Marcin keeps all this running smoothly and is always thinking about making things better.

I know there are some of you around in Berlin!

If you want to help or have a tip where I can get some hands, please mail me at info@meetthegimp.org.

The image on the right has another important quality. Several elements in it come from different artists who have licensed their work under Creative Commons. By sharing their work they enable others to use it further and in new combinations.

Next week I’ll post another little bit here. It will be a challenge for you and you will need a tie.

This is the first episode made by Philipp (note the missing “e”) and he has done an entire hour with two topics.

First he develops a script in Python for applying a vignette effect to your images. It shows that he is a much better programmer than me.

In the second part he has a shot of a “For Sale” poster (the self made ones with the phone number at the bottom for tearing off) in Greek and shows, how to make a version with your own believable text out of it.

You can get his original image and the script in the companion file. The XCF is lost, sorry.

My only contribution is slapping the music and bumpers on and the image on the right which has a vignette and Python written in Greek. If you like Phillip’s show, shower him with nice comments here. Perhaps he will make more shows then.

Meet the GIMP will make a video publication break until the first week in September. I’ll use the time to move and settle, clear up the blog and server, work out the feed and torrent problems, get the mobile version running again and hopefully produce some shows in advance for filling weeks suffering of time theft. Then I’ll be back on a regular one week schedule – it is better for me and you.

Up to now there is no TOC for this show.

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

Pascal de Bruijn has made his first Video

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.

I have found a very nice flat in Berlin (Rigaer Straße 27, Berlin-Friedrichshain, that is in East Berlin), have the signed lease documents in my filing cabinet and will get the keys on Tuesday.  Some cleaning is to be done – and hauling all our stuff to Berlin. A show is in the works – not by me but by a surprise guest host.

Download the Video! (59.9MB, 31:30)(link fixed)

This show covers the single window mode of GIMP 2.7.1 with a video (which sat some weeks here) from nachbarnebenan. I just installed the new version on my machine and I like it.
Then I scratch an itch I had – Printing DVDs with GIMP.
The sound in this episode in not as good as usual. Sorry.

00:20 Berlin and you
01:45 Single window mode demo
06:00 Printing on CD/DVDs
06:50 Defining the media size in Turbo Print
08:20 Defining a new image template
11:30 Starting a new image from the template
12:20 A layer with guide lines
16:15 New layer(s) for content
16:50 Inserting a source image
17:40 Scaling down of the new layer
20:00 A gradient background
21:00 Blending the layers with a mask
24:20 Adding text
25:50 Printing
28:50 Recap and more background about units

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

You can get it from: ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.7/

EDIT: You can even configure the Ubuntu package manager to automatically update GIMP with the latest development version. Just visit the forum http://forum.meetthegimp.org/index.php/topic,1060.html or go directly to http://ubuntu-tweak.com/source/gimp-testing/ for further instructions.

Official release notes:

Changes in GIMP 2.7.1
=====================

UI:

 - Add "lock content" button to the layers, channels and paths dialogs,
   make the lock buttons more compact
 - Refuse to edit locked items
 - Add support for layer groups
 - Improve internals and GUI of the save/export functionality
 - Move the shortcut dialog's "clear" button into the entry
 - Clean up UI code by introducing GimpDockWindow and GimpImageWindow
   classes
 - Support multi-column dock windows
 - Get rid of docking bars, use highlights in existing widget hierarchy instead
 - Remove toolbox-window-hint gimprc setting and use dock-window-hint
   for both toolbox and docks instead
 - Move GimpDock::default-height style property to GimpDockWindow
 - Polish save+export path-part precedence rules
 - Merge the GSoC 2009 Advanced GUI for Brush Dynamics project
 - Default to non-fixed-aspect in Canvas Size dialog
 - Add a still incomplete and Single-window mode
 - Have an Export button, not Save, in export dialogs
 - Improve Free Select Tool handle highlightning
 - Support changing user interface language from preferences
 - Update ps-menurc with PS CS4 keyboard shortcuts
 - Reduce spacing around canvas and use it for the canvas itself
 - Put name of active dockables in dock window titles
 - Don't have Toolbox in list of Recently Closed Docks, handle that
   directly in the Windows menu
 - Support selecting and tagging multiple objects in resource lists
 - Improve on-canvas text editing and text attribute setting
 - Add GimpContainerTreeStore and use it in all GtkTreeStore based views
 - Add a new default "automatic" tab style that makes sure dockable tabs
   always show as much detail as possible
 - Remove the dockable title bar and add the menu arrow button next to the
   notebook tabs
 - Add an icon for the desaturate tool
 - Add 'Rule of fifths' crop guide overlay
 - Make Alt+Click on layers not affecting active layer

Core:

 - Make all GimpItems lockable so their contents can't be changed
 - Make more sense when naming imported layers
 - Make group layers work except for layer masks and save them in
   the XCF
 - Change GimpProjectable::update to GimpProjectable:invalidate
 - Make sure we don't mix font backends (and crash) by explicitely
   asking for FT/Fontconfig backends
 - Move members of GimpObject to a private struct
 - gimp_object_get_name() takes a gconstpointer now, remove casts
   from all callers
 - Let drawables connect to their floating selection's "update" signal
   instead of letting the image do this job
 - Fix brush rotation artifacts at even 90 degree rotation
 - Don't leak shared tile memory on Solaris
 - Add a PDB procedure to access a text layer's markup
 - Remove legacy cruft from pdbgen and make sure number ranges are correct
 - Move all image creation functions to a common file
 - Add translation context to all undo descriptions

