Late – but here is #135.

Darktable is a new RAW converter, photo editor and image manager for Linux and MacOS. It is in early development and has some really cool features. most of them I only have partially explored, but what I saw was promising.

You find Darktable for Ubuntu at Pascal’s ppa.

The TOC

04:10 Darktable
04:50 Overview of interface
05:30 The lighttable
06:20 Zooming
08:00 Selections
08:20 Tagging
09:00 The Darkroom
09:30 Profiles needed
10:50 Exposure
11:40 Reset
12:50 Curves
14:00 Clipping / cropping
14:40 Sharpening
16:10 More plugins
16:30 Lens correction
17:30 Colour correction
18:30 Monochrome
20:00 Equalizer
21:00 History
22:10 The Verdict

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.

Pure Physics with Nikon gear – and what beasts of lenses!

This week I have a challenge for you. Do my homework and edit my shot from our Samba Carneval. You’ll find the JPEG and the NEF (RAW image by a Nikon D200) of a shot I did from my window. It is not a good photograph but catches a beautiful moment. Improve the image, store it somewhere on the Internet and post a link to it in the comments. You can embed a small version of it in a comment, just copy the HTML code from 23, flickr or other sites. It should be there in a box to cut and paste.

Then I’ll tell you why you always shall set your camera settings to a defined standard state before you put your camera in the bag or cupboard. I didn’t and it has ruined a whole series of shots from this occasion.

Have you ever wondered how to make a selection with a zig-zag border? Well, if you have, I have the answer. (Stolen from Saul Goode, BTW ) I was reminded that a Quickmask is an image and so can be editied much better than a selection. Making waves and sawteeth into it then is “elementary”.

And finally I reveal how I built a dust free blackboard and chalk with GIMP. The blackboard from the “Basics” series looses its mystery.

I made a TOC and forgot to save it.

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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.)

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.

Download the Video! (77.0 MB, 40:31)

This is the second time I try to get into Python scripting for GIMP. My script in the first show about scripting was simple, just saving some clicks. Now it is more complicated, variables, loops and floating points included. But no parrots!

You find a better version of the programs in the companion file. Following a tip in our Forum I included a Undo Group. So the action can be undone, a behaviour that should have been included from the start.

I mentioned some sources. Instant Python, the official Python Tutorial and the GIMP Python reference. Bert has a script page and a much better version of the Octave sharpening script.

Then we have a UnGIMP composition challenge on the Forum.

Have I forgotten some promised links? Please complain below!

Errata:

The loop counter in the companion file is set to 6 instead of 4. You can change it back or leave it.

Perhaps it is better to take the image size from drw instead of img. See the discussion in the forum. drw.height and drw.width should work also when the layer is smaller than the image.

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.

Dan McMahill

to gimp-user
Hello,

Has anyone written a script that would be a good starting point for the
following task?  I want to take an ascii file that has a bunch of names
along with a number.  Format is probably something like

1, name number 1
2, name number 2
1, name number 3
3, name number 4

then for each line in this file I want to start with a .xcf file which
is selected by the first field (the 1-3) and then add the persons name
as text on top of it.  Then I want to write out the generated image and
at the end up with a giant pdf file that I can send to the printer.

Basically I’m trying to make about 60 badges that will come in one of
several styles and each will have someones name printed on it.

If anyone has something close they could share it would be much
appreciated.  Probably script-fu is my preference since I already speak
scheme (but only a tiny bit of script-fu) but I could probably learn
enough python to muddle through too.

Thanks
-Dan

Gimp-user mailing list
Gimp-user@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user

saulgoode@flashingtwelve.brickfilms.com

to gimp-user
I’ve had a go at this.

The files are all available in the following location:
http://flashingtwelve.brickfilms.com/GIMP/Scripts/Badges/

There are two script files that need to be installed in your GIMP
scripts folder. The main one is ’sg-create-badges.scm’ which adds a
“Create badges…” command under the File menu. The other script is
’sg-mosaicize.scm” which is required by the other to produce the final
layout (it adds a “Mosaicize” command under the Filters->Map menu).

There are also an ‘example.data’ file and three sample badge style
files: ‘rainbow.xcf, ’seuss.xcf’, and ’simple.xcf’. The topmost layer
(typically transparent) of the style file’s image is used to determine
the location and size of the text of the person’s name. The name text
is centered within the bounds of this topmost layer (and then merged
down to a single layer).

The format for the data file is quite simple and described in the
comments of the ’sg-create-badges.scm’ file. You should use fully
qualified paths to the style files.

