Paths are Bezier curves and are controlled by anchor points and handles.With enough time and determination you can give them any form you want. A path can be generated with the path tool, from a selection and from a text in GIMP. And it can be stored and even exported as a SVG file.

So they do fit more into a vector based program like Inkscape. If you use them for drawing something, ask yourself if you are using the right tool.

Gimp has a good documentation about path basics , the paths tool, the dialog and the paths menu.

The last part of the video is edited in a hurry – you’ll notice some blunders.

The TOC

01:10 Path concept
03:05 Adding the Path dialog in GIMP
04:20 Adding a path with the Path tool
05:50 The Paths dialog
06:40 Turn a path into a selection
07:20 Stroke the path
07:50 Path context menue
08:40 Turn a selection into a path
09:40 Turn a text into a path and back
11:50 Put a text on a path
14:30 Don’t use GIMP for vector graphics
15:00 Wrapping up

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 find more about the Orton Effect in Wikipedia and a lot of other places.The one I show in the video is from Nature Photographer. Michael Orton’s homepage is not working at the moment, but you can fnd a review of his book. I haven’t found it in our library system yet – has one of you read it?

PCIN.net has a detailed description of the analog workflow. After reading that I would change my approach a bit. Stay tuned.

Even Wolfram Mathematica has Orton, I never thought of that program as a graphics software. But if you think about it – it has everything it needs built in.

The TOC

00:20 The show is late
01:40 The Orton effect
03:20 Michael Orton and his book
04:40 Cropping the image
06:00 Making bright an blurred layers
07:00 Blurring
08:40 Multiply mode set
09:20 Compare the result
09:25 Playing with the opacity sliders
10:15 Points for variation
11:35 Recap with a different image
15:00 Script?
15:30 Wolfram Mathematica Orton Effect Plugin

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.

In #39 I had shown how to make a Duotone or Tritone out of a monochrome image. And then Paul Wellner Bou showed in his Blog an easier way to do this.

It’s working, but why? To answer that, I look into the HSV colour model and try to explain the effects of the different layer modes.

A little bit about sharpening in an extra layer with “value” as the mode and a pointer to faking analog camera frames in digital images with a script and an original Hasselblad frame made by Marcus Ranum are at the end of the episode.

The TOC

01:00 Toning images
02:00 Toning enhances the visual volume
03:50 The recipe for a duotone
04:30 Adding a layer in colour mode and adding a layer mask from an image copy
07:00 Doing the same for the second tone
08:00 Inverting the mask
09:20 Switching layers on and off
10:30 Sharpening in Value mode
12:20 Unsharp mask
15:10 Explanation of Colour and Value mode
17:10 HSV colour model
20:00 A fake view camera frame
22:20 Multiply mode
23:40 A real Hasselblad frame

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.

With the money being on the back burner, Philippe made us a bowl of soup – absolutely low on calories and from scratch.

You’ll see how to get a textured plane into the shape of the soup, create reflections and steam and to control the light.

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 idea behind c2g is to convert each pixel to B&W using an optimal white balance: the black and white points are calculated for each pixel according to its surrounding, giving the closer pixels more weight (and following a gaussian curve). And basically this mimics the way our human eye perceives the image – how we perceive a color (or grey nuance) depends not only on its value, but on its environment.”

Interesting stuff – and controversly discussed in the comments to that post. Check them out too!

Then I follow a comment from Steinar and explore the Device Status dialog. It gives you all information you need about your row of input devices. Even if they are plugged in too late.

In the image I tackled last week were some really big damages. And I tried to fix them with the Resynthesis plugin and G’MIC. Both did well with small defects and considerably good with the big ones. The were only at loss where knowledge about the world was needed – like in the back of the chair. We know that the wood goes on – the computer does not.Perhaps the result would have been better with the first plugin if I had followed Tobias’ tip thouroughly.

UPDATE: If you call the Resynthesis plugin via Filters/Enhance/Smart remove selection you get a much better result. See in the image on the right.

Both plugins are not easy to use and need ore time to explore than I was motivated to invest.I found no way to “automagically” select the damged parts of the image. Perhaps a scan in full colour mode would have been better. Ther may be a colour difference between dirt and image that can be exploited for a selection. So, scan in RGB!

There is a an other plugin perhaps usable for such work. It’s the Wavelet decomposer. I’ll try that in a later show.

At the end of the show I tell you a bit more about this young man, show Norman’s version of the reconstructed image and propose a different approach with an oval “matte”, like it must have been in the original.

