Meet the GIMP!

Joel Cornuz has a promising project on his Blog: Niepce. Named after one of the photography pioneers it wants to bring the functionality of Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture to the Linux desktop. Non destructive editing is one of the goals.It depends on GEGL, so a GiMP integration is “easy” and planned.

Joel has links and more.

According to billstei in this comments it should work this way:

(This is a compilation of his three postings, I haven’t tried it.)

I was able to compile and install Gimp 2.5.2 (alongside the normal Ubuntu Hardy Gimp 2.4.5, so I have both at once) by following the instructions here: http://www.gimpusers.com/…

However I did the following differently:

1) I did not find it necessary to compile GLib or GTK+ as the ones already in Ubuntu Hardy were fine. So I only compiled babl, gegl, and gimp.

2) In step #5 the only export that you need for compiling is this one:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/lib/pkgconfig

Both the gegl and gimp configure steps will demand that you do that export first, or it will complain that you do not have babl. Make sure that you actually do have the babl you just created installed first, or else it will be correct when it tells you that you don’t have it

Then to run the program I made a shell script like this (per the advice on the Gimp website here: http://gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.5.html )

#!/bin/sh

 PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/bin:$PATH

 export PATH

 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/lib

 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

 /opt/gimp-2.5/bin/gimp-2.5 “$@”

Whatever name you give to that shell script file is the one you use to start Gimp 2.5. Remember to do:

chmod +x [whatever-you-called-it]

so you can execute it.

3) I prefer to use deb packaging where possible and so I use the program “checkinstall” rather than doing the “sudo make install” step for each of the 3 compiles. Checkinstall is a little buggy at times so you may not want to use it, but if you do here is some advice:

3a) Checkinstall will fail until you create some directories ahead of time (there may be some I missed, but checkinstall will let you know):

 sudo mkdir /opt/gimp-2.5/share/locale

 sudo mkdir /opt/gimp-2.5/share/icons

 sudo mkdir /opt/gimp-2.5/share/icons/hicolor

 sudo mkdir /opt/gimp-2.5/share/gimp/2.0/fonts

3b) Checkinstall will list 10 options, and option line #2 is the name of the package itself, which will be by default “gimp”. Since you already have “gimp” installed as Gimp 2.4.5 you will have to change the package name to avoid a conflict, to something like “gimp-2.5″ or similar, just so it’s different.
4) Start checkinstall like this:

sudo checkinstall --install=no

Then when it finishes you will get a deb, which you can install like this (babl package shown, similar for the others):

sudo dpkg -i babl_0.0.22-1_i386.deb

and of course the advantage is that this will show up in Synaptic if you later decide you want to get rid of it (or upgrade it).
I wish I could say all this is “easy”, but perhaps not. If it seems confusing, then just stick with the original instructions and not mine.

According to the weather report I have a lousy weekend in front of me, (my Croatian friends: it’s afternoon and 16°C in front of my window….. ) so perhaps I’ll give it a try.

For the very cool Gimp Colorize Plugin Christopher Lais is looking for a new maintainer. Don’t let this die.
The same is about the quite good GREYCstoration plugin, volunteers wanted to improve the code of the current GIMP plug-in and implement features of the commandline version.
The third is the JPG2000 plugin, since the GSoC project nothing happens and nobody has seen this working in Gimp on Linux.
So new developers are needed to improve existing plugins and move them to Gimp 2.4 and later to 2.6.
Anybody reading this could help finding the new maintainers and developers.
Post this on your blog and your related boards! If one of your friends could do this ask him!

(I got this from Eckhard M. Jäger  http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/gimp-plugins-developer-wanted)

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I shot this image on my way to Cakovec from the airplane over the Chiemsee. That is a famous lake in Bavaria. We were already so high in the air that serious haze made the image flat. It’s the one at the bottom of the image in this post.

In this episode I show how to get rid of the haze by using the curves or levels tool. And of course I have a way using layers. A layer copy in burn mode takes a lot of the haze away. Further fine tuning involves a layer mask and an overlay layer copy.

EDIT: Mathias (http://mathias.lindner.de.vu/) pointed me to an error in the layers version. The last overlay layer didn’t work well. I used a copy of the base image - I should have used a copy of the visible image after all the burning. “Edit|Copy Visible” and then “Edit|Paste” and setting the floating layer to a new layer by “Layer|New Layer” would have done the job. This image here is done that way:

Now one could start to lighten the cloud shadow in the forrest and water a bit and correct or enhance the vignetting made by the camera….. But this is not bad, considering the image where I started.