GEGL:

 - Make sure all nodes are added to their resp. graphs
 - Use GEGL for layer scaling if use-gegl is TRUE

Plug-ins:

 - Updated script-fu's scheme to latest upstream fixes
 - Don't store image-specific print settings globally
 - Add fundamental OpenRaster (.ora) import and export support
 - Add RGB565 support to the csource plug-in

Data:

 - Add texture/grunge brushes made by Johannes Engelhardt

Developer documentation:

 - Explain GimpContext
 - Add SVG graphic with GIMP application core module dependencies
 - Add a schedule for 2.8 development

Source and build system:

 - Add more code documentation
 - Clean up subsystem linking dependencies in app/
 - Add unit testing framework in app/tests/ and some basic tests,
   including basic UI tests and XCF tests
 - Tentatively introduce usage of using Glade + GtkBuilder
 - Depend on GLib 2.24.0 and GTK+ 2.20.0
 - Add git commit hash in --verbose --version output
 - Don't version control gtk-doc.m4, get it from gtkdocize
 - Add GimpObject tracking code
 - Plug memory leaks
 - Lots of bug fixes and cleanup
 - Lots of translation updates

                   ------------------------------
                   GNU Image Manipulation Program
                          2.6 Stable Branch
                   ------------------------------

This is the stable branch of GIMP. No new features are being added
here, just bug-fixes.

Overview of Changes from GIMP 2.6.8 to GIMP 2.6.9
=================================================

* Bugs fixed:

 612618 - Font selection remains visible
 622234 - gimp.desktop: image/x-psd in MimeTypes twice
 622196 - Unportable test(1) construct in configure script
 620604 - Description of "histogram" procedure is slightly inaccurate
 541586 - Tool options not saved/loaded correctly?
 614153 - Importing PDF files with long titles
 600112 - blur-gauss-selective.exe crashes
 599233 - Dialog of "Save as BMP" ignores changes which are not made
          with a mous
 565001 - Text-Tool crashes when edit a 2.4.2 version XCF file
 610478 - Layer preview suddenly stops getting updated
 609026 - leaks shared memory
 609056 - Exporting to Alias PIX format fails
 608188 - a few strings in Save as... > Raw image data dialog are always
          in English
 604820 - GEGL Operation "path" crashes GIMP
 603711 - Crashes when using path tool
 607242 - GIMP 2.7.0 fails to build against libpng 1.4.0
 606372 - Saving to .ppm fails on indexed colorspace
 605237 - the "Antialiasing..." message in the progress bar does not show
          translated
 604508 - gimp-layer-new-from-visible should work from updated projection

* Updated and new translations:

 Asturian (ast)
 Basque (eu)
 Burmese (my)
 Catalan (ca)
 Chinese (Hong Kong) (zh_HK)
 Chinese (Taiwan) (zh_HK)
 German (de)
 Italian (it)
 Latvian (lv)
 Low German (nds)
 Romanian (ro)
 Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)
 Slovenian (sl)
 Ukrainian (uk)
 Valencian (ca@valencia)

But I’ll have one for you at the end of the week – if we don’t find a promising flat in Berlin just now and have to travel.

GIMP has no LAB mode up to now – but now there is a plugin for that. I haven’t tested it yet (3 more days school and I have to type a lot of reports about kids and clear all my stuff in school) but it looks very promising.

In the second part of the lecture she goes into Script-Fu, shows advantages, traps and stuff that has changed at the switch to GIMP 2.4. Now I know that “car” is has been the content of the address register at least 20 years ago and is the first element of a list in Scheme. She gives again a lot of pointers for references – but this part of her speech entrenched me even deeper in the Python camp.

Definitely worth the 26 minutes for all script kiddies tinkerers here around! I will watch it again next week after my grades conference marathon and follow up the leads to the documentation. If you are there ahead of me, please put your links into the comments here.

Oh, before I forget: here is the link to the video and a lot of thanks to devvv from gimpusers.com for blogging about this.

Parts of the old Bremen harbour (the Europahafen and the Überseehafen) have been closed and are rebuilt as a new part of the city, called “Übersseestadt”. I took an image of the border between old and new. In the video I try to make the difference stronger by desaturating and colouring parts of the image. Not much success with the image, but the saturation and colour layer mode get explained.

In the begin I talk a bit about difficulties in the forum and my thoughts about flattr.

The TOC

03:25 Subscribe to the RSS feed
04:35 flattr
06:30 An image from the Europahafen
08:15 Goal: Enhance the contrast between old and new
08:25 Rotation correction
10:15 Saving as XCF
10:45 Cropping
11:25 Fixing the aspect ratio
13:15 Duplicating the layer before tweaking the colours
14:05 Adjusting the curve to get more contrast
15:35 Desaturationg parts of the image with a layer in saturation mode
20:00 Adding sepia colour
22:20 Colour layer mode

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

I got also a video about this, but haven’t been able to look at it up to now. We had “an unpleasantness” in the forum last week. All the sleuthing around in the log files and communicating has cost me at least 8 hours last week (I could/would have made a full blown show in that time) and this week I have to finish grades. So you will have to wait for the Weekend.

I now know in which school I will be working after the summer. It is in Berlin Neukölln-Britz. I want to live a bit more north, in Kreuzberg or “Kreuzkölln”. And now I am really starting to look for a flat there to rent.

