Finally we have a new Focus-Ring Episode online! It’s #18 with a new concept. Four participants from the Focus Ring Network as before, but now with one topic for all of them. This time it’s “Light & Shadow”. Contributors Chris Marquardt (Tips from the Top Floor), Jeff Curto (The History of Photography and Camera Position), Martin Bailey (Martin Bailey Photography Podcast) and Ibarionex Perello (The Candid Frame & Shooting with Alas) join together to discuss the importance of shadow in the creation of a successful photograph. And to make the point, each of them presents two images.

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.

If you ever wanted to look an image forensic specialist over the shoulder while looking at some nice “enhanced” imgages – have a look at the Hackerfactor. Be sure to look for the link to the sequel and finale and also check out this nice Bikini model. Poor girl – some bones are missing and her fingers have been hit by a magic spell – they cast no shadow. This page also has a follow up.

Stealing the image from LuX’s posting in the forum I wish some happy days for you all. Take care of yourself and the world around you.

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.

Over at the Digital Photograpy School is a nice challenge. Peter Carey put one of his images under CC license (the image on the right is a crop out of his final version), provided the RAW file and asks his readers to put their versions into the comments.

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.)

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Download the Companion File! (767 Bytes!)

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.

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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.

I found this cool thing on the GIMP users mailing list – perhaps someone can use it.

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
Read the rest of this entry »

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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.

Download the Video! (38.4 MB, 20:13)
Download the Torrent! (likely broken)
Download the Companion File!

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.