There are a lot of tutorials out there for “The Other Program”, also called Adobe(R) Photoshop(R). (I hope I got the Rs right, can’t find the page where Adobe(R) told the world how to call this program.) A lot of that stuff is easily translated to GIMP, but there are some serious differences. One are the “Adjustment(R) Layers(R)”. This is a way of applying a curve, gradient, hue or saturation change…..  without changing the real image. You can come back later and tweak the curve or the slider – non destructive editing.

There is an easy way to work around this: make a new layer of the visible image and work on that. You have to redo that, if you decide to change something in the lower layers.

To show how to do this I have ripped out a part of John Arnold’s Photowalkthrough podcast and redone the same in GIMP. Photowalktrough is a really good resource for everybody who is into the digital darkroom – independent from the program used. And John has his #100 out! Congratulations!

GIMP will have non destructive editing in a year or two – it’s the main reason for getting GEGL into GIMP and making this big effort of writing a lot of the program again.

In the second part of the show I get the blackboard out and start a new segment in the show. I try to explain how  film and sensors are working. I’ll expose you to some of these lessons for about 5 to 190 minutes and will then decide upon your reaction if I should keep this on. I’ll have them at the end of the show – if you are bored you can just skip the rest.

Sorry, there is no TOC up to now.

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The results of the Book Challenge have been so interesting that I have made two shows out of them. This is the second part.

If you want to buy Akkana Peck’s book from amazon.com in the US, go to her website and use her link. She gets a bit more money out of it and you pay the same.

The TOC

00:50 Threshold tool revisited
02:40 Ityker’s image
04:00 Selective decolorisation
05:00 Layer mask for selective decolorisation
05:00 Layer mask shortcuts
06:00 Duotone
08:45 Sample points
10:00 Preventing tonal change of the colorisation layer
11:10 Sharpening layer
12:50 Fake view cam cassete shadow
14:30 Mathias’ image
15:50 Image sources
17:00 Layers for ressources
18:40 Combining different exposures
19:25 Healing spots and bra straps
20:30 Layers for sculpting the hair
22:40 The sky – overlay mode
23:50 The sign
24:00 Layer groups
25:00 Dodge and burn on a layer in soft light mode
26:00 Unsharp mask for enhancing local and global contrast
27:20 The John Arnold Style Vignette(R)

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The results of the Book Challenge have been so interesting that I have made two shows out of them. This is the first part.

If you want to buy Akkana Peck’s book from amazon.com in the US, go to her website and use her link. She get’s a bit more money out of it and you pay the same.

It’s worth to keep an eye on John Arnold’s Photowalkthrough, perhaps something special is coming up there.

The TOC

03:30 Kevin’s image
04:00 Bracketing
05:30 Darkening parts of the image with curves and layer mask
06:30 Combining different images from the bracketed shots
09:00 image composition
10:00 Spray paint
10:10 Notes in a separate layer
12:00 jd24w9’s image
12:00 Combining background and foreground from different shots
12:50 Don’t merge your layers – keep them!
13:45 Better use a different shot for the sky – fake but easier
14:25 Ted’s image
14:40 Tab toggles the toolbox on and off the screen
15:00 Divide the image in several parts and process them differently
16:30 Overlay Mode for enhancing brickwork
17:15 Making a surreal sky with multiply mode
18:45 Gimpel’s image
20:00 Threshold tool for black and white
21:15 painting over the image
22:00 Wrapping up
22:35 Server problems and PCN

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If you want to make an incredible amount of money it is a good idea to learn GIMP. Sergey Brin did that, created the logo of his startup and got rich. I downloaded the xcf and peeked under the hood. Just standard stuff – as you have seen by Philippe.

03:00 Grabbing images from the web
04:30 Elipse select tool
05:00 Copy and paste between images
05:30 Shrink (scale) a layer
07:25 Blurring with a layer mask and the blend tool
09:45 Copy and paste between images
10:35 Don’t work on the layer mask
11:25 Move the layer
11:55 Scale the layer
14:10 Rotate the layer
15:30 Revealing parts of a layer with a mask
17:30 Cropping to a square
18:20 Scale the image
18:40 Exporting to png
19:45 The GOOGLE logo in GIMP
22:10 Analysis

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This week you’ll get both hosts of the show in one package. Philippe (southern France) and I (northern Germany) discuss the results of the Double Book Challenge in the “From Scratch” section. We use Skype and the connection is not as good as we were used to it between Chile and Germany.  So expect some funny noises added to the accents.

At the end of the show we both come up with a random number and calculate in a highly scientific way who wins the two books. I’ll give you all a chance to find out in the video if you have won and contact the winners later next week. And IF YOU have won, send me your contact data so that I can forward them to APRESS, who sponsor the prizes.

All the images we talked about are in the companion file.

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This is a short show about how to extract the colours out of an image and put them into a palette. The next version of GIMP will allow the export of the palettes in a lot of designer and programmer friendly ways.

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I take my big soft lens polishing cloth out of the cupboard and give my crystal ball a good rub. Usually I use it for writing reports about kids, but today I look at the upcoming GIMP 2.8.

With the publication of version 2.7.1 and some mails from the developers mailing list one can predict fairly good what will be in 2.8. I have compiled version 2.7.1 and try the stuff that was described in the posting at gimpusers.com.

I am looking forward to the publication of 2.8, even if it is not the “big step” and “16 Bit”. But it is the last stepping stone into that direction.

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This week I show you how to simulate a Graduated Neutral Density Filter with GIMP. This was started by a thread in the forum. And as I now need more time between recording and publishing, the thread has grown considerably and Bert has already made a script for this. So check it out in the forum!

While trying to create a filter for the image I stole from Bert I tell you a bit about the Blend Tool and give (again) an introduction into layer masks. “White reveals and black conceals!”