Version 1

Version 2

Version 3

Version 4

Please use the comments and vote in the poll on the sidebar if you are interested in a version for mobile devices.

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….)

He had a column running in Linux Format magazine (never heard before….) and now the magazine has set free the original, high resolution PDFs used for printing the magazine on TuxRadar. 

Go and get them!

This is the first Microsode of Meet the GIMP. This are short(er) videos that are produced ahead of publication and cover one topic – and no chit chat about my life, the site, the forum and so on.

In this Microsode I talk about the fourth value of a pixel, the opacity or transparency. It turns up in layers, tool settings and in the concept of layer masks. The erase tool can erase to the background colour or to transparency. You can even lock the alpha channel of a layer and so keep the transparent parts while painting in the image. BTW, I think I forgot to mention the proper name of the fourth “colour” – alpha. (Edit: I did at 5:00! )

TOC

00:27 Microsodes
01:25 3 nubers for red, green, blue – and one for opacity / transparency
02:40 opacity in the layer dialogue
02:50 the checkerboard
03:10 opacity in paint tools
04:30 two modes of the erase tool – alpha channel of a layer
05:40 lock opacity
06:20 making straight lines
07:40 layer masks

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

The basic principle is easy to understand. If you join flattr you have to give them at least 2€ a month. They take 10% of them to get rich pay for the service. (I have no problem with them getting rich. ) Then you can play two roles in the scheme, consument and producer.

As a consument of digital media you can click on these little flattr buttons:

Each month the money you have put in is divided by the clicks you have made. I tried it yesterday with Boris Nienke’s bnsonic blog – he would have got 1.80€. But today I clicked on Tim Pritlove’s “Not Safe For Work” podcast – and now each of them gets 0.90€. If I click more, I divide further, but I don’t have to increase my payment. The video on flattr compares it with a birthday cake that you bring to school or office.

As a producer of digital content you can place this little button in your content and wait for people to click on it. And of course, hope that they only love you. There is no special registration necessary for becoming a “producer”, if you are a participant you can play both roles.
I expect flattr buttons to come up on a lot of sites – also photo sites like flickr and 23. When I see an image that I really like, why not click on that button?

I want to emphasise that I see this mostly as an experiment. I take a lot of gratification out of your comments, forum activity and “thank you” mails – enough to keep me going. My job is well paid and I really don’t need more money. If there is something coming in on this channel I’ll use it NOT for the show, I’ll spend it just for my pleasure. And of course I’ll report about the success and post an image of the chocolate bar, glass of beer or what else I can get out of this.

Take only part if you are convinced of the concept, not to flatt(e)r me. If you want to do that, just send me a mail, postcard, beer crate… Make a video for me to play (nachbar, your’s will be on soon, Peter, I havent forgotten your images…..) or blog about Meet the GIMP or drop the link somewhere appropiate. (BTW, we have a Google Pagerank of 6 now, that is really not bad and better than the rest of the Photocast Network and I am getting nice advertisement offers which I turn down all.) Or just watch the show and enjoy, I see the download numbers too.

This project will still be financed by your contributions, there will be a new funding rally for 2011 at the end of this year. The funds for this year are sufficient, the server is covered and part of the new audio equipment I bought and try to get running, too.

I spent last week in England – but not on a vacation. In this episode I process one of the “tourist shots” made on the class trip following a workflow guide made from Bill in Belize. This guide will be published here in some time, there is still some work needed. It covers all the basic steps for polishing up an image.

The second part of the show covers a question from Bill: How to publish something with keeping your claim to fame and giving others the option to improve your work. My answer: Creative Commons. Let’s see if Bill shares my opinion. (Disclaimer: I am biased – see the button on top of the right column.)

You can license your images under Creative Commons too. We had an example of the advantages in the forum with this image.

There is a list of all possible licenses on the site and a very nice “click your license” boilerplate license generator. I used it to make the license text below.

One question I have for you: Should I drop the “Share Alike” part of the license for Meet the GIMP and leave only the “Attribution”? Please help me with discussing this in the forum.

The TOC

00:20 My trip to England
02:00 My photographic output – the image to process
03:20 Bill’s workflow guide
03:50 Copy the original layer
04:30 Perspective correction
05:15 Rotate (two attempts)
10:00 Crop, inside out
12:30 Cloning and healing
14:30 Contrast correction with a curve
15:05 Dodge and burn
19:00 Scaling
22:20 Sharpening and flattening the image
24:00 Saving for the Web
24:20 Scaling discussed
26:30 How to license the workflow guide
27:30 Creative Commons License
32:45 Creative Commons for images

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

He has just put a copy into the mail (the old one, with envelopes and stamps and so on) and I’ll definitely hang that on my wall. (EDIT: It has arrived on May 21, cool! The magazine is really good too.)

In other news I have survived the class trip and will look into a YAG laser in an hour. If my eye doctor gets it right, it will improve my vision significantly by burning away some fibrosis. (EDIT 2 hours later: I am back, all went well. Disappointingly uneventful, just looking into a scope and seeing some little flashes. Improvement already visible.) And then a new show will be produced tomorrow.

Download the Video! (50.9 MB, 26;46)

Finally there is a new show! This time I tackle an image shot at the airport here in Bremen. Before that I tell a bit about the dangers of being a teacher, an online paint program written in HTML5, content aware fill in TheOtherProgram and my new job in Berlin. I am looking for a flat there, by the way.

The image from the Hamburg train station I had planed to process turned out to be marred by motion blurr. A short discussion about how to avoid this is in the show – I hope I recall this next time.

