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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.

The TOC

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

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.

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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.The one I show in the video is from Nature Photographer. Michael Orton’s homepage is not working at the moment, but you can fnd a review of his book. I haven’t found it in our library system yet – has one of you read it?

PCIN.net has a detailed description of the analog workflow. After reading that I would change my approach a bit. Stay tuned.

Even Wolfram Mathematica has Orton, I never thought of that program as a graphics software. But if you think about it – it has everything it needs built in.

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

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.

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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 Wellner 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.

The TOC

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

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.

Tags: color mode, colour mode, duotone, frame, hasselblad, layer mask, layer mode, toning, value mode
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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.

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.

Tags: from scratch
Posted in From scatch, Gimp, Gimp video tutorial | 6 Comments »

 

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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.

The TOC

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!

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.

Tags: G'MIC, restore old images, Resynthesizer, tablet, wavelet decompose
Posted in Gimp, Gimp video tutorial | 22 Comments »

 

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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.

The TOC

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

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.

Tags: clone tool, heal tool, restore old images
Posted in Gimp, Gimp video tutorial | 11 Comments »

 

 Podcast Video (84.9MB) [42:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
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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.

Do you have any ideas for future “From Scratch” shows? Post them here in the comments or go to the forum! It’s not that we are running out of ideas really soon, but a little input from you would be very appreciated.

The TOC

will follow

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.

Tags: bump map, from scratch, plasma, rust, sign
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This is Show 100! Exactly 2 years after I put the first posting on the blog.

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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Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

Tags: #100, measurement
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What is the right amount of manipulating forging 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.

There will probably no show next week.

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 Podcast Video (18.6 MB) [19:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
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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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Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

Tags: focus blur, miniaturisation, tilt shift
Posted in Gimp, Gimp video tutorial | 3 Comments »