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Today I explore the information that GIMP provides about colour. It’s the always helpful histogram, the border average which gives you a nice colour for a background for your image, the colour cube analysis and the smooth palette. The last two are quite exotic and I can think of no way to use them for me.

As I have avoided to discuss Median, Mean and Standard Deviation, help yourself!

00:20 The feed for small players
01:55 A new camera
04:10 The Color Info Menu
04:20 The histogram
04:25 Stats
05:50 Log or Linear
07:50 Value and RGB
09:30 Border average
14:30 Color cube analysis
15:05 Smooth palette
16:55 Challenge reminder

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You may have noticed the new intro at the top of the show since we turned HD. It was made by Philippe with a combination of GIMP, Jahshaka and GAP, the GIMP Animation Package. As reported by Torbjorn below Jahshaka has been given a new name, CineFX: http://www.cinefx.org/ Is this a fork?

Jahshaka is a video editing and special effects tool. I looked into it as an editor when I planned this podcast and preferred then Cinelerra instead. Jahshaka has matured a lot in the last two years but is still a pain to install under most Linuxes, but it seems to be fine with Windows and OS X.

Philippe asked me to write here that this is just a short look into Jahshaka – no in depth tutorial. But I liked it a lot while I was editing the video.

And think about our two challenges! We have already some entries for the photography department – but the “from scratch” area is still an empty canvas. Well, it takes more time dto do something from scratch and the challenge is open up to September 9th.

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You can win a book in our two contests – the exact rules will be published in the next posting.

I continue to work on my project “Access Control”. My target is a photo book by blurb.com. They accept PDF files for printing – which is important for me because most of the book making software of the printers doesn’t work on Linux. Of course there is an Open Source program for making a PDF – Scribus. It is available for all OS, even OS/2. I’ll tell you about my experience in one of the next episodes.

A bit of Magic is shown by Philippe – and I have confess that I used an old version of his script. You’ll see better ones next time.

There are a lot of photobooks to look at for inspiration at SOFOBOMO.

Then I start to edit an image. The JPEG image is a bit overblown in the highlights and I have to go back to the RAW file. Cropping turns out to be difficult and the image needs a bit of a contrast boost in some parts.

The final steps – sharpening and deciding about a vignette will be made when the layout of the book is clear. For sharpening one needs to kknow the output resolution and size – and I will have to scale the image to 300 DPI before putting it into the book. The vignette depends on the background of the page.

00:20 The Book Challenge
05:20 A Photo Book as the target for “Access Control”
07:50 Scribus for making PDF files
10:00 Photobooks to look at
10:35 Editing an image for the book
11:15 Blown out pixelss
11:45 RAW to the rescue with UFRaw
16:28 Comparing JPEG and UFRaw output
18:50 Correcting a colour cast in UFRaw
20:45 Straightening the image
23:00 Cropping the image
26:50 Improving contrast with a layer in overlay mode and a mask
33:20 Crooping more
35:00 What’s left to do

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I hope this episode plays well on all computers and programs – the encoding should be supported by Quicktime and iTunes. Thanks to Tavo for figuring this out.

There is no GIMP in this episode, there is a bit of F-Spot, but mostly it’s about a new photography project I am starting. I want to make a series of images about means of “Access Control” and thought a bit about it in the video. (The content could have been better structured, but I was with my head more in video encoding and work flows than photography.) Is this still on topic of this show? I had requests for more photography centric stuff – but what do you think? Please write a comment here in the blog.

I point you to Jeff Curto’s podcast Camera Position, where you can find very valuable material about making a photography project from episode 73 on. Jeff is a professor and his lectures about the history of photography are also online as a podcast.

If you want to discuss my project, go to the Forum!

No time for a TOC at the moment.

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I cover two questions for this is the first HD show – and it took ages to render. I will have to adjust my workflow. I start with a problem of Ivo, the producer of Autozine – an online car magazine made with GIMP. He wants to change reality a bit and move letters around in an image.His images are in the companion file.

Then I tackle selective sharpening again after I got a question about how to further control the sharpened area. In episode 6 I constrained the sharpening to the edges in the image – here I reduce it to parts of the image.

In case that you wonder why there is no sharpening while I paint the antenna – have a look at the “eyes” in the layers dialog box…..

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Before you despair while using this tool, think about where you align to. What is you anchor and how do you want to place your snippets. Then you’ll find a sequence of steps to get to your result. This needs a bit thinking but beats moving with the move tool any time.

If you watch these videos with a mobile device you should consider to switch the feed to the new MOBILE feed. And I still need help with iTunes! Apple locks Linux users out of the system – and I will not install Windows here.

If you are a photographer, you have to go over to WTF WTD – What the Duck! A daily comic about photography. It’s a must.

The TOC

00:19 Welcome
00:25 The new mobile feed
03:17 The Align tool
03:49 Create some layers to try the tool on
06:00 Moving layers using the move tool
06:40 Centering a layer using the align tool
08:00 Aligning layers to each other
08:50 Distributing layers
09:30 Selecting layers using the rubber-band select
11:00 Summary
13:19 Reminder about the mobile feed
14:46 The End

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In this screencast I will demonstrate how to pull Inkscape, Blender and Gimp together in order to produce some artwork. I will be using Inkscape 0.46, Blender 2.49a, and Gimp 2.6.6.

I have been wanting to screencast Blender along with Inkscape for quite sometime now. I tried to keep this tutorial rather simple for the sake of the screencast but I’m pretty sure the real artist in you can take the fundamentals and expand on it.  I have to say that combining Inkscape and Blender artwork is rather fun and once you get the hang of Blender then you might find yourself in it all of the time. Here’s an example of a Blender bottle that I modeled from an Inkscape sketch. The bottle was rendered out of Blender and brought into Inkscape where I had added a 2D label. Spic and span.

I would like to thank Christian from Chrisdesign for giving me the inspiration.