Oh, and I’ll be in England the first week of May 2010. I may have time for a meeting in central London on May 6th – Election Day. Depends on how the kids behave. More on twitter.

The TOC

00:20 Greetings and looking for a flat in Berlin
03:30 Content aware Fill in Photoshop – http://photwalkthrough.com
04:20 HTML5 graphics program
05:30 Train Station image and motion blurr
08:10 Baggage claimage area shot
08:50 Intentions of the image
09:40 Straighten the image
11:30 Finding a crop
14:30 First try: enhance contrast and colours
16:00 Using curves for reducing contrast
21:40 Selective sharpening
24:00 Function of a layer mask
25:00 Denoise the layer mask
26:30 Sharpen the top layer
31:00 Saving as XCF for further work
32:00 Rolf is in England next week – http://twitter.com/rstein

The companion file contains the original shot in JPG and NEF and the XCF file in its present state. Still work to do. And I put the train station image in there too, perhaps somebody wants to play with it.

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

A really mixed bag today. First I reveal my criteria for selecting the images of the last show and tell, why I think that deleting of not so good images is a good idea. Then I show a bit of how I recorded the sound in Hamburg and how I used Cinelerra to include the sound in the show. This can be a good way to make a slide show out of your images. Add the stuff from “Cinelerra in Japan” and Michelle’s instruction videos and you are set.

Finally I “prove” that higher bit depths are important for editing – not for input or output.

A proper blog entry will follow when my DSL line is repaired.

As you can see, the new version of “The Other Program” has a nice new feature that is missing in GIMP.

This needs an answer from the Free Software Movement! And so the GIMP team has decided to put all GEGL related stuff (high bit depth, non destructive editing……) on hold and concentrate on this feature for the next year.

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.

I mention two podcasts worth to follow. Jeff Curto’s “The History of Photography” and The World’s “Technology Podcast“.  And then there is the Haus der Photographie in the Deichtorhallen, which has good exhibitions and a good bookstore. The map in the begin was provided by the Open Street Map Project.

The TOC

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

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

I got the planned episode 136 nearly ready – a photography trip to Hamburg. But then came an urgent job from Chicago and overturned the schedule. (No, John, it wasn’t urgent, it was convenient to have a bit more time to edit the Hamburg show).

A big portrait had to be downsized from 3504×2336 to 95×125 pixels. And of course this postage stamp then should still have some atmosphere and style. How much damage this does to the details is visible in the animation on the right.

I never have done this before in such an extreme way and found out, that scaling down in steps is really better than doing one big step.

Beware, this is not the last word about downscaling. There are plugins at the Plugin Registry and we have a discussion about this in the Forum.

For making the image interseting and informative enough for web use I tried to change the contrast with the curve tool, burned and dodged and even made some duotone images.

The TOC

01:48 Find a crop / crop tool and aspect ratio
03:00 What has to be in?
06:00 Cloning out a disturbance
08:20 Make a copy and add an alpha channel
08:40 Curves tool to change contrast
09:45 Dodge and burn to give more light to the bass
14:00 Second approach
14:15 Give names to layers
15:00 Curves again
16:15 Make a Duotone
17:00 Adding two layers with layer masks
18:30 Chose colours
20:00 Fine tuning with the opacity slider
20:30 Instructions for experiments
22:40 Scaling down
25:00 Correcting scaling artefacts
27:00 Better scaling down in steps
29:30 Why is it better?

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

Late – but here is #135.

Darktable is a new RAW converter, photo editor and image manager for Linux and MacOS. It is in early development and has some really cool features. most of them I only have partially explored, but what I saw was promising.

You find Darktable for Ubuntu at Pascal’s ppa.

The TOC

04:10 Darktable
04:50 Overview of interface
05:30 The lighttable
06:20 Zooming
08:00 Selections
08:20 Tagging
09:00 The Darkroom
09:30 Profiles needed
10:50 Exposure
11:40 Reset
12:50 Curves
14:00 Clipping / cropping
14:40 Sharpening
16:10 More plugins
16:30 Lens correction
17:30 Colour correction
18:30 Monochrome
20:00 Equalizer
21:00 History
22:10 The Verdict

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

Torrent questions came up too. I need some help with setting this up properly.
Comments to all topics very welcome!

Download the Torrent!
(Mobile version tomorrow)

The German word “Terrorie” was coined by a kid in a Physics lesson of my late colleague Helmut Mohr in Hamburg. It is what it sounds like – and today’s video is full of it. No GIMP, no images, only the blackboard and me talking. Please consider this as a WARNING.

We had a lively discussion in the forum about the theory behind making images, circling around the term “dynamic range”. There is a big difference between light and dark parts of our world, often more that a camera can catch. And nearly always more than fits onto paper or a computer screen.

The process of squeezing this big range into the small output range is called Post Processing. Either you do it via RAW anf GIMP – or the smart chip in your camera does it while saving your iage as JPEG. What I forgot to say – if you do it, you can redo it. The RAW file still exists. If the chip does it, the RAW file is discarded and you are stuck with the version of the image made by the chip.

I got a lot of information about this subject from a wonderful paper by Karl Lang at Adobe(R). Worth to download and read, even if you decide to skip the video this week.