The TOC

00:30 Comparing the Wacom Bamboo with the Intuos
05:40 2 tablets, 1 machine
06:30 The “Device Status” dialog
13:30 Going back to the “Portrait of a Young Man”
14:00 Resyntesizer and Wavelet Decompose
16:15 G’MIC
17:30 Comparing G’MIC and Resynthesizer
18:00 Please scan in RGB even if the image is monochrome!
19:20 Take care with the eyes!
20:30 Preparing a mask for the plugins
24:40 Using a colour for the mask
28:30 The G’MIC plugin at work
32:40 Resynthesizer at work
34:40 Comparing the results
36:00 Conclusion
37:00 Who is in the image?
39:00 Norman’s version of the image
39:40 Making an oval frame
43:40 Good bye!

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.

His image was on a glass plate negative and was then copied as a contact print to photographic paper. The guys who took the image were a bit sloppy and left some lint and marks on the image. And then came 140 years of storage and handling.

Norman has offered to restore the images and I’ll try to help him with this and the next episode. In this one I revisit the clone tool and explore the heal tool. It’s the right tool for tackling all the spots in the image.

The show starts with greeting to Russia, A lot of visits to the site are from there and comments in Cyrillic are getting more. Google translate helps not a lot and so we are looking for some help from Russia. You speak Russian? Become an Editor for this blog and decide what’s real and what’s SPAM. And to all the Russian visitors here – please try to write in English, even if you think it’s not good enough. We will understand you better than Google translate – or ask.

Then I show a plugin that turns dull screenshots into nice reflecting 3-D product shot.

This plugin was written by Fabian A. Scherschel, the German part of the Linux Outlaws podcast. Fabian is drinking beer and talking with Dan Lynch (several cups of tea) about Linux, Open Source news, politics and more.

I think you’ll hear about a really good video podcast about GIMP there soon, so check them out.

The TOC

00:30 Greetings to Russia
02:48 Linuxoutlaws and screenshot plugin
08:25 Norman has a new problem
09:00 What’s wrong with this image from 1870?
14:10 How much to correct
15:10 Make a backup layer
15:30 Clone tool
17:30 Heal tool
22:10 Undo a whole area
23:20 Working on the face
25:30 Verschlimmbessern
26:50 Comparison of clone and heal tool
29:10 Keep the pattern of the suit
31:00 Tedious work ahead, but….
31:20 perhaps a G’MIC can help?
32:50 Wrap up

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.

And consider to help in developing or donate to speed things up!

They have used it now, just in time for the Kirchentag, a big church meeting here in Bremen. It’s on this (very expensive) chocolate, postcards, posters, tags and more.

But in reality this sign was made from scratch by Philippe, with a generous amout of bump mapping and applying plasma. Two things are to be thought about – making this three dimensional and getting the age effects right. Rust blooms and runs and so there are several ways to go to emulate it.

Every time I watch one of these shows I am stunned by the ease of making a three dimensional effect with some simple shadows.

Do you have any ideas for future “From Scratch” shows? Post them here in the comments or go to the forum! It’s not that we are running out of ideas really soon, but a little input from you would be very appreciated.

The TOC

will follow

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.

There is more to tablets in show 104.

At the end of the show I have a essage for the German speaking audience. There is no German Meet the GIMP, but Berhnhard Stockmann (devvv) from Gimpusers.de and Gimpusers.com has made a nice video DVD about GIMP. Also a DVD about building WEB sites. Both are available for 29.95€ in book stores and online.

I gave the GIMP DVD to Boris form Happy Shooting, a German language podcast about photography. Boris (nsonic) and Chris (Tips from the Top Floor) are well known podcasters and as a team they are simply great. Useful information and a lot of “dumme Sprüche”. Just now there are no shows, Chris is trecking in the Himalaya and the SatPhone broke down.

The TOC

00:30 The Wacom Intuos Tablet on stage
07:30 GIMP and the tablet
11:20 Using the tablet
12:35 Brush dynamics
16:00 Advantages over the mouse
17:40 Good bye to all non German speakers
18:20 Promotion for devvv’s GIMP DVD
21:30 Second end of the show

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Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

The way to sharpen the image with a layer in value mode is also a very good idea. Now it is possible to change the colours in the lower levels without ruining the sharpening. This should also work with selective sharpening.