In the dialog for the script, you would select your data file, a font,
the text color for the person’s name, and a percent value for the font
size (100% means use the largest font that will fit in the allotted
area).

The result of the script is an image with a separate layer for each
badge, as well as a background layer. The layout of these layers is a
MxN grid. This layout is determined by the the Mosaicize script and
chooses “M” and “N” such that the result is as close to square as
possible (e.g., 11 badges would result in a 3×4 grid).

No file is written to disk.

Though not required, I would appreciate being notified if you improve
the script (or even whether you find it useful).

If you have problems with the sound – simply reload! There was a glitch.

I was out on a photo walk with a GIMPer from Bremen. One of these shots is post processed in this show. Nothing special, just adjusting the colours with a curve in two different parts of the image. Of course a layer with mask is used to separate the different areas and explained again for the new GIMP users.

The really new information is about uploading images from F-SPOT to 23 and flickr. You have to enable the exporter in the menu Edit/Mange Extensions/Export. 23 is covered by the flickr exporter, they use the same API.

You can find the final image on 23 and flickr, both uploads worked like a charm.

You can participate in episode planning in the Wave. It is open for everybody.

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.

A posting in the forum pointed me to a description of an interesting way to sharpen an image. This Octave Sharpening is useful when you have to do a lot of sharpening and want to avoid the typical halos around the edges.

The secret lies in a combination of 4 USM sharpened layers with different opacity. As in the recipe I used an amount of 5 (500% in the Other Program), threshold 0 and 0.5, 1, 2 and 4 in the different layers. The opacity was set to 100%, 50%, 25% and 12.5%. The more sharpening the less impact in the image. But the traces of harsh sharpening give a bit of a gradient to the edges in the final image.

Norman needs some information about old slide producers in Israel. Are you able to help?

And I have started to use Google Wave for episode planning. If you want to participate, drop me a line at info@meetthegimp.org . I also have some invites.

The TOC

00:30 Torrent for the first 100 shows
02:10 Grandfatherclock tutorial in writing at meetthegimp.org
03:10 Help for Norman
04:00 Google Wave
04:40 Octave sharpening
06:20 TAB hides the dialogs
06:50 Octave sharpening in action
08:00 50% Zoom for sharpening
08:10 Sharpen the 4 layers
11:20 setting the opacity
12:00 Looking at the result
13:15 Layer group workaround
14:30 Recap
17:10 Forum
17:00 Fund raising

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.

And now I give over to LuX, who will show you how to make a Grandfathers Clock from scratch:

This is something I’ve been working on the last month. I wanted to emulate a old longcase clock aka grandfather clock standing in our living room.

You can download the final XCF.

This tutorial isn’t difficult. I follow the KISS rule; Keep It Simple, Stupid!
Feel free to respond and create you own version maybe upload in user gallery in the forum.

Files to complete this tutorial can be found on Dafont.com and Deviantart.com, search for “resources for gimp”.

For reference or inspiration goto Wikipedia, there’s a long list of time devices.

And I have collected a bunch of free SVG images as examples for watches made from scratch.

Tutorial

• Create new picture with dimensions 600×800 facing Portrait
• Pull out guidelines to decide and divide the clock from each area. How much patterns should it have? How big should it be? and so on…

*At this point it’s wise to make several circles at once. Both to ease the process and for reference later in the project

• Create a circle for the outer line of the watch and make it to a path.
• Go to Select>Shrink enter 10 and call this path No_1.
• Repeat this step twice; 5 pixels and call it No_2 then 55 pixels and call it Innercircle.
• Go to path dialogue and click the Outercircle visible. With the Rectangular tool create a square that covers the circle. Remember to check fix ratio 1:1 and save it as a path, call it Outer Square.
• Last create a half circle on top of the square and save this also as a path. Name it Top.

• With the blend tool make a gradient from light to dark Braun on the background layer.
• Create a new layer, call it CornersBG and make a selection of the half circle from your paths dialogue. Select the blend tool pick Golden from the gradient list and set the mode to screen, form linear and check dithering. Repeat this with the square.

*The surface around  the clock is uneven due to patterns, so don’t make the reflection area same on the half circle and square. I choose to have it on each side of the square. Look below.

• New layer, call it Innercircle. Make a selection of the path with the same name. Pick colours FG dbcf48 and BG ffea00. With the blendtool choose mode normal, form radiant and check dithering. Fill the area with colour from the centre to the edge.