If you want to examine the files that I used for this screencast then grab the archive from here.

by heathenx

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Today I go into the details of the path tool. It has a real lot of different modes and states – so one gets easily confused. I try to sort that out – but you’ll have to train yourself to master this.

Seth aka W_Nightshade has made a video about making ambigrams with paths. You see the one he did here on the side. I couldn’t make a show out of his video – but you’ll get a fast version of it with music in the video and if you are interested can download the whole package in the companion file. The music is from John Pazdan, the composer of the podcast music.

I start with a book review. Akkana Peck’s book “Beginning GIMP – from Novice to Professional” is gone into a second edition. And now it’s even better than before. If you are looking for a book about GIMP – this would be my first choice. Apress has given me the second edition book – I bought the first one before starting with this project.

And I have two of the books to give away. To you. We’ll make two challenges, one from Philippe, one from me. And Apress will send a book to each of the winners.

The TOC

01:00 Switch to HD
02:30 Ubuntu script for Wacom Tablets
03:45 Book review: Akkana Peck:
10:30 Path tool: Design mode
11:00 Adding nodes and moving them
12:30 Close a path
12:50 Add a second component to the path
13:45 Expanding a path
14:30 Selecting nodes and moving them together
15:00 Delete a node
15:30 Move a component
15:50 Tweak a segment
16:15 Move a segment
17:40 Interlude: Ambigrams by Seth (Video) and John Pazdan (Music: Solistice)
21:45 Edit mode with paths
22:15 Adding nodes
22:30 Pulling out handles
23:30 Removing handles and segemnts
24:40 Joining components of the path
25:10 Straightening out the curve at the node
26:30 Read the documentation at docs.gimp.org
27:50 What does Akkane Peck write about the path tool?
29:40 iTunes help needed

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You challenged Philippe to make a bill of a currency from scratch. It is a lot more complicated than it looks at the first glance – of course – otherwise I would print some Euro notes at the beginning of the week instead of going into the school for earning my pay.

Bills have a complicated background for discouraging counterfeiters. Philippe analyses the background of a 10 SFR bill from his home country and then combines two images from an analysis of Linux filesystems to the intricate pattern on the right.

The  foreground of the note will be finished in his next show.

The TOC

00:20 Philippe looks at a 10 SFR bill and tells a bit about his home country
04:00 Looking for a motive for the bill – Visual expedition into the Linux file system
06:50 Draging an image from the Web into GIMP
07:00 Two ways of cropping a layer
09:30 Scale the layer to the final size
10:15 Flipping the layer (mirror it)
11:20 Duplicating the layer
12:20 More volume with “self bumping” (bump map explained)
17:00 Texture with Gimppressionist?
18:00 another texture from the web
19:20 Scaling to adjust to the rest of the image – get out the calculator
22:00 Duplicate and adjust
25:20 Reduce to image size
26:00 Making paper structure with Gimpressionist
27:15 Clipping out the dots out of the texture
28:30 Bumping the dots
30:30 A place fot the water mark
32:20 Filling the layer mask with a gradient (blend tool)
35:00 Room for text (bilinear blend)
37:00 Good bye

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Paths are a powerful tool in GIMP – and not so easy to understand. So I’ll make a two part series out of them.

Paths are Bezier curves and are controlled by anchor points and handles.With enough time and determination you can give them any form you want. A path can be generated with the path tool, from a selection and from a text in GIMP. And it can be stored and even exported as a SVG file.

So they do fit more into a vector based program like Inkscape. If you use them for drawing something, ask yourself if you are using the right tool.

Gimp has a good documentation about path basics , the paths tool, the dialog and the paths menu.

The last part of the video is edited in a hurry – you’ll notice some blunders.

01:10 Path concept
03:05 Adding the Path dialog in GIMP
04:20 Adding a path with the Path tool
05:50 The Paths dialog
06:40 Turn a path into a selection
07:20 Stroke the path
07:50 Path context menue
08:40 Turn a selection into a path
09:40 Turn a text into a path and back
11:50 Put a text on a path
14:30 Don’t use GIMP for vector graphics
15:00 Wrapping up

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A bit late, but finally here!

You find more about the Orton Effect in Wikipedia and a lot of other places.

I’ll update the blog post tomorrow, but I have a TOC.

The TOC

00:20 The show is late
01:40 The Orton effect
03:20 Michael Orton and his book
04:40 Cropping the image
06:00 Making bright an blurred layers
07:00 Blurring
08:40 Multiply mode set
09:20 Compare the result
09:25 Playing with the opacity sliders
10:15 Points for variation
11:35 Recap with a different image
15:00 Script?
15:30 Wolfram Mathematica Orton Effect Plugin

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It’s toning time again. Toning is done do black and white images to increase their “volume”, the perceived contrast range. We only have 256 values on the screen, so a bit of colour can be good.

In #39 I had shown how to make a Duotone or Tritone out of a monochrome image. And then Paul Weller Bou showed in his Blog an easier way to do this.

It’s working, but why? To answer that, I look into the HSV colour model and try to explain the effects of the different layer modes.

A little bit about sharpening in an extra layer with “value” as the mode and a pointer to faking analog camera frames in digital images with a script and an original Hasselblad frame made by Marcus Ranum are at the end of the episode.

01:00 Toning images
02:00 Toning enhances the visual volume
03:50 The recipe for a duotone
04:30 Adding a layer in colour mode and adding a layer mask from an image copy
07:00 Doing the same for the second tone
08:00 Inverting the mask
09:20 Switching layers on and off
10:30 Sharpening in Value mode
12:20 Unsharp mask
15:10 Explanation of Colour and Value mode
17:10 HSV colour model
20:00 A fake view camera frame
22:20 Multiply mode
23:40 A real Hasselblad frame

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Philippe was working on bank notes - but it turned out to be a too big task for the available time. The designers of these notes have one thing on top of their minds - make it difficult to copy.

