Pascal de Bruijn has made his first Video about Darktable, the free virtual lighttable and darkroom for digital photographers. I gave a short intro here some episodes ago, but didn’t go beyond “Oh – I can click here too!”. Pascal has been actively involved in making Darktable and so I assume he really knows what he is talking about.
Edit: Darktable is available for Linux and other *nixes and Mac (which is a *nix too now…). Sorry, no Windows up to now. Nobody wants to do the work of porting it.
Developers and users of Free, Libre and Open Source graphics software will meet May 27-30 in Brussels at the fifth annual Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM). The meeting space is truly unique — an historic piano factory, freshly renovated into a lively exhibition and workspace. LGM 2010 gives software developers, artists, designers and other graphics professionals the opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other. LGM emphasizes the sharing of collective creativity, innovation and ideas and is free for everyone to attend.
The above text and the headline are simply stolen from the website of the LGM. These meetings have given a big boost to the development of Open Source graphics software in the past. Up to now face to face conversation in a group of like minded persons has no equivalent in the net.
I will not be able to attend, but I ask you to give some money to them. (I did, BTW and brought the counter just below the 3000 mark. Seems to work….)
This time I have made an experiment. You can look over my shoulder while I select the images to keep from a trip to Hamburg. I use F-Spot for this task.
I am not sure if this was a successful approach because I didn’t talk that much while selecting the images. Can you find out what I was looking for? What are your criteria? I found out again that shooting without a goal is fun, but has not that much good results.
00:20 A trip to Hamburg – Podcast Promo Jeff Curto
02:30 Where I wanted to shoot
03:50 Using F-Spot for grading images
04:30 Setting the date range
04:40 Going through the images
18:30 What were my criteria?
19:40 Discarding a lot
20:50 THROW AWAY
21:00 Second walk through the images
21:15 Fullscreen mode in F-Spot
21:45 Selecting images for more doing work on them
23:00 How to shoot good images – not like me.
24:15 Podcast Promo for the “World Technology Podcast”
25:00 Train ride home
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.
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.
Stephane Delcroix, the maintainer of F-spot, has sent me this link to his blog. There he describes the GdkPixbuf loader for XCF he wrote.This allows a lot of Gnome programs to read XCF files. He had to do this under “Clean Room” conditions because GIMP is GPL licensed and he had to release under LGPL. So he wasn’t allowed to look into the source of GIMP and had to use some documentation and the old fashioned hexdump and brain combination.
Full XCF suppurt for F-Spot will follow. Now you can see and open XCF files in GIMP, but sending a JPEG to GIMP and getting a XCF back is in the pipeline. Stephane mentioned a “perhaps” date, but I’ll translate that into “soon” here. I’ll keep you updated.
This week I start with a short introduction into autostereoscopic images, see two posts below. Then I cover the GEGL operation “c2g”, which converts acouloured image into a monochrome image with a lot of noise or other other effects. It’s a “try out” thing – up to now I have not found documentation. Perhaps one has to look into the source. Be warned – some parameters can kill the program.
Then Joseph tells us. how easy it is to make “HDR” images. It’s not as complicated as I feared. I’ll try it soon myself. The website Joseph pointed me to is here.
The TOC
00:28 Autostereoscopic images
02:10 Petersons image with GEGL c2g
03:30 c2g is used
06:30 Introducing Joseph
07:00 Introduction into HDR photography
09:00 QTPFSGui
10:00 Aligning the images
10:30 waiting….
11:20 Editing tools
12:10 Set the parameters
12:50 Save the image
13:00 Change the EV values
14:30 Tone mapping
15:40 saving in an LDR format (JPEG)
16:20 different effects
18:10 Web site with more info
heathenx and Richard Querin have introduced a new kind of screencasts at their site – “Microsodes”. A microsode is a (relatively) short video about one aspect of Inkscape without the usual context of making a complete drawing. The target audience are Inkscape beginners. A longer Blog entry explains the details.
In the end this can develop into a audiovisual FAQ. Check it out!
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Pascal de Bruijn has made his first Video about Darktable, the free virtual lighttable and darkroom for digital photographers. I gave a short intro here some episodes ago, but didn’t go beyond “Oh – I can click here too!”. Pascal has been actively involved in making Darktable and so I assume he really knows what he is talking about.
and brought the counter just below the 3000 mark. Seems to work….)
Download the HD-Video! (95.4 MB, 49:54)
Stephane Delcroix, the maintainer of F-spot, has sent me 
This week I start with a short introduction into autostereoscopic images, see two posts below. Then I cover the GEGL operation “c2g”, which converts acouloured image into a monochrome image with a lot of noise or other other effects. It’s a “try out” thing – up to now I have not found documentation. Perhaps one has to look into the source. Be warned – some parameters can kill the program.
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