Meet the GIMP!

We have a lively discussion in the Forum about printing and colour profiles. And now Joel has something new; Photoprint, a frontend for Gutenprint.

If you remember my shot at making a comic out of a portrait you’ll know that I want some day to make an image like Roy Lichtenstein did.

Well, Richard Querin at screencasters .heathenx.org brought me a big step forward to that goal. I think we have to forget about making this automatically and take up the pen….

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.

In total it took two years of development but there it is: version 1.0 of Rawstudio. Congrats to the developers! Apart from the usual bug fixes and GUI enhancements the most noticeable feature is probably the possibility to export to GIMP.

Rawstudio is an application to manipulate RAW images of digital cameras. RAW applications are not fully fledged image editors but they rather prepare the RAW images for further processing in e.g. GIMP. In a way one could say that converting a RAW image is developing a digital negative.

Joel has an interview with one of the developers on his fine site.

CinePaint has already been mentioned on this blog by some readers as an alternative to GIMP, especially if one wishes to handle 16 bits pictures. Today it was mentioned on its homepage that version 0.23 has been released for MacIntel and Fedora. There is however no mention of 0.23 sources or release notes. It is a bit confusing and I am under the impression that a CVS version has been used for these releases. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile for those concerned to check it out on SourceForge.

The sources were already available at SourceForge.net for two weeks but now it is official: version 0.46 of Inkscape has been released.

Although the version “jump” from 0.45 to 0.46 might suggest a minor update, it is in fact a leap forward. There are way too many new features to mention here. To wet your appetite I just name native PDF support and colour management.

Check out the release notes to see a comprehensive list.

EDIT BY ROLF: I copied the following comment from Serge below in the thread to here.

This is not an exhaustive account but rather a personal summary of the highlights of Inkscape 0.46.

- Editing of gradients has become much user friendlier now. They can be edited on canvas and by simply dragging and dropping a colour on or between its nodes you can now very easily define a gradient.
- Inkscape has now implemented a bunch of SVG filters, e.g. displacement mapping or specular lighting. Using them is not straight forward at first instance but it provides a powerful way of concatenating basic filters to define a new filter. It reminds in a way of Blender’s node editor. As one may expect, all these filters are non-destructive.
- Inkscape offers the possibility to use paths as a deforming object: the child object will be deformed according to this path. Here I encountered buggy behaviour when editing the paths: the handles of nodes move easily in random and extreme ways.
- You can use colour profiles and do soft proofing. There is no working space however which seems odd to me. Maybe I missed something.
- You can import PDF files now and then edit them as usual objects in Inkscape. This means that text, shapes, etc can be modified. This is not as strange as it looks: PDF is essentially also a vector format.
- Last but not least and for me a big surprise: the tweak tool. This is like the sculpt tool in Blender or ZBrush. You use the mouse as a modeling tool: you can push and pull paths, smooth or roughen them, change colour just by painting over objects with the mouse. You have not the feeling anymore that you are using a vector drawing application. If you have not done this before, it will require some getting used to, but after some time you cannot live without it.

As I said, there are many, many more changes, new features and enhancements. I can recommend to spend some hours reading and experimenting with 0.46. It will convince you that 0.46 is not just a minor upgrade. Of course there are some flaws, missing features (e.g. an improved way of handling layers) and you will probably encounter a bug. I am pretty sure by the way that those will be ironed out in a bug fixes release 0.46.1.

If you are curious to know more about Inkscape, heathenx and Richard Querin provide excellent screencasts in which they show how to use Inkscape. Highly recommended: http://screencasters.heathenx.org/

Joel has a great article about HDR on his site. Perhaps I have to steal that again…..

Recently two interesting messages have been published on the Hugin
site.

First, a blog has been launched to provide regular news on Hugin and related open source tools such as panotools. It is called “This week in panospace”.

Second, as part of the upcoming stable release 0.7.0 enfuse will be incorporated which permits to blend images with different exposures. It resembles HDR but is geared towards panorama photography. On that subject a nice tutorial has been written which gives at the same time a nice overview of how to work with Hugin.

Links:
Hugin blog
Tutorial on enfuse

On the 24th of January Rawstudio has released version 0.7 of its RAW image processing application. Most important new feature may well be its ability to demosaic RAW images.

Demosaicing is in fact colour reconstruction. Because the sensor elements of a digital camera cannot save the colour information, a filter grid is used so that each sensor element only detects red, green or blue (other separations are used as well). To take advantage of the full resolution of the sensor the colour of each pixel has to be estimated by using the colour information of the other pixels around it. That process is called demosaicing.

Joel has again covered something that I was looking for and was too lazy to research. How to make a slideshow out of your images that can be played on any DVD player. With menus and all the fine stuff.