The TOC

02:04 Orders of Magnitude
04:00 How much light is in a scene? (Dynamic range ramp up)
06:00 There is no black and white
06:30 Dynamic range of a scene
06:50 Dynamic range of LCD and prints
08:50 Dynamic range of the camera
09:50 Exposure = slide the dynamic range
11:05 Post processing by the camera
12:15 RAW -> GIMP -> print
13:00 Slides and egatives in analog photography
15:05 A source at Adobe(R)
15:15 8 Bits – a problem (sometimes)
17:10 Why is it possible to make images? Because our eyes are no camera and our brain no computer.

“Meet the GIMP”  by Rolf Steinort is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

Pure Physics with Nikon gear – and what beasts of lenses!

This week I have a challenge for you. Do my homework and edit my shot from our Samba Carneval. You’ll find the JPEG and the NEF (RAW image by a Nikon D200) of a shot I did from my window. It is not a good photograph but catches a beautiful moment. Improve the image, store it somewhere on the Internet and post a link to it in the comments. You can embed a small version of it in a comment, just copy the HTML code from 23, flickr or other sites. It should be there in a box to cut and paste.

Then I’ll tell you why you always shall set your camera settings to a defined standard state before you put your camera in the bag or cupboard. I didn’t and it has ruined a whole series of shots from this occasion.

Have you ever wondered how to make a selection with a zig-zag border? Well, if you have, I have the answer. (Stolen from Saul Goode, BTW ) I was reminded that a Quickmask is an image and so can be editied much better than a selection. Making waves and sawteeth into it then is “elementary”.

And finally I reveal how I built a dust free blackboard and chalk with GIMP. The blackboard from the “Basics” series looses its mystery.

I made a TOC and forgot to save it.

But there are two nice places to check out for you in the time until the next show.

GIMPtricks on Youtube are made by Jolie from the Netherlands. I recommend to get a close shave with the healing tool and then check out the rest.

And if you have caught yourself wanting to print a logo on a plain T-Shirt after  you made an image from it - here is the solution in Spanish and English made by a young woman in Venezuela. There are 5 more videos to watch. (Thanks to medyr for the tip.)

So, drown them in Clicks!

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.

Meet the GIMP Episode 132 by Rolf Steinort is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

I’ll try RawTherapee when they have put on a more mature Alpha and make a podcast about it.

After a bit of “housekeeping”, which includes thanks to contributors and a nod over to the Focus Ring, I try to use the stuff hidden in the <Image>/Color/Auto menu. My results are not that good and I try to do it better with curves.

Why did I fail? No idea, it may be the software or perhaps my choice of image was bad. Please share your experiences with this option.

At the end of the show I lift the secret behind the numbers 1 – 1.4 – 2 – 2.8 – 4 – 5.6 – 11 – 16 – 22 …. – aperture numbers decoded.

I couldn’t decide which of the two shots I made for the show image should go into the post, so here are both.

The TOC

00:20 Starting 2010 – thanks and a guy selling GIMP
04:30 New Forum policy
05:40 New Focus Ring Episode
07:00 Exporting an image from F-Spot to GIMP
07:20 The Histogram shows underexposure
08:00 Exploring /Colors/Auto
09:15 Equalize, stretch contrast, stretch HSV
11:50 Color Enhance
12:50 The manual curves approach
15:30 Unsharp Maks (USM) for getting details in snow
17:00 Selection with layer mask
19:00 Basics: Apperture numbers explained

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

Ibarionex Perello

Chris Marquadt

Jeff Curto

Martin Bailey

I haven’t  heard it yet but it sounds promising!

“Meet the GIMP” is just stuck a bit in the production pipeline. I recorded a show twice about my try to contribute in the  Challenge of the Digital Photography School – but it was simply not good enough. I’ll try do a piece about snow later this day, but I have some work for school still sitting on my desk. They simply pay more than you, so I have to set priorities.

Let’s fight them as long as we still can.

I want to point to an instructional video on Linux for Designers. I don’t know if this was done with Blender, but it must have taken a lot of the time since last winter to make. And never trust your tree decoration….

I think there will be a video still in 2009, but at the moment I am only lazy.

Some interesting versions are there already – done with “The Other Program”. Let’s show them what we can do!

(The image was shot with a Canon “eos rebel t1i” or  “500D” – you may need that information for finding a colour profile for the RAW import.)

Sorry, again a “Nerd Show”. I tackle some problems that have come up with the Python script of the last week and show my way to debug and test while making errors. My first error was to take a test case without colours – my script from last week changed all images to greyscale. Then I learn something useful about merging layers in Python.

But the top of the show is even more nerdy – the Octave plugin allows to access the Octave math software from GIMP. Caluculate your images or do a FFT with them.

The scripters crowd in the forum found a bug in GIMP, saulgoode reported it and it got fixed in a day. Take that, Adobe!

Then I try to explain why the big blobs in the image featured two shows ago are not made with GIMP but with pure physics in the camera. You can see a Blender video I made about this for #200 of Chris Marquards Tips from the Top Floor show. My part starts at about 11:40 and contains an embarrassing error. Do you get it?

This image by Nachbarnebenan is a good example for a shallow DoF.

The next show will be a simple, non-nerd walk through the post processing of an image. Promised.