With the money being on the back burner, Philippe made us a bowl of soup - absolutely low on calories and from scratch.

You’ll see how to get a textured plane into the shape of the soup, create reflections and steam and to control the light.

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This weeks show starts with some additional talk about tablets. After Episode 101 there still was the question if a Wacom Bamboo tablet is “good enough”. Matthias visited me with his tablet and we sat in a street cafe and compared. (Sorry, the sound in this segment is not very good and out of sync.) The Bamboo is as good as the Intuos if you don’t need diffenrent pens. I would buy one. (Too bad that I don’t get money from W….)

Then I follow a comment from Steinar and explore the Device Status dialog. It gives you all information you need about your row of input devices. Even if they are plugged in too late.

In the image I tackled last week were some really big damages. And I tried to fix them with the Resynthesis plugin and G’MIC. Both did well with small defects and considerably good with the big ones. The were only at loss where knowledge about the world was needed - like in the back of the chair. We know that the wood goes on - the computer does not.Perhaps the result would have been better with the first plugin if I had followed Tobias’ tip thouroughly.

UPDATE: If you call the Resynthesis plugin via Filters/Enhance/Smart remove selection you get a much better result. See in the image on the right.

Both plugins are not easy to use and need ore time to explore than I was motivated to invest.I found no way to “automagically” select the damged parts of the image. Perhaps a scan in full colour mode would have been better. Ther may be a colour difference between dirt and image that can be exploited for a selection. So, scan in RGB!

There is a an other plugin perhaps usable for such work. It’s the Wavelet decomposer. I’ll try that in a later show.

At the end of the show I tell you a bit more about this young man, show Norman’s version of the reconstructed image and propose a different approach with an oval “matte”, like it must have been in the original.

00:30 Comparing the Wacom Bamboo with the Intuos
05:40 2 tablets, 1 machine
06:30 The “Device Status” dialog
13:30 Going back to the “Portrait of a Young Man”
14:00 Resyntesizer and Wavelet Decompose
16:15 G’MIC
17:30 Comparing G’MIC and Resynthesizer
18:00 Please scan in RGB even if the image is monochrome!
19:20 Take care with the eyes!
20:30 Preparing a mask for the plugins
24:40 Using a colour for the mask
28:30 The G’MIC plugin at work
32:40 Resynthesizer at work
34:40 Comparing the results
36:00 Conclusion
37:00 Who is in the image?
39:00 Norman’s version of the image
39:40 Making an oval frame
43:40 Good bye!

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Again Norman has an interesting task for me - restoring old images. John Edwin Frewer was photographed in London around 1866/7 - of course not digital. I’ll tell you a bit more about him in the next episode.

His image was on a glass plate negative and was then copied as a contact print to photographic paper. The guys who took the image were a bit sloppy and left some lint and marks on the image. And then came 140 years of storage and handling.

Norman has offered to restore the images and I’ll try to help him with this and the next episode. In this one I revisit the clone tool and explore the heal tool. It’s the right tool for tackling all the spots in the image.

The show starts with greeting to Russia, A lot of visits to the site are from there and comments in Cyrillic are getting more. Google translate helps not a lot and so we are looking for some help from Russia. You speak Russian? Become an Editor for this blog and decide what’s real and what’s SPAM. And to all the Russian visitors here - please try to write in English, even if you think it’s not good enough. We will understand you better than Google translate - or ask.

Then I show a plugin that turns dull screenshots into nice reflecting 3-D product shot.

This plugin was written by Fabian A. Scherschel, the German part of the Linux Outlaws podcast. Fabian is drinking beer and talking with Dan Lynch (several cups of tea) about Linux, Open Source news, politics and more.

I think you’ll hear about a really good video podcast about GIMP there soon, so check them out.

00:30 Greetings to Russia
02:48 Linuxoutlaws and screenshot plugin
08:25 Norman has a new problem
09:00 What’s wrong with this image from 1870?
14:10 How much to correct
15:10 Make a backup layer
15:30 Clone tool
17:30 Heal tool
22:10 Undo a whole area
23:20 Working on the face
25:30 Verschlimmbessern
26:50 Comparison of clone and heal tool
29:10 Keep the pattern of the suit
31:00 Tedious work ahead, but….
31:20 perhaps a G’MIC can help?
32:50 Wrap up

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A metal sign has been sitting on a wooden wall for decades, rusting away in the weather.Nobody really cared.

But in reality this sign was made from scratch by Philippe, with a generous amout of bump mapping and applying plasma. Two things are to be thought about - making this three dimensional and getting the age effects right. Rust blooms and runs and so there are several ways to go to emulate it.

Every time I watch one of these shows I am stunned by the ease of making a three dimensional effect with some simple shadows.

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A Graphics Tablet is a great input device for working with GIMP. You’ll see what to look for (pressure sensitivity and size) and how to integate them into GIMP. My tablet is from Wacom, the market leader. But a lot of other good ones are around too.

At the end of the show I have a essage for the German speaking audience. There is no German Meet the GIMP, but Berhnhard Stockmann (devvv) from Gimpusers.de and Gimpusers.com has made a nice video DVD about GIMP. Also a DVD about building WEB sites. Both are available for 29.95€ in book stores and online.

I gave the GIMP DVD to Boris form Happy Shooting, a German language podcast about photography. Boris (nsonic) and Chris (Tips from the Top Floor) are well known podcasters and as a team they are simply great. Useful information and a lot of “dumme Sprüche”. Just now there are no shows, Chris is trecking in the Himalaya and the SatPhone broke down.

00:30 The Wacom Intuos Tablet on stage
07:30 GIMP and the tablet
11:20 Using the tablet
12:35 Brush dynamics
16:00 Advantages over the mouse
17:40 Good bye to all non German speakers
18:20 Promotion for devvv’s GIMP DVD
21:30 Second end of the show

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I wanted to do something special - for example an interview with Sven Neumann. But he has had no time - you’ll hear about it in the video.