• Select text tool, pick a font CapitalisTypOasis with size 45, check hinting and antialiasing, colour black, spacing-2,3. Because Roman numbers are close to each other this is however different from font to font.

The right spacing between each letter is done by inserting extra spacings; (3) after I-(5)II-(4)III-(4)IIII-(4)V-(3)VI-(3)VII-(3)VIII-(3)IX-(3)X-(3)XI-XII(3)

• After the Roman numbers are written in text box with spacing,  choose the Innercircle path from the dialogue and click on text along path button.
• Make a selection of the Roman path, fill it with black and anchor it to a  new layer. Then rotate it until it fits with a clock with 12 a top and 3 to the right.
• New layer. Goto Filters>Render>Clouds>Plasma value 5,1 and click OK. Then Colours>Desaturate and pick Lightness.
• Take the innercicle layer goto Filters>Map>Bumpmap with the plasma layer. Choose following values; check Compensate for darkening, 125, 45, 3, 120, 319, 0, 0
• Delete the Plasma layer.

• New layer, call it NoBG and make a path to selection with No_1 path. Goto gradientlist pick Metallic Something then fill selection with blendtool, mode normal, form linear and dithering checked.
• Create a layer for the lines. Select each path and go to Edit>Stroke path with a solid colour at value 3 or 4.
• New layer call this Pattern. Find a pattern* and drag it to your layer. Highlight the square and press Ctrl+I and cut all excess.

*If you don’t have any patterns there’s several places online, Deviantart. The folder is located the same gimpfolder as the font folder. I’ve used zen79_cherry_arabesque.

• Cut one half of the remaining pattern away, copy, paste and flip it vertically to the opposite side. Anchor it to the patterns layer.
• Select the OuterCircle and cut away selection.

• Create a new layer for a globe. On this layer a wire frame must be drawn with a pencil, simply make some lines cross in a 90degree angle.
• Find a world map and open it in GIMP. If the picture you got is in different colours then make it black and white, or with colour picker select as much as you can.
• Copy selection into a second new layer and check the alpha channel box found in the layers dialogue. Fill the layer with black.
• Be sure to resize the frame so it’s slightly bigger than the world map and press the to layers into one. Then goto Layer>AutoCropLayer. Result should look like below.

• Filter>Map>MapObject pick ball and uncheck light source. Rotate the globe in Orientation page.
• With the scale tool get the proportions correct by entering the same values in top and bottom. Last scale it to the size you like.

• New layer, name it Top and fill it with another kind of pattern.
• Make a selection of Top path, Ctrl+I and cut. Or you can use a font which does patterns instead of letters.
• Create a text layer and write; Tempus Fugit font Schwaben_alt.
• With pencil draw a big hand, small hand and a center. Optional use the ellipse tool and stroke the selection.
• Finish

Adding some more effects

- added shadow to the hands
- woodwork on top of background colour
- created darker outlines in wood
- glass with blurred reflection
- title of producer
- bumpmapped the patterns into the CornerBG layer

You should be able to do that now.

Tutorial is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Sorry – no mobile version yet!

A short one this time – I upgraded to Karmic Koala and did a clean install with new partitions and EXT4 file system. And now I am getting the important stuff back on the disk and leave the cruft out. This meant that a lot of the files needed for a proper podcast are still on the external disks.

I take a look a the new Folio by Jeff Curto at Lenswork – because it’s an example of printing an image on paper with a different aspect ratio, the images are really good and Jeff is a friend and I hope he sells a lot of them.  Jeff does two podcasts in the Photocast Network, Camera Position and The History of Photography. The last is the only podcast where I have experienced a coffee break.

I use an image from “wbool63″ from the forum to make some nice frames with G’MIC, the Swiss Knife plugin from France.

And I have done….

The TOC

00:20 Greetings and Jeff Curto at lenswork
02:30 Using a white frame and text
03:10 Cropping an image
05:50 Getting a square crop
06:20 Eyes out of focus – no problem here
07:10 G’MIC plugin and frames

No blackboard this time – and no mobile version  yet. The upgrade broke the toolchain, I have to compile ffmpeg to get it running again. Software patents are really …….

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.

We had a nice discussion in the forum about how to crop. What shall determine the crop, the output paper format or the content of the image?

The two main aspect ratios used in digital cameras are 2:3 and 3:4. This has technical reasons – not artistic considerations. Then there is a flood of different formats for papers, from ancient to the modern A-series. The big question: How do you fit your camera image onto the paper?

