the following: zypper install perl-Image-ExifTool and zypper install openexr. Note: To see if you need more packages, you can check the dependencies of the package by entering ‘rpm -qpR <Photomatix…>.rpm’
After the two dependencies (two in my case) were installed, I tried to install the Photomatix.rpm but the installer was still complaining about the libraries even though I had just installed them, so I ignored this error by installing the rpm by ignoring the deps,scripts, etc like this: rpm -i --nodeps --noscript --nofiles --nofiledigest photomatix-1.1-1.x86_64.rpm
All of the above steps ran with out any problems for me and the software worked as intended.
I also use darktable and gimp, very good tools, but I don’t think they have HDR capability. I am not promoting Photomatix but it is a tool that has helped in such times, plus if you don’t like it no one is forcing you to use it hehe.
Darktable will take raw images and combine them to form a 32-bit dng image, you then process that in the same manner as you process any other raw file in darktable.
Gimp requires a lot of “ingenuity”, you have to import images as layers and manipulate from there.
Neither are “point and click” solutions, they require a degree of understanding.
I am not promoting Photomatix but it is a tool that has helped in such times,
That’s rather what it looked like … nonetheless you have no doubt answered all of the requests from forum users of “how on earth do I use photmatix on openSUSE?” (Which, incidentally, in the five years or so I’ve been a forum member, I don’t recall having seen).
plus if you don’t like it no one is forcing you to use it hehe.
True indeed …
I wish you well, perhaps you will be able to contribute more to this forum. Do try to remember though this is openSUSE, with the emphasis on open.
At least darktable has some HDR options in it’s menus. But, I see your initial post more as an attempt to show how one could install the Photomatix app. And, that the adagio of “Use what you like” fits fine for the app itself.
On a side note: I’m one of those, that prefer FOSS solutions over closed source ones :). In the past I’ve used luminance-hdr but that project seems to be dead.
I have been in and out of the country lately and installing 3rd party SWs have been a pain since some countries won’t allow me to install. I think I have to use VPN now. Will take note of your tip though…thanks!