The TOC

01:10 Octave Math Plugin
02:10 Number types in Python
06:00 Making a test case
06:30 Finding the wrong layer mode
08:00 Running into a wall and thinking around it
09:40 Isolate the bug
12:40 Cleaning up the code
14:40 Colour halos wit Normal Mode sharpening
16:40 When to use Octave sharpening
17:10 Basics of Photography – Depth of Field and Bokeh
19:00 Image creation with a lens
21:00 Circle of Confusion
22:30 Depth of Field
25:00 Apperture and DoF
28:30 DoF and sensor size
29:00 Dofmaster
30:00 Focal length and DoF

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

Download the Video! (77.0 MB, 40:31)

This is the second time I try to get into Python scripting for GIMP. My script in the first show about scripting was simple, just saving some clicks. Now it is more complicated, variables, loops and floating points included. But no parrots!

You find a better version of the programs in the companion file. Following a tip in our Forum I included a Undo Group. So the action can be undone, a behaviour that should have been included from the start.

I mentioned some sources. Instant Python, the official Python Tutorial and the GIMP Python reference. Bert has a script page and a much better version of the Octave sharpening script.

Then we have a UnGIMP composition challenge on the Forum.

Have I forgotten some promised links? Please complain below!

Errata:

The loop counter in the companion file is set to 6 instead of 4. You can change it back or leave it.

Perhaps it is better to take the image size from drw instead of img. See the discussion in the forum. drw.height and drw.width should work also when the layer is smaller than the image.

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

Dan McMahill

to gimp-user
Hello,

Has anyone written a script that would be a good starting point for the
following task?  I want to take an ascii file that has a bunch of names
along with a number.  Format is probably something like

1, name number 1
2, name number 2
1, name number 3
3, name number 4

then for each line in this file I want to start with a .xcf file which
is selected by the first field (the 1-3) and then add the persons name
as text on top of it.  Then I want to write out the generated image and
at the end up with a giant pdf file that I can send to the printer.

Basically I’m trying to make about 60 badges that will come in one of
several styles and each will have someones name printed on it.

If anyone has something close they could share it would be much
appreciated.  Probably script-fu is my preference since I already speak
scheme (but only a tiny bit of script-fu) but I could probably learn
enough python to muddle through too.

Thanks
-Dan

Gimp-user mailing list
Gimp-user@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user

saulgoode@flashingtwelve.brickfilms.com

to gimp-user
I’ve had a go at this.

The files are all available in the following location:
http://flashingtwelve.brickfilms.com/GIMP/Scripts/Badges/

There are two script files that need to be installed in your GIMP
scripts folder. The main one is ‘sg-create-badges.scm’ which adds a
“Create badges…” command under the File menu. The other script is
‘sg-mosaicize.scm” which is required by the other to produce the final
layout (it adds a “Mosaicize” command under the Filters->Map menu).

There are also an ‘example.data’ file and three sample badge style
files: ‘rainbow.xcf, ‘seuss.xcf’, and ‘simple.xcf’. The topmost layer
(typically transparent) of the style file’s image is used to determine
the location and size of the text of the person’s name. The name text
is centered within the bounds of this topmost layer (and then merged
down to a single layer).

The format for the data file is quite simple and described in the
comments of the ‘sg-create-badges.scm’ file. You should use fully
qualified paths to the style files.

In the dialog for the script, you would select your data file, a font,
the text color for the person’s name, and a percent value for the font
size (100% means use the largest font that will fit in the allotted
area).

The result of the script is an image with a separate layer for each
badge, as well as a background layer. The layout of these layers is a
MxN grid. This layout is determined by the the Mosaicize script and
chooses “M” and “N” such that the result is as close to square as
possible (e.g., 11 badges would result in a 3×4 grid).

No file is written to disk.

Though not required, I would appreciate being notified if you improve
the script (or even whether you find it useful).

If you have problems with the sound – simply reload! There was a glitch.

I was out on a photo walk with a GIMPer from Bremen. One of these shots is post processed in this show. Nothing special, just adjusting the colours with a curve in two different parts of the image. Of course a layer with mask is used to separate the different areas and explained again for the new GIMP users.

The really new information is about uploading images from F-SPOT to 23 and flickr. You have to enable the exporter in the menu Edit/Mange Extensions/Export. 23 is covered by the flickr exporter, they use the same API.

You can find the final image on 23 and flickr, both uploads worked like a charm.

You can participate in episode planning in the Wave. It is open for everybody.

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

A posting in the forum pointed me to a description of an interesting way to sharpen an image. This Octave Sharpening is useful when you have to do a lot of sharpening and want to avoid the typical halos around the edges.

The secret lies in a combination of 4 USM sharpened layers with different opacity. As in the recipe I used an amount of 5 (500% in the Other Program), threshold 0 and 0.5, 1, 2 and 4 in the different layers. The opacity was set to 100%, 50%, 25% and 12.5%. The more sharpening the less impact in the image. But the traces of harsh sharpening give a bit of a gradient to the edges in the final image.

Norman needs some information about old slide producers in Israel. Are you able to help?

And I have started to use Google Wave for episode planning. If you want to participate, drop me a line at info@meetthegimp.org . I also have some invites.

The TOC

00:30 Torrent for the first 100 shows
02:10 Grandfatherclock tutorial in writing at meetthegimp.org
03:10 Help for Norman
04:00 Google Wave
04:40 Octave sharpening
06:20 TAB hides the dialogs
06:50 Octave sharpening in action
08:00 50% Zoom for sharpening
08:10 Sharpen the 4 layers
11:20 setting the opacity
12:00 Looking at the result
13:15 Layer group workaround
14:30 Recap
17:10 Forum
17:00 Fund raising

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

If you have a torrent client running and some disk space and upstream traffic to share  – please put this on to your machine. Just now it is terribly slow, but only one machine seeding.

