What’s “meaningful black”? It’s a concept out of the book “Welcome to Oz” from Vincent Versace. It’s for this other program, but I try to convert it to GIMP. It’s not so easy – so we have to write a script to do the tedious work. This script is also covered here.
EDIT: This plugin has evolved tremendously. Go to the Forum entry and search from the last postings backwards for it’s latest incarnation!
Information about the Zone System is at Wikipedia and a lot of other sites. Chris Marquardt has made a simple version of it for digital cameras.
At the end of the video I do some ironing. I made some promotional images for our organic shop around the corner. The team had donned brand new aprons with all the creases from packing still in them. Awful! I show you a way to iron them out after the shot. BTW, this works too with wrinkles in the skin of a portrait model.
The “Old Ink Challenge is still open. Give it a try!
I also have some updates about the forum and ask for input with a new design for this web site. Daniel (DRB) is helping me a lot – and he has made a great interactive and collaborative storytelling site at StoryEverTelling.com . If you are into telling stories with a twist or reading them – check this out and help him to build this up.
The TOC
Old Ink challenge update (1:30)
Forum update (1:55)
Daniel’s “Story Ever Telling” (4:40)
Meaningful Black (6:25)
- Zone System (9:42)
- Finding the Black Point (12:00)
- Twisting the curves (16:05)
- Building a Plugin (19:00)
Ironing an Apron with GIMP (20:10)
This video has been rendered in a different way. Is the problem still there that it calls itself a MP3 audio file? Is it playing everywhere?
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.
Tags: curves, softening wrinkles, Zone System
I believe that the old Ink challenge is still too hard, Rolf!
About the intensities. A look a like grayscale is used by my camera.
And I saw such a thing on a website in order to give the watcher a reference to determine if he can see a picture the right way.
There the use a grayscale of 16 values so you could enhance monitor settings. ( http://gallery.zoom.nl/ uses the scale at the bottom of his site ) /Link editied by Rolf/
meaningful black or grayscales …
Keep going on, Rolf
These grey scales have a lot of uses and come in different steppings. You can put them into a test shot r use them, as you have described, as a pointer to setting your monitor right or getting the right light for hanging photographies for an exhibition.
The core of the Zone System goes deeper. Adams formulated a description fort each Zone and than noted down which part of the image he wanted to be in which Zone. He used careful spot metering of the scene and a lot of data acquired in years of series of test shots on different films and series of processing with different chemicals and conditions to get the right exposure and process for that specific image. And then of course burning and dodging while making the print.
A lot of people have tried to recreate his shots – it’s no secret where he stood in most cases – but the weather seems to never right.
I would appreciate it much if you could do a show on the Zone System. Probably it will be a miniseries; one show won’t be enough, I think, to cover the Zone System.
It will need a miniseries. And a good opportunity for me to finally do the camera calibration. I’ll do that “live on stage”.
The ironing aprons bit makes me wonder what fraction of retouching work is facilitated by layer masks — I might guess a pretty high proportion!
If one were to catalogue techniques that a beginner must learn, this would seem one of the most important. Of course, everybody here already knows that; it just seems like it’s worth reciting every now and then.
–jim
Rolf,
I must say I love the show and I am learning a lot but having some problems with doing the simple things as well as the hard since for some reason my Gimp panel doesn’t look like yours (in the tutorials) and I usually watch your tutorials on my ipod at work about 10 times a week and I can not get all of the podcast…..1-45. Help me please?! Also are there other tutorials you can recommend to go along with your own? Thank you have a great week.
You can get the old shows directly from the blog at http://meetthegimp.org/getting-the-old-shows/ .
Episode 002 shows how to set up Gimp – I’ll do another one directly after 2.6 is out.
There are lots of tutorials around, I can’t recommend something special except the Gimp documentation at http://gimp.org/docs/
Hey,
I love your show. I was at first suspicious about video podcasts, but I learned through your show how much more helpful video is (compared to mere text). And you seem such a nice guy
Now I’m catching up on old shows, as well as check out the new ones.
About this one: I didn’t quite get the “meaningful white” part – which value should the first meaningful white pixel have? 248?
And another thing… the finished product (i.e. picture) just zipped on by – you should have left it a while longer, because I couldn’t really see the difference.
Otherwise – this show is great, especially for a novice like me.
Thanks, and keep at this – you’re good.
Tine from Slovenia
Hey Tine,
you have cought me there. I chose the wrong image for that and there is not that much difference. I’ll try to cover that with a better image in the next show.
A lot of photographers like the brightest spot in the image to be a bit darker than the paper, there should be a bit of silver (darkroom) or ink (digital) on them. Only really bright lamps, the sun and so on are “allowed” to have paper whiteness. The term in German darkroom lingo was “ausgefressene Lichter”, gnawed out highlights. A big nono with my photography teacher.
Basically it’s, like all the other stuff, a matter of taste.
Have you been at the Slobodny Festival in Cakovec? I seem to recall the name and it was really near to Slovenia, I had an escape route planned out to get back into the EU – just walk along the rail road tracks westward for two hours.
OK, thanks.
I am looking forward to that show.
Čakovec is in Croatia, and – I’m sorry to say – my knowledge of former Yugoslav republics (except Slovenia, and even that could be better…) is very much limited. I’ve never been to Čakovec, nor heard of that festival. I’ve been to the Croatian seaside (luckily I never had to plan escape routes
But I’ll keep that in mind – with the Slovene-Croatian relationships a bit frosty now it might just come in handy someday… Just kidding – for my part I never had any trouble with our neighbors.
But next time you travel in our direction – make sure you make a pit stop in Slovenia. It’s worth it.
Tine
[...] Episode 056: Meaningfull Black [...]
[...] Meet the Gimp utvecklar Gimp med ett nytt innovativt plugin. Meaningful Black som pluginet heter har nog flera olika användningsområden om man använder det kreativt. Jag ser fler möjligheter. Här har jag använt det för skapa en dramatisk himmel. Original: [...]