A final bonus is a link to a script which adds a fine “full frame” border to the image. This was the black frame caused by the gap between negative and film holder in the enlarger – a not so subtle way to brag about the photographers  abilities to compose an image that doesn’t need cropping. Absolutely hilarious in a digital image, but it still looks good.

I take this into one of the next shows.

I wanted to do something special – for example an interview with Sven Neumann. But he has had no time – you’ll hear about it in the video.

But I could help out a bit with a scientific project – finding out how much a airplane wing bends in a wind tunnel. This is still work in progress, you can follow it here.

You can find the cross stitch script in the forum.

And then we have a new script out of our secret Script Writers Guild. It’s the tonal range relection script and it can do some very weird stuff. And either Bert has bugged my computer or can read minds – he included the stuff I wanted to have without having seen the video.

The TOC

00:20 Show 100!
01:00 Congratulations to Sven Neumann!
04:10 The problem – measure wing deformation
06:20 The images
07:00 Stacking images in layers
07:30 Aligning the images
12:20 Cropping
12:50 Saving as XCF
13:20 Calibrating the setup
14:30 Measurement tool
15:20 Making a grid
17:00 Putting lines on the wing tips
19:30 Making a grid with horizontal lines
20:30 Turning the grid into a ruler
21:10 Beware of wrong selections
22:10 Pintin straigth lines
24:30 Save each layer as JPEG
26:20 Recap
28:00 Happy Birthday!
29:30 Cross stich script
30:30 Tonal range selection script
32:20 Simple DRI/HDR with the script
33:10 Installing the script
34:50 Testing the script
43:20 Wrapping up the script
44:50 Selection instead of new layer
46:00 Good bye and spread the word!

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Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

Philippe is doing it from scratch again, this time unscratched acrylic glass, cut with a laser and mounted on a brushed steel plate.

Acrylic glass panes (or other kinds of glass panes) are not only transparent. They reflect externally and internally, distort, cast shadows and more. So it’s a lot to think about to get a believable image.

In the companion file there are also two scripts from Philippe for making such glass panes with letters cut into them.

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Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

I start with a snap shot with a bad composition. A crop, a bit of curves and sharpening and the snap shot turned into a better snap shot.

The image to the right is not made with GIMP – it’s shot with a “Subjektiv” and had only it’s curve tweaked a bit. The Subjektiv is a lens with exchangable optics. I used an acrylic lens, like in the Holga. There is also a glas lens which even can be stopped down with an aperture, a pinhole and a zone plate. So this image is a “real” photography – would there be a difference if I had shot it with a good lens and made it look like this in GIMP?

I was inspired to this topic by these two discussions in the forum. And I have started a third about the question I posted here. Got an opinion? Join us there or post your comments here in the show blog.

There will probably no show next week.

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An important tool for this is the Focus Blur plugin. The homepage needs some assistance in translation from Japanese to English – are you able to help?

The Focus Blur plugin needs a “Depth Map”, a grayscale image which defines the amount of blur  in each part of the image. Rob A has made a tutorial about making a believable depth map. It’s not enough to make a simple gradient, you have to keep things with the same distance to the focal plane on the same level of gray and make the gradients follow the planes in the image. And here my subect turned out to be too complicated. My result is not as good as I wanted.

If I wanted to do this again I would choose a different subject and camera position. Higher up and farther away and so including more stuff. And I would look out for regular shapes in the area to make building a depth map easier.

(EDIT 04/03/09) A much better example than I was able to produce was made by the above mentioned Rob A. He describes his process in the forum thread.

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…There is an exceptional new plugin available to restore old/faded transparencies/photos!

Our user geoff has written an awesome new python plugin that makes it possible to enhance matt/faded transparencies or photos by reversing the aging process.

Some background: The plugin is based on an algorithm that recalculates the aging effect of color pigments based on physical considerations. It is possible for example to gain a nice new red color from a faded red color tone in a photo without having to do massive color/lighting corrections. It is a one-click-easy-and-simple-to-use plugin.

I haven’t tested it and would be happy about reports here or in the forum.

Todays topic is simulating a stone carving. Again Philippe starts with an analysis of the real world: how do we perceive the depth of a carving? It’s not only a drop shadow, like in so many illustrations. For “believability” additional highlights and some effects from dirt and imperfections are also important. Then he constructs these details in a very convincing way.

From the forum discussion about this episode:

Regarding the theme of software-patents I want to bring in
the link to the petition against software-patents here:

http://www.stopsoftwarepatents.eu/

Please read the information and sign the petition…
…and spread the word, please!