And if you understand Spanish – have a look at the other things on that page, it looks like a really good collection of free educational material about all things graphics. Starting with PDF manuals and not ending with video podcasts.

And now I give over to LuX, who will show you how to make a Grandfathers Clock from scratch:

This is something I’ve been working on the last month. I wanted to emulate a old longcase clock aka grandfather clock standing in our living room.

You can download the final XCF.

This tutorial isn’t difficult. I follow the KISS rule; Keep It Simple, Stupid!
Feel free to respond and create you own version maybe upload in user gallery in the forum.

Files to complete this tutorial can be found on Dafont.com and Deviantart.com, search for “resources for gimp”.

For reference or inspiration goto Wikipedia, there’s a long list of time devices.

And I have collected a bunch of free SVG images as examples for watches made from scratch.

Tutorial

• Create new picture with dimensions 600×800 facing Portrait
• Pull out guidelines to decide and divide the clock from each area. How much patterns should it have? How big should it be? and so on…

*At this point it’s wise to make several circles at once. Both to ease the process and for reference later in the project

• Create a circle for the outer line of the watch and make it to a path.
• Go to Select>Shrink enter 10 and call this path No_1.
• Repeat this step twice; 5 pixels and call it No_2 then 55 pixels and call it Innercircle.
• Go to path dialogue and click the Outercircle visible. With the Rectangular tool create a square that covers the circle. Remember to check fix ratio 1:1 and save it as a path, call it Outer Square.
• Last create a half circle on top of the square and save this also as a path. Name it Top.

• With the blend tool make a gradient from light to dark Braun on the background layer.
• Create a new layer, call it CornersBG and make a selection of the half circle from your paths dialogue. Select the blend tool pick Golden from the gradient list and set the mode to screen, form linear and check dithering. Repeat this with the square.

*The surface around  the clock is uneven due to patterns, so don’t make the reflection area same on the half circle and square. I choose to have it on each side of the square. Look below.

• New layer, call it Innercircle. Make a selection of the path with the same name. Pick colours FG dbcf48 and BG ffea00. With the blendtool choose mode normal, form radiant and check dithering. Fill the area with colour from the centre to the edge.

• Select text tool, pick a font CapitalisTypOasis with size 45, check hinting and antialiasing, colour black, spacing-2,3. Because Roman numbers are close to each other this is however different from font to font.

The right spacing between each letter is done by inserting extra spacings; (3) after I-(5)II-(4)III-(4)IIII-(4)V-(3)VI-(3)VII-(3)VIII-(3)IX-(3)X-(3)XI-XII(3)

• After the Roman numbers are written in text box with spacing,  choose the Innercircle path from the dialogue and click on text along path button.
• Make a selection of the Roman path, fill it with black and anchor it to a  new layer. Then rotate it until it fits with a clock with 12 a top and 3 to the right.
• New layer. Goto Filters>Render>Clouds>Plasma value 5,1 and click OK. Then Colours>Desaturate and pick Lightness.
• Take the innercicle layer goto Filters>Map>Bumpmap with the plasma layer. Choose following values; check Compensate for darkening, 125, 45, 3, 120, 319, 0, 0
• Delete the Plasma layer.

• New layer, call it NoBG and make a path to selection with No_1 path. Goto gradientlist pick Metallic Something then fill selection with blendtool, mode normal, form linear and dithering checked.
• Create a layer for the lines. Select each path and go to Edit>Stroke path with a solid colour at value 3 or 4.
• New layer call this Pattern. Find a pattern* and drag it to your layer. Highlight the square and press Ctrl+I and cut all excess.

*If you don’t have any patterns there’s several places online, Deviantart. The folder is located the same gimpfolder as the font folder. I’ve used zen79_cherry_arabesque.

• Cut one half of the remaining pattern away, copy, paste and flip it vertically to the opposite side. Anchor it to the patterns layer.
• Select the OuterCircle and cut away selection.

• Create a new layer for a globe. On this layer a wire frame must be drawn with a pencil, simply make some lines cross in a 90degree angle.
• Find a world map and open it in GIMP. If the picture you got is in different colours then make it black and white, or with colour picker select as much as you can.
• Copy selection into a second new layer and check the alpha channel box found in the layers dialogue. Fill the layer with black.
• Be sure to resize the frame so it’s slightly bigger than the world map and press the to layers into one. Then goto Layer>AutoCropLayer. Result should look like below.

• Filter>Map>MapObject pick ball and uncheck light source. Rotate the globe in Orientation page.
• With the scale tool get the proportions correct by entering the same values in top and bottom. Last scale it to the size you like.

• New layer, name it Top and fill it with another kind of pattern.
• Make a selection of Top path, Ctrl+I and cut. Or you can use a font which does patterns instead of letters.
• Create a text layer and write; Tempus Fugit font Schwaben_alt.
• With pencil draw a big hand, small hand and a center. Optional use the ellipse tool and stroke the selection.
• Finish

Adding some more effects

- added shadow to the hands
- woodwork on top of background colour
- created darker outlines in wood
- glass with blurred reflection
- title of producer
- bumpmapped the patterns into the CornerBG layer

You should be able to do that now.

Tutorial is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Congratulations!

Sorry – no mobile version yet!

A short one this time – I upgraded to Karmic Koala and did a clean install with new partitions and EXT4 file system. And now I am getting the important stuff back on the disk and leave the cruft out. This meant that a lot of the files needed for a proper podcast are still on the external disks.

