After a lot of work in the last two weeks I went a bit under the weather this (for me long) weekend. I think I’ll be fit again when school starts. Sometimes I think it would be smarter to move the schedule of the down time from free time to school time….

But there are two nice places to check out for you in the time until the next show.

GIMPtricks on Youtube are made by Jolie from the Netherlands. I recommend to get a close shave with the healing tool and then check out the rest.

And if you have caught yourself wanting to print a logo on a plain T-Shirt after  you made an image from it - here is the solution in Spanish and English made by a young woman in Venezuela. There are 5 more videos to watch. (Thanks to medyr for the tip.)

So, drown them in Clicks!

Download the Video! (59.0 MB, 31:03)
Download the Torrent!
The Video for Mobile Devices! (57.3 MB, 31:03)
Download the Companion File!

This week there is only a little bit of GIMP, but a lot more about the free video editor Cinelerra. I use it to make a kind of slide show video used to illustrate a short “bumper” for Martin Bailey’s blog and podcast about his (mostly nature) photography. Martin is living in Japan and has a lot to tell about photography and Japan. Highly recommended!

Cinelerra is a full “non linear” video editor for Linux – and so perhaps a bit overkill for making a slide show. Non linear says that the program does not change the video and sound data and that you can access all your media easy and fast because only references are moved around. I forgot to introduce it properly at the start of the video. There are programs around for Windows and MacOS which do the same, I am sure.

Cinelerra comes in a lot of different flavours. I take the version from cinelerra.org.

The final version of the bumper, the used images and the Cinelerra XML file are in the companion file.

And here are, as promised, my settings. Compare if you have problems, my setup is running, but I am not sure why….

Playback – check for “Stop playback locks up” if you encounter stutter – uncheck “Play every frame” for performance

Recording – Important is the last point about images

Performance

Interface – Check “Show Thumbnails”

About – for version information

This week we have a mobile version of the video again. It’s not on the feed, because I don’t know if this version fills your needs. So feedback please!

Sorry, I could not make a TOC this time, too much school stuff around.

Meet the GIMP Episode 132 by Rolf Steinort is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

Now also RawTherapee qualifies for a show in Meet the GIMP – they have opened their source and published under GPL. A very early Alpha of the new major version (3.0) has been published and I already got some promising reports from viewers. Congratulations!

I’ll try RawTherapee when they have put on a more mature Alpha and make a podcast about it.

Download the Video! (57.9 MB, 30:27)
Download the Torrent!

After a bit of “housekeeping”, which includes thanks to contributors and a nod over to the Focus Ring, I try to use the stuff hidden in the <Image>/Color/Auto menu. My results are not that good and I try to do it better with curves.

Why did I fail? No idea, it may be the software or perhaps my choice of image was bad. Please share your experiences with this option.

At the end of the show I lift the secret behind the numbers 1 – 1.4 – 2 – 2.8 – 4 – 5.6 – 11 – 16 – 22 …. – aperture numbers decoded.

I couldn’t decide which of the two shots I made for the show image should go into the post, so here are both.

The TOC

00:20 Starting 2010 – thanks and a guy selling GIMP
04:30 New Forum policy
05:40 New Focus Ring Episode
07:00 Exporting an image from F-Spot to GIMP
07:20 The Histogram shows underexposure
08:00 Exploring /Colors/Auto
09:15 Equalize, stretch contrast, stretch HSV
11:50 Color Enhance
12:50 The manual curves approach
15:30 Unsharp Maks (USM) for getting details in snow
17:00 Selection with layer mask
19:00 Basics: Apperture numbers explained

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

Finally we have a new Focus-Ring Episode online! It’s #18 with a new concept. Four participants from the Focus Ring Network as before, but now with one topic for all of them. This time it’s “Light & Shadow”. Contributors Chris Marquardt (Tips from the Top Floor), Jeff Curto (The History of Photography and Camera Position), Martin Bailey (Martin Bailey Photography Podcast) and Ibarionex Perello (The Candid Frame & Shooting with Alas) join together to discuss the importance of shadow in the creation of a successful photograph. And to make the point, each of them presents two images.

Ibarionex Perello

Chris Marquadt

Jeff Curto

Martin Bailey

I haven’t  heard it yet but it sounds promising!

“Meet the GIMP” is just stuck a bit in the production pipeline. I recorded a show twice about my try to contribute in the  Challenge of the Digital Photography School – but it was simply not good enough. I’ll try do a piece about snow later this day, but I have some work for school still sitting on my desk. They simply pay more than you, so I have to set priorities.

Let’s fight them as long as we still can.

If you ever wanted to look an image forensic specialist over the shoulder while looking at some nice “enhanced” imgages – have a look at the Hackerfactor. Be sure to look for the link to the sequel and finale and also check out this nice Bikini model. Poor girl – some bones are missing and her fingers have been hit by a magic spell – they cast no shadow. This page also has a follow up.

Stealing the image from LuX’s posting in the forum I wish some happy days for you all. Take care of yourself and the world around you.

I want to point to an instructional video on Linux for Designers. I don’t know if this was done with Blender, but it must have taken a lot of the time since last winter to make. And never trust your tree decoration….

I think there will be a video still in 2009, but at the moment I am only lazy.

Over at the Digital Photograpy School is a nice challenge. Peter Carey put one of his images under CC license (the image on the right is a crop out of his final version), provided the RAW file and asks his readers to put their versions into the comments.

Some interesting versions are there already – done with “The Other Program”. Let’s show them what we can do!

(The image was shot with a Canon “eos rebel t1i” or  “500D” – you may need that information for finding a colour profile for the RAW import.)

Download the Video! (61.2 MB, 32:10)
Download the Torrent!
Download the Companion File! (767 Bytes!)

Sorry, again a “Nerd Show”. I tackle some problems that have come up with the Python script of the last week and show my way to debug and test while making errors. My first error was to take a test case without colours – my script from last week changed all images to greyscale. Then I learn something useful about merging layers in Python.

But the top of the show is even more nerdy – the Octave plugin allows to access the Octave math software from GIMP. Caluculate your images or do a FFT with them.

The scripters crowd in the forum found a bug in GIMP, saulgoode reported it and it got fixed in a day. Take that, Adobe!

Then I try to explain why the big blobs in the image featured two shows ago are not made with GIMP but with pure physics in the camera. You can see a Blender video I made about this for #200 of Chris Marquards Tips from the Top Floor show. My part starts at about 11:40 and contains an embarrassing error. Do you get it?

This image by Nachbarnebenan is a good example for a shallow DoF.

The next show will be a simple, non-nerd walk through the post processing of an image. Promised.

The TOC

01:10 Octave Math Plugin
02:10 Number types in Python
06:00 Making a test case
06:30 Finding the wrong layer mode
08:00 Running into a wall and thinking around it
09:40 Isolate the bug
12:40 Cleaning up the code
14:40 Colour halos wit Normal Mode sharpening
16:40 When to use Octave sharpening
17:10 Basics of Photography – Depth of Field and Bokeh
19:00 Image creation with a lens
21:00 Circle of Confusion
22:30 Depth of Field
25:00 Apperture and DoF
28:30 DoF and sensor size
29:00 Dofmaster
30:00 Focal length and DoF

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.