Meet the GIMP!

I tried to upload the last torrents to Pirate Bay several times. Either the site wasn’t there or I got kicked out for typing in a wrong captcha. It was right, BTW.

How important is the listing at Pirate Bay if the torrent is available here? Or is there one of the torrenters out there who can put the torrent on the site?

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In this first Epsiode of the second year of Meet the GiMP! I return to Cakovec, Croatia with an image from the old castle. For celebrations I made a double length show. And to celebrate the Croatian style weather here (30+C), I had the windows open and you get some street noises. Our weather is mostly so cold that only bigger shops have an AC.

Before Croatia there is an update on the Old Ink Challenge from the last show. You can download the new set of images and try your knowledge of GiMP (or any other free software program) on that. Please send the results to info@meetthegimp.org.

Of course the new Forum gets a place too in this show. Have a look!

Then I reveal the secret of painting without gaps or overlaps - to answer a question from Luis in Buenos Aires.

In Cakovec I take you with me while I shoot the image to postprocess and tell you a secret of a lot of better photographers than me: MOVE!

The postprocessing involves mostly stuff I had already covered. New is an enhancement of the sky with a masked layer in multiply mode.

A team of highly trained Penguins in the MTG-Labs invented a new TLA, the TOC. And here it is:

The Old Ink Challenge 0:40
The new forum 7:00
Painting without overlap or gaps 10:50
How to shoot a castle 15:20
Postprocessing the castle image 18:20
Rotate 18:50
Crop 20:30
Clone a powerline out 24:20
Boosting the colours with curves 31:10
Enhance the sky with a masked layer in multiply mode 33:00

Now you can skip the parts of the video you don’t like.

Edit: With an audience like you a podcaster can be lazy:

The image I mentioned in the podcast and two links found by Andrew.

And another goodie found by Mathias in the Netzzeitung

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

There was a misunderstanding between me and Ted, the owner of the documents. These documents are not all for publication because that would violate the rights of the archives and persons.

Free to use are the files with the numbers 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. All others should be deleted!

The download link is working again with a new, smaller archive.

You see, the real challenges are still in there.

Please document your work and send it to me at info@meetthegimp.org

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.