A walk through the post processing of a calm and cold winter morning image is perhaps right for this time of the year.
This is 5 minutes away from my home, half way to my school. There are still cobblestones in the streets like in the 1870s, when this quarter of the city was developed. This is a lucky accident because this area got not much bombs in WWII and was left alone as an area for the expansion of the inner city after the war. So houses were cheap and got bought by young families with mostly intellectual background. As the planners were ready to build their high rises and 4 lane streets the people made such a fuss that the plans were scrapped.
I changed the mood of the image by combining two different outputs from UFRaw. One with “cold” colour temperature for the sky, the other warmer for the street. Then I combined both as two layers in one image, rotated both layers, added a layer mask for revealing the street in the lower layer, cloned away an ugly reflection or colour artefact, resized and sharpened with USM.
So nothing really new. 
You can get the files for this episode on the download page.
The TOC
00:23 Welcome
00:30 The original image
01:50 The objective
02:40 Altering the colour balance in UFRaw
08:00 Combine the images in Gimp as layers
09:19 Rotating the two layers
11:52 Cropping
14:06 Add a layer mask and edit it
20:30 Fine-tuning the layer mask
22:20 Use clone tool to remove unwanted features
24:30 Extra edits
26:45 Re-size for the web
28:00 Sharpen using Unsharp mask
28:52 Frohe Weihnachten
29:44 the End
TOC made by paynekj
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Hi, that was a nice Christmas gift. I liked this one very much: by means of a photo explaining and showing how to arrive at a desired result. One could call this Gimpractice
Thanks again, Rolf, and hope to meet the GIMP also many times in 2008!
GIMPractice is noted down as title for these type of show. Thanks!
Now I am thinking about GIMPheory and GIMPoolbox.
I enjoyed this video very much indeed. Sometimes I wonder how much processing has been done before you actually show some manipulation or other and the result. You know, a bit like those broadcasts about cooking where most of the ingredients are already weighed and then when the mixture is ready for cooking the presenter bends down and produces a dish which just happened to have been cooked before the show started. I am not complaining I just think it must take you a considerable amount of time to prepare and present your excellent videos, far more than it takes me to view them.
Thank you again for all you have shown me this year and I look forward to an interesting and instructive 2008.
With most of the images I have done only the basic stuff – rotating, cropping and perhaps a bit of curves. I try to remember to tell what has been done to the image – but perhaps I forget to do it sometimes.
Another really interesting video, thank you Rolf, and i wish you a great 2008!
I liked the image so much that I decided to take a closer look at it. The more one looks at the image the more detail is revealed. I used UFraw with the Nikon file you provided and got an image which was somewhat different from yours. In fact, not having seen the actual scene I was quite prepared to accept the foreground as it was. Perhaps the sky could be just a touch colder. I noticed that there was a bicycle in the left foreground and the car to the right of the foreground was quite obvious. I noticed also that there were some shrubs or something growing up the fronts of some of the houses. The windows, which you had to treat needed no treatment on the image I looked at and I begin to wonder was the image I downloaded the same as yours. How fortunate you are to have such a beautiful view to the south as you walk to school.
Incidentally, did you use a tripod and, if as I suspect the answer is no, how do you manage to avoid camera shake with such a relatively long exposure?
… just getting a break in doing the taxes….
You have got the same image – that is the power of RAW. I thought after I had finished the show about getting more out of the foreground. Either with an other RAW conversion or with a bit burning and dodging. I will look again at this image – I like it too and want it for the wall.
I could have shot this in burst mode – a trick I learned from Chris Marquard’s podcast. Set the camera to “rapid fire”, get a good stand and shoot a series of at least 5 images. You move while pressing and releasing the shutter, but the middle ones are quite steady.
But this was 1/15 at 18mm focal length with VR (”Anti Shake”) enabled. So this was not necessary, 1/8 could have been also safe.
BTW, I added a GeoTag for this image, there is now a google map on the page at 23.
If you are doing your tax returns you deserve a break. You know, I am so old fashioned, I had forgotten all about things like Anti Shake.
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