But I could help out a bit with a scientific project - finding out how much a airplane wing bends in a wind tunnel. This is still work in progress, you can follow it here.

You can find the cross stitch script in the forum.

And then we have a new script out of our secret Script Writers Guild. It’s the tonal range relection script and it can do some very weird stuff. And either Bert has bugged my computer or can read minds - he included the stuff I wanted to have without having seen the video.

The TOC

00:20 Show 100!
01:00 Congratulations to Sven Neumann!
04:10 The problem - measure wing deformation
06:20 The images
07:00 Stacking images in layers
07:30 Aligning the images
12:20 Cropping
12:50 Saving as XCF
13:20 Calibrating the setup
14:30 Measurement tool
15:20 Making a grid
17:00 Putting lines on the wing tips
19:30 Making a grid with horizontal lines
20:30 Turning the grid into a ruler
21:10 Beware of wrong selections
22:10 Pintin straigth lines
24:30 Save each layer as JPEG
26:20 Recap
28:00 Happy Birthday!
29:30 Cross stich script
30:30 Tonal range selection script
32:20 Simple DRI/HDR with the script
33:10 Installing the script
34:50 Testing the script
43:20 Wrapping up the script
44:50 Selection instead of new layer
46:00 Good bye and spread the word!

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This is the last episode where I have to look out for the leading zero in the episode number!

Philippe is doing it from scratch again, this time unscratched acrylic glass, cut with a laser and mounted on a brushed steel plate.

Acrylic glass panes (or other kinds of glass panes) are not only transparent. They reflect externally and internally, distort, cast shadows and more. So it’s a lot to think about to get a believable image.

In the companion file there are also two scripts from Philippe for making such glass panes with letters cut into them.

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What is the right amount of post processing a photograph? Is there “enough”? Too much? In this epsiode I try to get into these questions - but don’t expect an answer.

I start with a snap shot with a bad composition. A crop, a bit of curves and sharpening and the snap shot turned into a better snap shot.

The image to the right is not made with GIMP - it’s shot with a “Subjektiv” and had only it’s curve tweaked a bit. The Subjektiv is a lens with exchangable optics. I used an acrylic lens, like in the Holga. There is also a glas lens which even can be stopped down with an aperture, a pinhole and a zone plate. So this image is a “real” photography - would there be a difference if I had shot it with a good lens and made it look like this in GIMP?

I was inspired to this topic by these two discussions in the forum. And I have started a third about the question I posted here. Got an opinion? Join us there or post your comments here in the show blog.

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After a welcome to the (hopefully) lots of new viewers from the Miro Guide, I continue to shrink a real building site to a model train scale.

An important tool for this is the Focus Blur plugin. The homepage needs some assistance in translation from Japanese to English - are you able to help?

The Focus Blur plugin needs a “Depth Map”, a grayscale image which defines the amount of blur  in each part of the image. Rob A has made a tutorial about making a believable depth map. It’s not enough to make a simple gradient, you have to keep things with the same distance to the focal plane on the same level of gray and make the gradients follow the planes in the image. And here my subect turned out to be too complicated. My result is not as good as I wanted.

If I wanted to do this again I would choose a different subject and camera position. Higher up and farther away and so including more stuff. And I would look out for regular shapes in the area to make building a depth map easier.

(EDIT 04/03/09) A much better example than I was able to produce was made by the above mentioned Rob A. He describes his process in the forum thread.

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Philippe has a problem with Software Patents - and so he makes a headstone for them.

Todays topic is simulating a stone carving. Again Philippe starts with an analysis of the real world: how do we perceive the depth of a carving? It’s not only a drop shadow, like in so many illustrations. For “believability” additional highlights and some effects from dirt and imperfections are also important. Then he constructs these details in a very convincing way.

From the forum discussion about this episode:

Regarding the theme of software-patents I want to bring in
the link to the petition against software-patents here:

http://www.stopsoftwarepatents.eu/

Please read the information and sign the petition…
…and spread the word, please!

Softwarepatents are absolutely contarily to free software,
and even commercial (and also closed source software) vendors
can get problems by them. But for open source they are extremely
unhealthy.

For Software there is the copyright law, and it’s well suited.
Software-patents are… well, how to say it… they are… hmhhhh,
they are …. evil.(GIMPel)

Nothing to add! Sign the petition, they are not dead yet.

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Again I steal an idea from the forum. It’s making fake tilt shift images. They look like images of model railway landscapes but are made from reality. Have a look at the forum for links to images by Bert and others.

I do half of the work in this podcast - planning the image and give the real world a plastic look. Next week I’ll add the focus blur that is so typical for macro shots.

But at the start I show that I have learned something from Philippe: Look carefully at an original. The image on the right is a H0 scale model in the sand on the Weser beach - real plastic.

The companion file contains the original shots - the xcf will follow next week.

00:30 Fake tilt shift images
01:50 Analyzing a macro shot of a toy
05:30 The real image
06:30 What shall be in the focus?
13:00 Rotate before crop and resize
16:00 Inside out crop
17:30 Scaling down
18:00 Analyze the plastic look
19:30 Selective sharpening
24:30 Unsharp mask for getting the plastic look
28:50 Specular highlights

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It’s curves time again. This powerful tool is in the centre of the stage and I try to explain it’s nearly unlimited power over colours, contrasts and brightness. Worth to learn.

This week I visit a vineyard in Missouri (too bad - only via HTTP) and discuss the dangers of blowing out the highlights under overcast sky. Just underexpose a bit when in doubt, you can get detail out of dark areas but 255 white has nothing to save in it.

The overexposed sky has killed all the details in a tree that looked over the horizon. I use the curves tool on a layer copy to get the details back and integrate the fixed tree with a layer mask into the original shot.