I show two ways of getting it right. One is to leave a strip of paper white and cut it off later. Or you put the image into the centre of the paper and leave a nice white border around it. For both a bit of math is needed.

In the video I mention a script for getting images straight – a rotation tool on steroids. You find it at Ray Adagio’s Script Manufacture.

What happens in the camera when you change the ISO? This is my topic for the tech part of the show.

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.

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. the moment Kevin made one.

The TOC

00:28 Welcome to PhotoWalkThrough.com from John Arnold
01:05 Welcome to Meet The Gimp from Rolf
02:30 Back to John
02:50 – a curves layer
05:10 – a layer mask
08:20 Back to Rolf
09:00 The original photo
09:20 Make a layer with increased saturation
10:40 Add a gradient layer in soft light mode to alter the sky
12:10 New layer from visible
13:25 Add a layer mask and edit it
15:25 The problem with destructive editing
15:55 But it’s not that big a problem
18:20 New segment – time for lessons
19:55 How film works
24:00 How a sensor works
27:00 Feedback please
28:14 The End

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.

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)

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.

The current development  version has already a choice for for using this mode or the classical multi window mode.

But beware – it is under construction and has a lot of holes in the floorboards. Switching back to multi window mode is a pain – but all this will be fixed.

My standard disclaimer: Don’t use 2.7.x if your time or images are worth something and you are not helping with debugging. It is not even alpha – it is just compiling.

A big “Thank You” to all the developers!

(The image is stolen from Martin’s website.)

Another screen shot from NachbarNebenan (click for full resolution) and a pop up dialogue. We discuss thi in the forum.

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

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.

Apache or PHP?

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.

The TOC

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

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.

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.

The step done in 2.8 seems to be even larger now. And I can’t wait for the time line thumbnails!

And of course Gimpusers has more about this.

Edit: Gimpusers gets hammered from Digg, but is keeping up. I thought our site was sluggish because of a lot of stray people from there – but it was a wld download script in Manila. IP is blocked now.

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.

There is a sound problem with this video. I had massive clicking in the sound file. I got a fair amount of it removed, but now I sound like I had recorded it in an empty trash can.

David Gowers made some very good comments about this show below. I pull them up here:

“That ‘new color from FG’ button you use is good for something (i’m not sure what). However I have to say, in the context in which you were using it, it would have been more appropriate IMO to use the ‘add to palette’ option of the eyedropper (then you just click with the eyedropper once to add a color to the active palette. If you have selected a color in the palette, the new color will get added to the right of that color (and will become the new active color).
Dragging rather than clicking will update the color as you move the cursor, and you can release the mouse button when you are happy with the color you have (which will be the one now stored in the palette).

AFAIK, the reason you cannot edit the color name is because you have not selected a palette entry by clicking on it.”

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.

Download the HD-Video! (55.3 MB, 28:03)
Download the Video for iPods etc ( MB, 28:03)
Download the Torrent!

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.

I had only little time to make this episode. There are probably some editing glitches and I had no chance to make a TOC. Too late in the evening.

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.

Some highlights:

Years over years GIMPusers waited for this feature – now a dream has finally become true: Layer Groups for GIMP will be available in GIMP 2.8! more…

There is an interesting message of Martin Nordholts, one of the core developers of GIMP, in the official mailing list about GIMP 2.8 being shipped in a single window mode. more…

And finally a writeup of all the goodies we will get (perhaps for Christmas ):
Most probably, GIMP 2.8 will yet be released 2009, so it has been time to have a look at the current developer version. There are many cool new features, but the most important thing for us are the layer groups. more…

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!”

If you are a Linux Geek living in the UK, you may be tempted to attend the Ogg Camp, organized by the Ubuntu UK Podcast and Linux Outlaws.

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.

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!

And of course I remind you that the challenge is still open!

The TOC

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

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.

Martin Nordholts

We are pleased to announce the release of GIMP 2.7.0 which is the
first step towards GIMP 2.8, the next stable release. Even though GEGL
related work has been made, the primary focus for GIMP 2.8 is to get
work not related to GEGL done. This will enable us to fully focus on
GEGL once GIMP 2.8 has been released and finish the integration we
have tentatively started.

You will need GEGL 0.1.0 and babl 0.1.0 found at http://www.gegl.org
and http://www.gegl.org/babl to build GIMP 2.7.0. The GIMP 2.7 release
notes can be read at http://gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.7.html. A
more complete but summarized list of changes is in the NEWS file found
at http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gimp/tree/NEWS. This file is also quoted
below.