Softwarepatents are absolutely contarily to free software,
and even commercial (and also closed source software) vendors
can get problems by them. But for open source they are extremely
unhealthy.

For Software there is the copyright law, and it’s well suited.
Software-patents are… well, how to say it… they are… hmhhhh,
they are …. evil.(GIMPel)

Nothing to add! Sign the petition, they are not dead yet.

This work is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

The SONY centre has no lack of tenants and I would perhaps be able to rent a broom closet there for my monthley income.

Philippe will spend his winter in Chile faking more images. He has fixed the poster to that wall and hung the French “April Fool Fish” into the tent over the Plaza.

The original image was made by Andreas Tille (have a look at the other images at his site – terrific stuff!) and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Of course all the modified images are following this license, but I doubt that there will be any further use in them. I hope Andreas will not be too mad about using his wonderful image without proper license information for 24 hours.

One thing came to my mind: Is there interest for a real workshop? In meatspace, face to face?

Opens Source booms as budgets shrink. I got contacted by the German police to make a series of tutorials for using GIMP in the postprocessing of crime scene images. They want to use GIMP instead of “the other program” and spend the saved money on critical equipment. And more contacts are evolving too.

Video tutorials are gaining steadily a greater share in the market of software education.

So I think promoting and educating Open Source software is a market with future in it and Meet the GIMP is an established brand in this area.

Rents are going down and landlords are desperate to fill voids that would be too obvious in prestigious locations. I was able to rent an office suite in Berlin, Potsdamer Platz. I’ll share a presentation and workshop room with a business training agency.

I took over the office last weekend. I got the furniture from the previous tenant in exchange for subletting him the office up to the summer. But I fixed a banner on the wall where I’ll record the show. You can see it in the full resolution image and the detail below..

Outside advertizing is not allowed – it is reserved to the big brands who don’t want to dilute their impact on the people flowing through.

Why Berlin? It’s the center of GIMP development, has a lot of great photo locations, a broad range of places to stay from hostels, B&B to 5 star hotels and is a hub for traffic from all directions.

A lot of the audience of this podcast lives in Russia and eastern Europe. From  there Berlin is basically across the street. (Well, I would expect to have at least one fuel stop if you come from behind the Ural ) North America and East Asia have a lot of air line connections available. And imagine to have a beer with Sven Neumann or Mitch Natterer after the workshop day and tell them that we need 16 bit?

In July I’ll quit my job here in Bremen and move to Berlin. Courses will start in August, prominently featuring a couple of “From Scratch” two day weekend and 4 day week courses by Philippe. He’ll spend his winter in our summer. And of course I’ll have workshops starting then too.

Time tables, workshop programs, rebates for forum members and fees have still to be finalized. But I’ll publish further details soon.

Give us your input in the comments here!  What do you want to see in a workshop? How much time can you spend? What other services would you expect?

This will be a lot of fun!

Again I steal an idea from the forum. It’s making fake tilt shift images. They look like images of model railway landscapes but are made from reality. Have a look at the forum for links to images by Bert and others.

I do half of the work in this podcast – planning the image and give the real world a plastic look. Next week I’ll add the focus blur that is so typical for macro shots.

But at the start I show that I have learned something from Philippe: Look carefully at an original. The image on the right is a H0 scale model in the sand on the Weser beach – real plastic.

The companion file contains the original shots – the xcf will follow next week.

The TOC

00:30 Fake tilt shift images
01:50 Analyzing a macro shot of a toy
05:30 The real image
06:30 What shall be in the focus?
13:00 Rotate before crop and resize
16:00 Inside out crop
17:30 Scaling down
18:00 Analyze the plastic look
19:30 Selective sharpening
24:30 Unsharp mask for getting the plastic look
28:50 Specular highlights

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Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

It’s curves time again. This powerful tool is in the centre of the stage and I try to explain it’s nearly unlimited power over colours, contrasts and brightness. Worth to learn.

This week I visit a vineyard in Missouri (too bad – only via HTTP) and discuss the dangers of blowing out the highlights under overcast sky. Just underexpose a bit when in doubt, you can get detail out of dark areas but 255 white has nothing to save in it.

The overexposed sky has killed all the details in a tree that looked over the horizon. I use the curves tool on a layer copy to get the details back and integrate the fixed tree with a layer mask into the original shot.