Then I adjust the black and white points and give a little more contrast to the image - of course with the curves tool. Finally I have some fun with - of course - the curves tool and come to an image that is not suitable for a vineyard but for a LSD factory. But they don’t have websites….

The TOC

(Kevin, I made one! )

00:20 Wine, Missouri and the Church

02:50 One image - two views

04:30 The histogram

06:40 Diagnosing overexposure

07:30 DO NOT BLOW OUT THE HIGHLIGHTS!!!

09:25 Histogram details

09:40 Linear and logarithmic

13:50 Blown out tree branches

14:30 Curves tool sight seeing

15:10 The translation line/curve

15:40 Black point

17:50 Set contrast in the curve

18:40 Bend the curve

20:30 Inspector - eye dropper

22:30 Repairing the tree

25:30 Get the blue cast out of the twigs

25:40 Adding a layer mask

29:30 Copy visible in new layer

33:00 “HDR” in a very cheap way

34:30 Power of the curve

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In this episode I try to isolate a subject from the background.

There are a lot of ways to do this - I chose to make a layer mask with the threshold tool. Selecting with the path tool is an other option - see the comments to this post.

To get rid of the artificial look I feathered (blurred) the edge of the mask a bit. This gives a soft edge.

The subject of this image is the logo of the Weltladen in Bremen. This is a shop with fair trade products. In the past these products were often bad in quality and high in price, but this has changed. Now the goal of a lot of fair trade organisations is to get the producers to good quality for a competitive price and make them fit for competing in the regular markets. By going mostly organic they can get more money for the products. We buy there all our chocolate (in the box with a bulk discount ) , wine, orange and other juices, rice and even a honey from southern Chile. Philippe considers this type of honey as the best from Chile and recommended mixing it with yoghurt. Exellent!

00:20 Fairtrade shop
01:42 The initial image
02:05 Create a layer to be used later as a layer-mask
02:50 The problem with using the threshold tool
03:45 Try doing it in peices
04:40 Use the selection tool to keep the part we want
06:15 Repeat for the next zone
08:20 Join the parts together with merge visible layers
09:00 Fine-tuning
09:47 - trying to find the biggest contrast using the channels
12:00 - paint in the missing parts
14:40 - invert colours to tidy-up the edges
16:00 Make the layer mask
17:30 More fine tuning
18:25 Smooth the edges
18:30 - select the wanted area
20:00 - feather the edges
21:00 - fill the unwanted areas to make them transparent
22:00 More fine tuning
23:53 Brighten the catch-lights in the eyes
26:52 The End

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It’s Philippe’s turn again. Today he starts with an image of his son David and turns it into a poster like the ones made by Shephard Fairey.

We had a show about this topic by Andrew A. Gill, who made a USSR propaganda style poster out of a portrait of President Roosevelt.

Philippe uses basically the same technique but has some aditional tricks in his sleeve, as separating zones with details that have to be preserved from others that should turn into flat areas and clear lines. And he shows how to get some fine lines into the image to get a half tone shade. The result really looks like a serigraph.

As always he starts with carefull watching and planning - a thing I too often forget.

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There was a question in the forum about how to desaturate and blur the surroundings of a figure. The blur and desaturation should follow the shape of the figure. I give an answer here - making a selection, storing it in a channel and then grow and feather it according to the needs of the task.

More information about selections, feathering. growing and shrinking them is in the outstanding GIMP documentation.

The image on the right is not made with this technique. I just tweaked the curve madly and used an insanely amount of unsharp mask.

Before all that I’ll take you to the work of Bert, who has combined images of the past and today. The results are stunning, have a look in this thread in the forum.

And at the end I’ll go back to the last show and finish the image that I made for selling a twin vacuum gauge. I left out the downscaling and sharpening. This gives the last kick for the image. The gauges are in the science collection of my school now - not on sale.

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I want to sell some stuff on eBay and of course I know that it will sell better with a good image. So I set up my “Production Shot Home Studio”, consisting out of a special height adjustable table, a light tent, reflector and flash.

EDIT: See the comments for additional tips about IKEA and other suppliers of high grade photographic equipment.

After that I edited the image in GIMP to get a nice appearance like in a catalogue. Now I see that the white balance is off….. But I am already thinking about putting this thing into our science lab in school istead of putting it into an auction. We don’t have such low pressure measurement devices.

00:40 Setting up the shot
02:45 Opening the image in GIMP
04:25 Making a copy
04:40 Levels tool explained (forgot to cut some stuff away)
07:30 Getting the image brighter
08:40 Switching to curves for finetuning
10:50 Ímproving contrast with copy in overlay mode and layer mask
14:20 Getting the background white
17:50 Wrapping up
19:50 Cropping

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Today I talk about the Eraser Tool, Alpha Channels and Layer Masks - in short: about transparency. Jim got me onto this topic with an email. Jim, consider this the answer.

Norman sent me another mail about F-Spot and using RAW and  XCF files. Up to the inclusion of XCF files in the database and an option to get images out of UFRaw in XCF or TIFF, just copy the path of the JPEG with a right click. Store your XCF in the same directory as the F-Spot images and add the tag “HasXCF” So you know that there is a XCF and can search for it.

Show 100 is coming up. What shall be in it? I know about the intro, but nothing more. Discuss it in the forum or in the comments.

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After reading all your comments to this post and tracing back the origin of the mail I found out that this upcoming device is not from China but Chile. It’s only two letters difference…. OK, it’s a fake - but you should have seen this at one glance. Which device for nerds is shown with a bearded guy and not with someone female and near 20? Thank you to the people who recognized Philippe and kept their fingers away from the keyboard.

Philippe shows today how to make a mock up of a device with buttons and more and to combine it with a photograph.

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This is the second show about F-Spot - one week late because of sound problems.