/ Martin

Changes in GIMP 2.7.0
=====================

UI:

- Change the Text Tool to perform text editing on-canvas (GSoC 2008)
- Add support for tagging GIMP resources such as brushes and allow
filtering based on these tags (GSoC 2008)
- Separate the activies of saving an image and exporting it, there is
now an ‘File->Export…’ for example
- Port file plug-ins to new export API which gets rid of many
annoying export dialogs
- Add a simple parser to size entry widgets, images can be scaled
to e.g. “50%” or “2 * 37px + 10in”
- Arrange layer modes into more logical and useful groups
- Added support for rotation of brushes
- Make the Pointer dockable show information about selection position
and size
- Get rid of the Tools dockable and move toolbox configuration to
Preferences
- Add status bar feedback for keyboard changes to brush paramaters
- Add diagonal guides to the Crop Tool
- New docks are created at the pointer position
- Add support for printing crop marks for images
- Move ‘Text along path’ from tool options to text context menu
- Change default shortcuts for “Shrink Wrap” and “Fit in Window” to
Ctrl+R and Ctrl+Shift+R respectively since the previous shortcuts
are now used for the save+export feature
- Make Alt+Click on layers in Layers dockable create a selection from
the layer
- Allow to specify written language in the Text Tool

Plug-ins:

- Map the ‘Linear Dodge’ layer mode in PSD files to the ‘Addition’
layer mode in GIMP
- Add JPEG2000 load plug-in
- Add X11 mouse cursor plug-in
- Add support for loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data
- Add palette exporter for CSS, PHP, Python, txt and Java, accessed
through palette context menu
- Add plug-in API for getting image URI, for manipulating size of
text layers, for getting and setting text layer hint, and for
unified export dialog appearance

Data:

- Add large variants of round brushes and remove duplicate and
useless brushes
- Add “FG to BG (Hardedge)” gradient

GEGL:

- Port the projection code, the code that composes a single image
from a stack of layers, to GEGL
- Port layer modes to GEGL
- Port the floating selection code to GEGL
- Refactor the layer stack code to prepare for layer groups later
- Prepare better and more intuitive handling of the floating
selection
- Add File->Debug->Show Image Graph that show the GEGL graph of an
image
- Allow to benchmark projection performance with
File->Debug->Benchmark Projection
- When using GEGL for the projection, use CIELCH instead of HSV/HSL
for color based layer modes

Core:

- Make painting strokes Catmull-Rom Spline interpolated
- Add support for arbitrary affine transforms of brushes
- Add support for brush dynamics to depend on tilt
- Add aspect ratio to brush dynamics
- Add infrastructure to soon support vector layers (GSoC 2006)
- Rearrange legacy layer mode code to increase maintainability
- Drop support for the obsolete GnomeVFS file-uri backend
- Allow to dump keyboard shortucts ith File->Debug->Dump Keyboard
Shortcuts
- Prepare data structures for layer groups
- Remove gimprc setting “menu-mnemonics”,
“GtkSettings:gtk-enable-

mnemonics” shall be used instead
- Remove “transient-docks” gimprc setting, the ‘Utility window’ hint
and a sane window manager does a better job
- Remove “web-browser” gimprc setting and use gtk_show_uri() instead

General:

- Changed licence to (L)GPLv3+
- Use the automake 1.11 feature ’silent build rules’ by default
- Lots of bug fixes and cleanup
_______________________________________________
Gimp-developer mailing list
Gimp-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer

Overview of changes: http://developer.gimp.org/NEWS-2.6

The installer for Windows is already available: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html
Further compiled installers will follow within the next few days.

Edit: This update is specially important for Windows users, because it fixes some nasty Windows specific bugs.

(Reported by Ray Adagio in the Forum)

Download the HD-Video! (95.4 MB, 49:54)

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.

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.

You can see the slides and hear the audio or read the stuff at his blog in part 1 and part 2.

Challenge 1: “From Scratch!”

Make an image from scratch with GIMP, like Philippe does in his shows. Start with a blank canvas and create.

Store your image as a XCF file and announce it in this board of the forum. You have to sign up as a member for that – but there are no strings attached. If your image is too big for uploading to the forum you can send it to info@meetthegimp.org as a mail attachment. We will host them on the server. We are open for further ideas of getting the images into the forum.

Write a bit about what you have done in the forum posting. This has not to be a tutorial – just that we all have an idea which way you have took.

If you post several images, then the last one will be in the draw for the book. All of them are in the pot for the review choice by Philippe.

