This week you are in for a strange show. I try to make an image out of a not so good night shot by Stuart Martin from New Zealand. Stuart had his camera for three days and was experimenting with it. He shot the Christmas decora- tion of his neigh- bour but only got a dark and a bit blurry image.
With no specific goal in mind I just played around with UFRaw and layers in GIMP and got a quite nice result. The 100% crop you see here is a bit like a painting, the full image looks like seen through night vision goggles. 
The lesson to learn except a refresh of using UFRaw and layers: Play around! Make experiments! There is no right way – just interesting results.
Stuart has an incredible collection of links to sites about language – from fun to pure science.
Don’t forget the challenge! Make a monochrome image and post it in our meetthegimp.org photogroup at 23 and be sure to use the tag “mtg-monochrome”. The challenge ends March 31 1600GMT and I’ll draw a winner by random choice.
You can find the image used in this episode here on the Download Page
Contact me!
You can leave your comments on this blog or write me a mail.
The TOC
00:35 Welcome
02:14 The original image by Stuart Martin
03:28 The problems with the image
06:50 Examine using UFRaw
08:40 – change the colour temperature
09:15 – change the exposure
10:18 – Make the second version of the image
13:15 – Make the third version of the image
14:03 Put the 3 images as layers
15:54 Plan the composition
17:19 Rotating all the layers together
19:40 Cropping
22:50 Combining the layers
23:49 Add a layer mask
30:25 The Blog
31:06 The Black and White Challenge
32:26 Request for help with WordPress
33:20 The End
TOC made by paynekj
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.
Tags: layers, UFRaw, underexposure
That was an entertaining episode. Just to see someone exploring and indicating different ways to enhance a picture. This is what I call a GIMPeriment
One note though. It seemed to me that during video editing some parts got lost. E.g. at 10 and 13 minutes there seems to be a sudden transition in the show.
This show triggered an idea for a future challenge: make the best you can from an image as this one and then see what the viewers come up with at 23HQ.
Thanks for the show.
Just got around to watching this episode.
“I don’t know if this has really been worth the effort”
Rolf, this was great. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The detail that you pulled out in the right hand side really meshes well with the image.
The whole image reminds me of Starry Night
Thanks again for showing the potential in my bad photo, Rolf. I’m gratified that my ineptitude has been of use to others!
[...] Episode 036: Nightvision on a lazy Sunday Afternoon [...]
Hello, why do you edit the RAW image ? I cant open your image with Gimp to edit it.
And in your video, i see this menu, and i dont find it in my Gimp.
I capture it here:
http://www.imageox.com/image/200777-whatthis.jpeg
@Cuong.
Rolf used UFRaw which is both a stand alone program and a GIMP plugin. GIMP itself cannot work on RAW images. The screen shot shows the interface of UFRaw.
Home site: http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/
@Cuong: Serge is right. Look at
http://meetthegimp.org/episode-11-raw-converting-with-ufraw/
for more information.
Ah, right. Now i’m working on your RAW image.