I take a look a the new Folio by Jeff Curto at Lenswork – because it’s an example of printing an image on paper with a different aspect ratio, the images are really good and Jeff is a friend and I hope he sells a lot of them.  Jeff does two podcasts in the Photocast Network, Camera Position and The History of Photography. The last is the only podcast where I have experienced a coffee break.

I use an image from “wbool63″ from the forum to make some nice frames with G’MIC, the Swiss Knife plugin from France.

And I have done….

The TOC

00:20 Greetings and Jeff Curto at lenswork
02:30 Using a white frame and text
03:10 Cropping an image
05:50 Getting a square crop
06:20 Eyes out of focus – no problem here
07:10 G’MIC plugin and frames

No blackboard this time – and no mobile version  yet. The upgrade broke the toolchain, I have to compile ffmpeg to get it running again. Software patents are really …….

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

We had a nice discussion in the forum about how to crop. What shall determine the crop, the output paper format or the content of the image?

The two main aspect ratios used in digital cameras are 2:3 and 3:4. This has technical reasons – not artistic considerations. Then there is a flood of different formats for papers, from ancient to the modern A-series. The big question: How do you fit your camera image onto the paper?

I show two ways of getting it right. One is to leave a strip of paper white and cut it off later. Or you put the image into the centre of the paper and leave a nice white border around it. For both a bit of math is needed.

In the video I mention a script for getting images straight – a rotation tool on steroids. You find it at Ray Adagio’s Script Manufacture.

What happens in the camera when you change the ISO? This is my topic for the tech part of the show.

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD A LOT OF VIDEOS, PLEASE, DO IT IN A SEQUENCE AND NOT PARALLEL AT THE SAME TIME!

I have lifted the ban on that IP (59.92.1xx.x – it’s in India and on a big pipe) but will keep an eye on the server performance and have the axe ready.

I’ll ask Marcin to limit the amount of connections for a single IP, then the problem should be gone.

UPDATE: Blocking the bot worked. And if you want to have a look at the log…. Whow!

There are a lot of tutorials out there for “The Other Program”, also called Adobe(R) Photoshop(R). (I hope I got the Rs right, can’t find the page where Adobe(R) told the world how to call this program.) A lot of that stuff is easily translated to GIMP, but there are some serious differences. One are the “Adjustment(R) Layers(R)”. This is a way of applying a curve, gradient, hue or saturation change…..  without changing the real image. You can come back later and tweak the curve or the slider – non destructive editing.

There is an easy way to work around this: make a new layer of the visible image and work on that. You have to redo that, if you decide to change something in the lower layers.

To show how to do this I have ripped out a part of John Arnold’s Photowalkthrough podcast and redone the same in GIMP. Photowalktrough is a really good resource for everybody who is into the digital darkroom – independent from the program used. And John has his #100 out! Congratulations!

GIMP will have non destructive editing in a year or two – it’s the main reason for getting GEGL into GIMP and making this big effort of writing a lot of the program again.

In the second part of the show I get the blackboard out and start a new segment in the show. I try to explain how  film and sensors are working. I’ll expose you to some of these lessons for about 5 to 190 minutes and will then decide upon your reaction if I should keep this on. I’ll have them at the end of the show – if you are bored you can just skip the rest.

Sorry, there is no TOC up to now. the moment Kevin made one.

The TOC

00:28 Welcome to PhotoWalkThrough.com from John Arnold
01:05 Welcome to Meet The Gimp from Rolf
02:30 Back to John
02:50 – a curves layer
05:10 – a layer mask
08:20 Back to Rolf
09:00 The original photo
09:20 Make a layer with increased saturation
10:40 Add a gradient layer in soft light mode to alter the sky
12:10 New layer from visible
13:25 Add a layer mask and edit it
15:25 The problem with destructive editing
15:55 But it’s not that big a problem
18:20 New segment – time for lessons
19:55 How film works
24:00 How a sensor works
27:00 Feedback please
28:14 The End

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

The results of the Book Challenge have been so interesting that I have made two shows out of them. This is the second part.

If you want to buy Akkana Peck’s book from amazon.com in the US, go to her website and use her link. She gets a bit more money out of it and you pay the same.

The TOC

00:50 Threshold tool revisited
02:40 Ityker’s image
04:00 Selective decolorisation
05:00 Layer mask for selective decolorisation
05:00 Layer mask shortcuts
06:00 Duotone
08:45 Sample points
10:00 Preventing tonal change of the colorisation layer
11:10 Sharpening layer
12:50 Fake view cam cassete shadow
14:30 Mathias’ image
15:50 Image sources
17:00 Layers for ressources
18:40 Combining different exposures
19:25 Healing spots and bra straps
20:30 Layers for sculpting the hair
22:40 The sky – overlay mode
23:50 The sign
24:00 Layer groups
25:00 Dodge and burn on a layer in soft light mode
26:00 Unsharp mask for enhancing local and global contrast
27:20 The John Arnold Style Vignette(R)

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

The current development  version has already a choice for for using this mode or the classical multi window mode.

But beware – it is under construction and has a lot of holes in the floorboards. Switching back to multi window mode is a pain – but all this will be fixed.

My standard disclaimer: Don’t use 2.7.x if your time or images are worth something and you are not helping with debugging. It is not even alpha – it is just compiling.

A big “Thank You” to all the developers!

(The image is stolen from Martin’s website.)

Another screen shot from NachbarNebenan (click for full resolution) and a pop up dialogue. We discuss thi in the forum.