The Book Prize

All entries that follow the above rules to be in the draw and are posted before September 10, 0:00 “Forum Time” (that is something similar to UTC) are put in a numbered list – starting with 0.

After the end of the challenge Philippe will generate a large enough random number (in the common sense meaning, not math proofed) in a way of his choice. And then the entry at the position “Philippe’s Number MODULO Number of Entries” will win.

The Review

Philippe will take his pick out of the entries and present one or more in the show.

Challenge 2: “Pimp my Photo!”

Modify a digital or scanned analog photography with GIMP and other Free Software programs, like Rolf does in his shows.

Store your original image from the camera and your result as a XCF file and announce it in this board of the forum. You have to sign up as a member for that – but there are no strings attached. If your images are too big for uploading to the forum you can send them to info@meetthegimp.org as a mail attachment. We will host them on the server. We are open for further ideas of getting the images into the forum.

Write a bit about what you have done in the forum posting. This has not to be a tutorial – just that we all have an idea which way you have took.

If you post several images, then the last one will be in the draw for the book. All of them are in the pot for the review choice by Rolf.

The Book Prize

All entries that follow the above rules to be in the draw and are posted before September 10, 0:00 “Forum Time” (that is something similar to UTC)are put in a numbered list – starting with 0.

After the end of the challenge Rolf will generate a large enough random number (in the common sense meaning, not math proofed) in a way of his choice. And then the entry at the position “Rolf’s Number MODULO Number of Entries” will win.

The Review

Rolf will take his pick out of the entries and present one or more in the show.

Other Rules

The books are not sent out by meetthegimp.org, but by APress. Our only responsibility is to send them the winners adresses, not to make sure the book is delivered.

All decisions, “random numbers” and so on made by Philippe and Rolf are final.

By entering an image you accept the above rules.

Have a lot of fun!

Added Aug 9th: Everybody is allowed to enter into both challenges – except for Philippe in the first and Rolf in the second. Both are not eligible for winning the book.

Download the Video! (74.4 MB, 39:09)
Download the Video for iPods etc (40.0 MB, 39:09)
Download the Torrent!
Download the Companion File! (24.5 MB)

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.

The TOC

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

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.

The image is stolen from his site.

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.

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.

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…..

This post will be updated tomorrow – then there will be also a mobile version and the companion file. Good night!

Mobile version of the vido is in the making is ready – I hope it will play everywhere.

There are comments about problems with iTunes and this episode. Is there anybody who can play this in iTunes?

The Mobile Version is a quick and dirty build with Handbrake. Does it play? Where? Where not? And why is it so large? Update: newer version in a bit larger and different encoding. Please check!

I wanted to celebrate this day with the first HD episode. But I ran into problems with the rendering and editing – it will have to wait a bit.

The align tool is not very visible in the toolbox, but can be very handy for arranging text or several layers. I use it for example to tile map snippets that I have copied from the web.

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

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.

GAP was featured in Episode 21 of Meet the GIMP – perhaps it is time for a new look into this corner.

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 Wacom button problem is discussed in this forum thread. Look in the later pages for the script – it’s there in several incarnations.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The TOC by wbool63

00:18 Philippe talks about the Bank Note problems
02:30 The soup bowl from scratch
03:10 Prepare the texture layer of the bowl
04:10 Design the rim pattern for the bowl
07:00 Use noise filter and bump map to give a ceramic texture to the bowl
08:55 Map to sphere to create the bowl
10:45 Create shadow for bowl
11:45 Use selective blur from Quickmask for shadow using gradient
14:00 Use perspective tool to clean up shadow
15:30 Fill the bowl; use subtract selections to cut the shape
18:08 Prepare the soup using Whirl and Pinch, Waves and perspective tool
23:30 Make steam, using copied layers and individual Iwarps
29:30 Blur image behind steam
30:50 Shadow from rim onto soup
33:50 Phillipe recaps actions, goodbye

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.

“The idea behind c2g is to convert each pixel to B&W using an optimal white balance: the black and white points are calculated for each pixel according to its surrounding, giving the closer pixels more weight (and following a gaussian curve). And basically this mimics the way our human eye perceives the image – how we perceive a color (or grey nuance) depends not only on its value, but on its environment.”

Interesting stuff – and controversly discussed in the comments to that post. Check them out too!

Then I follow a comment from Steinar and explore the Device Status dialogue. 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. They 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 thoroughly.

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 damaged parts of the image. Perhaps a scan in full colour mode would have been better. There 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.

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.