Edit: I have said something wrong in the video: The hotkey for opening the tag entry is “t”, not “Ctrl-t”. “Enter” validates the input and “Esc” closes the entry field.
It’s about editing images and exporting them into image sharing sites or into folders. Even a gallery creation function is provided, see the image on the right. The editing is only suitable for simple, quick edits. But you can call GIMP or UFRaw to help with heavier stuff. The images produced by these programs are also stored in the database of F-Spot. Only XCF files are not known to F-Spot - a real drawback in my eyes. Perhaps a later version will include them. At version 0.5 there is still room for an other feature.

F-Spot is expandable. You can get a lot of plugins on the F-Spot homepage or write your own.
I’ll use F-Spot from now on as my image database solution.
F-Spot stores the images in a system of folders (year/month/day), so backup or access with other programs is not a problem. While backing up you should include the F-Spot database, or all your tags will be gone. I shy away from the option to include the metadata in the original files - perhaps I am paranoid.

02:45 Copy images with drag and drop
03:24 Why I shot in manual mode
04:30 Adjusting colours with F-Spot edit mode
06:15 F-Spot makes new versions of the images
06:30 Export to 23hq, flickr and more sites
09:40 Exporting to GIMP
12:00 Sorry, no XCF supported
13:00 Develop in UFRaw
14:50 More export filters
14:40 Making a Web gallery in seconds
18:00 Adding a tag from the keyboard
18:36 Managing extensions for export and editing

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Today I explore the program F-Spot. It’s an image multi-tool - you can rate, tag and index your images, store or export them and even do some editing with it.

You find the F-Spot homepage at f-spot.org.

F-Spot is a program for Linux and the Gnome desktop environment. But there are more programs out there for other Linux flavours and operating systems. For some you can even pay money.

I hope that I concentrated enough on the work flow  and not the specialities of this program. The work flow should be the same under all programs. Import, rate, delete the bad stuff, tag and store or post process further.

00:20 Introduction (Bremen, site of shooting)
03:30 Open StreetMap
04:00 Insering the memory card and importing the images
06:20 Add a general tag to the import
07:30 Looking around in F-Spot
10:40 Merge JPEG and RAW images to one entry
11:50 Different modes of F-Spot
14:00 Help files
14:20 Burst trick and Browse mode
15:00 Rating the images
16:00 A glimpse into edit mode
18:10 Rotate an image
18:30 Rating revisited
19:20 Fullscreen mode
20:30 Select by rating
22:00 Deleting the un-stared images
22:30 Tagging the images
23:30 Adding a tag to the cloud
24:30 Excluding images with a certain tag from the view
26:10 Edit a tag - name and icon
27:00 AirShelters. musicians and peace
31:00 Summing up - what can F-Spot do
33:40 Web site design help wanted

Open Street Map provided the map of Bremen.

In the forum we are planning a new design for this web site. More specific, we plan and Daniel does the work. A big thank you to you, Daniel! Please check out the progress at our playground and give us some tips here in the comments or in the forum.

If you have filled out the registration forms in the forum and got no mail with the confirmation link to click at - please send me an eMail at info@meetthegimp.org. There is a problem with the mail on some servers.

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This week it’s geek time. I found in the German c’t magazine an image which can measure the amount of change to contrast caused by an image manipulation. Yes, an image can measure. I contacted the author, Ralph Altmann, and we cooperated in translating this file from Photoshop to GIMP. (Cooperation = he did most of the work. )

The sound of this episode is a bit off. I have a new headset for recording - good quality - but I have messed up the mixer settings. Some experiments to do.

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This week I start with a short introduction into autostereoscopic images, see two posts below. Then I  cover the GEGL operation “c2g”, which converts acouloured image into a monochrome image with a lot of noise or other other effects. It’s a “try out” thing - up to now I have not found documentation. Perhaps one has to look into the source. Be warned - some parameters can kill the program.

Then Joseph tells us. how easy it is to make “HDR” images. It’s not as complicated as I feared. I’ll try it soon myself. The website Joseph pointed me to is here.

00:28 Autostereoscopic images
02:10 Petersons image with GEGL c2g
03:30 c2g is used
06:30 Introducing Joseph
07:00 Introduction into HDR photography
09:00 QTPFSGui
10:00 Aligning the images
10:30 waiting….
11:20 Editing tools
12:10 Set the parameters
12:50 Save the image
13:00 Change the EV values
14:30 Tone mapping
15:40 saving in an LDR format (JPEG)
16:20 different effects
18:10 Web site with more info

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A lot of people miss “film grain” in digital images. I show how to add it (the exmple on the left is a bit over the top…). You can extract the grain from a scanned analog image or make your own digital grain with the HSV noise filter.

I found these links useful: Gimp Guru and Petteri’s Pontifications. The last one is a very rich ressource.

The end of the video is quite abrupt. I didn’t want to start the recording again, you can read the rest here: “These 1000 Danish Crowns cover half a year of the server costs and the domain fees for this year. A big thank you!And there is more nice stuff in the pipeline. Perhaps we will have a challenge soon - with a real price from a sponsor. Good Bye up to next week!”

00:30 Film grain - then and now
02:20 What’s film grain?
03:00 Anaylsing grain in photographs
05:05 Getting digital grain
05:30 Extracting from a scanned image
09:05 Sythetic grain
10:00 Make artificial grain
13:10 Apply grain to an image
13:15 Scale to the final size first
15:00 Tiling and adding the grain layer
18:00 Layer mask for grain in the midtones only
21:00 Comparing real and artificial grain
22:50 Good bye!

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I am back with a short trip into the land of the non-square pixels. You can change the resolution and aspect ratio not only of the image but also of the individual pixels.

And then I have a reminder about animated GIFs - a “commercial” from SCALE 7x.