I couldn’t record in Croatia, somehow we never got a recording with sound and video. If I am invited to another such event, I’ll buy a strong enough notebook and test the setup before the trip. But aside from this it was fun and I met a lot of interesting people, most of them connected with the Croatian Linux Group “HULK”.

I recommended Akkana Peck’s book “Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional”. It’s the best book about GIMP I have seen up to now. If you buy via Amazon.com, use the link on her site.

You can find the files used in this episode at the usual place.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

I shot pictures of my colleagues at work for a farewell book. One image came out with a real drunkards nose - much too red. Not so nice.

I just doubled the layer, inverted it (Color/Invert) and set it to overlay mode. Ghastly. Then I added a layer mask in black, (hiding everything) and painted with a soft brush in white (with low opacity) over the nose. Worked really well. Gradually the skin looked better. This worked too on some blotches on the skin.

Sorry, I can’t show the image here.

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As I should have known, Belize is a small country in middle America. Next to Mexico and Nicaragua. I should have known because our fair traded Bananas are from Belize. But this video is not about Bananas, it’s about this image made in the shadow on a bright tropical day.

You see the problems in the original top-left. The background is a bit too bright  and the woman way too dark. But two layers in overlay mode of an inverted desaturated copy of the image helped a lot. The final touches came by applying a layer for dodging and burning, also in overlay mode, and painting on it in white. All Croat to you? (Not Greek this week, see this blog entry.…) No problem, after the video you’ll understand.

Overlay mode does strange things, even the explanation in the help pages is a bit cryptic: “Overlay mode inverts the pixel value of the lower layer, multiplies it by two times the pixel value of the upper layer, adds that to the original pixel value of the lower layer, divides by 255, and then multiplies by the pixel value of the original lower layer and divides by 255 again.” I’ll think about a way to get that a bit easier to swallow.

The Linux Darkroom is an interesting collection of links and program descriptions. Definitely worth to look at - and perhaps you have something to add.

You can find the file used in this episode at the usual place.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

On the next weekend I’ll be at the “Free Festival” in Čakovec, Croatia.

There I’ll record an episode with “Questions and Answers”, hopefully from the audience. But if you have any questions, prefered with an image to show, send them in. Either in a comment to this page or as a mail to info@meetthegimp.org. Spontaneous answers are easier if you know the question ahead.

I got this mail:

Hi Rolf Steinort,

First congratulations for your shows… I just met them.. they are great.

I am Daniel from Brazil.

I would like to ask you one thing.

I am new in webdesign and till now, I have being used to make my layouts, Inkscape. But I talk with some and see that a lot of people use photoshop to make a web layout. So, I am with vector program and a lot of people use a bitmap editor…

Searching … I found that some people use Gimp to make layout too.. and I found some tutorial.. but they are very weak. Could be possible you cover this in some of your shows ?

Just a classic layout would be already enough to me.. I just need some base to start.

Thanks and keep this great work.

Best,
Daniel

I have no idea what to answer. My gut feeling is to stay with vector based programs. For what do you need raster images in web design except for photo manipulation?

Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Yes, there is one around - a special keyboard for GIMP. (The site is in German, but the Fish will help you.) Uwe Mayer has made one out of an old cash register keyboard bought from eBay. He got his informations from an other German site from Markus Dollinger.

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This 50th episode is 40 minutes long. I am not sure if this  “Double Length” is caused by the complexity of the work or simply a bit of laziness. But I declare “celebrating the 50th” as the official reason for this.

The log files of my blog show from where clicks are coming in. One of the most successful linkers is Jeff (jeffegg2) on flickr. He drops a comment with a link to this site whenever appropriate.

There is a GIMP users group on flickr that I found out about on this way. And there I found a tutorial from Shelly and Roy about making a comic like drawing out of a photography.

I was looking for such an effect for a while. My final goal is to do something like Roy Lichtenstein did - replacing every colour gradient with solid colour or a dot pattern. I think this is a step on that way.

I am not very happy with my result. It still has too much “non-comic” in it. If you compare my work with this image from Shelly and Roy, you see that I am not really there.

One thing that I found out after I made the video: these images are very ugly to scale down. So work in your final resolution.

You can find the file used in this episode at the usual place.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.