Then I adjust the black and white points and give a little more contrast to the image – of course with the curves tool. Finally I have some fun with – of course – the curves tool and come to an image that is not suitable for a vineyard but for a LSD factory. But they don’t have websites….

The TOC

(Kevin, I made one! )

00:20 Wine, Missouri and the Church
02:50 One image – two views
04:30 The histogram
06:40 Diagnosing overexposure
07:30 DO NOT BLOW OUT THE HIGHLIGHTS!!!
09:25 Histogram details
09:40 Linear and logarithmic
13:50 Blown out tree branches
14:30 Curves tool sight seeing
15:10 The translation line/curve
15:40 Black point
17:50 Set contrast in the curve
18:40 Bend the curve
20:30 Inspector – eye dropper
22:30 Repairing the tree
25:30 Get the blue cast out of the twigs
25:40 Adding a layer mask
29:30 Copy visible in new layer
33:00 “HDR” in a very cheap way
34:30 Power of the curve

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Overview of Changes from GIMP 2.6.5 to GIMP 2.6.6
=================================================

* Bugs fixed:

 571117 – lcms plug-in crashes on broken profile
 575154 – changing the help browser preference may not work
 573542 – blur plugin: bug in the first line
 572403 – gimp-2.6 crashed with SIGSEGV in IA__g_object_get()
 573695 – 1-bit white background saved as PBM becomes all black
 573488 – Small bug in Filter>Distorts>Ripple
 572156 – top left pixel position/coordinate is not 0,0 but 1,1
 472644 – Rotate with clipping crops the whole layer

* Updated translations:

 German (de)
 Spanish (es)
 Estonian (et)
 Basque (eu)
 French (fr)
 Italian (it)
 Portuguese (pt)
 Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)

There are a lot of ways to do this – I chose to make a layer mask with the threshold tool. Selecting with the path tool is an other option – see the comments to this post.

To get rid of the artificial look I feathered (blurred) the edge of the mask a bit. This gives a soft edge.

The subject of this image is the logo of the Weltladen in Bremen. This is a shop with fair trade products. In the past these products were often bad in quality and high in price, but this has changed. Now the goal of a lot of fair trade organisations is to get the producers to good quality for a competitive price and make them fit for competing in the regular markets. By going mostly organic they can get more money for the products. We buy there all our chocolate (in the box with a bulk discount ) , wine, orange and other juices, rice and even a honey from southern Chile. Philippe considers this type of honey as the best from Chile and recommended mixing it with yoghurt. Exellent!

TOC

00:20 Fairtrade shop
01:42 The initial image
02:05 Create a layer to be used later as a layer-mask
02:50 The problem with using the threshold tool
03:45 Try doing it in peices
04:40 Use the selection tool to keep the part we want
06:15 Repeat for the next zone
08:20 Join the parts together with merge visible layers
09:00 Fine-tuning
09:47 – trying to find the biggest contrast using the channels
12:00 – paint in the missing parts
14:40 – invert colours to tidy-up the edges
16:00 Make the layer mask
17:30 More fine tuning
18:25 Smooth the edges
18:30 – select the wanted area
20:00 – feather the edges
21:00 – fill the unwanted areas to make them transparent
22:00 More fine tuning
23:53 Brighten the catch-lights in the eyes
26:52 The End

TOC kindly made by Kevin

Note: Use “right click” and “Save as” to download the image file. Somehow Podpress doesn’t get it….

It’s Philippe’s turn again. Today he starts with an image of his son David and turns it into a poster like the ones made by Shephard Fairey.

We had a show about this topic by Andrew A. Gill, who made a USSR propaganda style poster out of a portrait of President Roosevelt.

Philippe uses basically the same technique but has some aditional tricks in his sleeve, as separating zones with details that have to be preserved from others that should turn into flat areas and clear lines. And he shows how to get some fine lines into the image to get a half tone shade. The result really looks like a serigraph.

As always he starts with carefull watching and planning – a thing I too often forget.

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Then I decided not to ruin Philippe’s work and save it as a GIF image.

Beware of JPEG for indexed images….. The method for compression matters.

Full XCF suppurt for F-Spot will follow. Now you can see and open XCF files in GIMP, but sending a JPEG to GIMP and getting a XCF back is in the pipeline. Stephane mentioned a “perhaps” date, but I’ll translate that into “soon” here. I’ll keep you updated.

A big “Thank You” to Stephane!

(Image stoen from Stephane’s site)