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This show has a new encoding, so it may not be playable on every device. I wanted to test this thoroughly before rolling it out, but the old converter program has some problems. If you run into problems - it should be playable on any computer with the program VLC.

After a short visit to the Schnoor in Bremen and a Christmas Equipment Shop that is open all year Max makes a winter theme wallpaper.

He constructs a snowflake brush and then makes a multi layerd wallpaper for his computer.

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This show is two days late - lots of work and again some eye trouble. This time the other one - but it is working out.

Bert (Ray Adagio on the Forum) is the star of this episode. He has written some great scripts and enhanced others, the Zone Adjustment script for example. And now he has tackled rotation. You just have to mark two points on a vertical or horizontal line and click - the rotation starts. Ok, the tool from the toolbox has way more options, but usually you don’t need them.
Bert has also started a discussion about sharpening in different colour modes. Sharpeneing the “L” of LAB should be the best way, but this involves a lot of lossy math in 8 bit mode. Forget about it. But sharpening the “V” of HSV can be an alternative.

The animation in this post has a lot of artifacts due to the 256 colours of the GIF image. The real ones are better. All the example images are in the companion file of episode 79, not 78 as I said in the video. Only the one with selective sharpening is in the ZIP file for this episode.

I add a way to do a selective or high pass filtering in HSV. Perhaps in a script on a server near you in the future.

Sharpening is a topic that has to covered in later episodes. On can sharpen a colour channel (gree is best most of the time) or use different values for the USM (unsharp mask) algorithm. How that thing really works would be interesting too.

Information about the DOCMA Award 2009 can be found in the forum. I’ll update that tomorrow.

00:30 DOCMA Award Challenge
02:30 Subscribe and donate
04:20 Writing scripts
05:00 Rotation script
06:20 Install a script
08:00 Missing folders - no problem
08:45 Using the Rotation script
11:25 Sharpening in LAB?
12:30 HSV and LAB
14:45 Differences between RGB, HSV and LAB sharpening
20:40 Conclusion
21:15 Decompose
22:00 Unsharp mask
23:30 Adding a layer mask for selective sharpening
24:00 Edge detection
25:30 Temporary layer for controlling the effect
27:30 Recompose the image
29:00 Adding an image into a new layer
30:00 Conclusion - there are more ways….

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This is just a short show to catch up on my missed show on Tuesday. I’ll look a tiny bit behind the math in the convolution matrix with a spreadsheet model of a single row of pixels.

And I’ll show you an often overlooked feature of GIMP - the screenshot. It’s way more flexible than just pressing “PrntScrn”. It even stores the mouse pointer on a different layer.

The companion file contains also the images for the next show. I was too lazy to un- and repack that again.

00:19 Welcome
00:33 Greetings to Norman
01:10 Understanding the Convolution Matrix
03:48 - Sharpening
05:18 - Blurring
06:43 The Forum
08:16 Screen shots using Gimp
13:03 the End
TOC made by paynekj

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Philippe lives in Chile - and that is on the southern hemisphere. Summer, flowers, the beach….  (In Bremen it’s winter, rain and wind.) So he sends us northerners, who are shivering in the cold, a floral greeting. Of course made from scratch after a visual visit in the garden.

This is Philippe’s last show for 2008. He torments us by making a summer holiday and has perhaps some extra work to do during Christmas.

But he’ll be back in January. (Rolf has his sound card problems sorted out and faces some time slot sorting problems. He will be here with a show soon.)

If you have a wish for a project for Philippe to do, post it in the forum or here in the comments.

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Today we are going into Math-Land, but not too deep - I promise. But first there is a visit to the Oakland Technology Exchange West - a non profit that gives new life to (not so) old hardware.

The Convolution Matrix lives in Math-Land. It is the backbone of a lot of filter plugins. It’s fun to play with if you have understood the basics and lost your fear. One example of a filter done with this is the Pencil Shade Filter by Alex Turner

I forgot to talk about the “Border” options. “Extend” just adds a virtual black border around the source image. “Wrap” takes the pixels from the opposite corner and wraps them around.

The matrix in the image has no deeper meaning, it’s just some random numbers.

My lens replacement surgery went well and I am recovering fast. Thanks for all the good wishes!

00:19 Welcome
00:23 Oakland Technology Exchange West
02:25 Rolf’s Eyes
03:13 Convolution Matrix Filter
05:18 - User interface
06:08 - Experimenting
06:56 - The documentation
12:30 - sharpening
16:48 - blur
17:16 - normalize option
18:02 - edge enhance
21:38 The End
TOC made by paynekj

This work is licensed under a

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I got a mail from Pascal de Bruijn, the man behind the p-code blog. He knows a lot about colour management, RAW processing and so on. He had seen episode 11 and pointed me to some errors and stuff that is new in UFRaw. So I read his mail and had a look.

This is really a fast forward through the program, nothing really in depth. It can be a guide for experimenting. If you know not much about RAW processing, have a look at episode 11. It covers some basics about the technology behind it.

I used the UFRaw version compiled by Pascal. You can find it for Ubuntu on his site - other OS have to look around. Start with the UFRaw home page.

I’ll have an eye surgery tomorrow (lens replacement) and had not much time to prepare this episode. TOC and more will follow. And I’ll be off screen for some days until I am allowed to read again.

The TOC

0:00 Intro
0:26 Statistics
1:50 Pascal’s e-mail blog.pcode.nl
4:16 - Fire up UFRaw!
4:30 - Color matrix vs. Color profile
5:57 — Working Color Space Profile
6:33 — Rendering Intent Option
8:50 - Details Restauration & Highlight Clippings
10:13 - Import base curves from .NCV
10:26 - Auto black point correction works perfectly!
11:13 - New features in new version of UFRaw
11:36 - LensFun
14:00 - Fix cromatic aberration
15:57 - Optical Vignetting
16:23 - Lens distortion - Panotools
17:16 - Lens geometry
19:18 Outro

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