Meet the GIMP!

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This is the first of two episodes about the complete work on an image. It’s pretty slow, because Rolf is slow on thinking with a thick head from a cold.

The image is from a not so nice part of the town and it shall finally show a certain lost atmosphere. But for that he needs a plan.

Following advice from Vincent Versace’s book “Welcome to Oz” he makes some maps over the image to find a crop and to get the light and contrasts right. The crop is found at the end of the episode, the lighting will follow next week.

If you want to work ahead - the original image with all the work done up to now is in the downloadable companion file. See the top of this posting for a download link.

The TOC

00:45 How I made the image
02:20 Selecting the image
06:50 Making a plan
09:30 Defining a crop
13:40 Cropping help with a black bar
16:10 Looking for tilt and deformation
17:00 Cromatic abberation
17:45 Zoom memory
18:00 Lighting issues
22:00 Rotating on a separate layer
26:10 Making the crop
31:10 The second crop
33:15 Locking the layers
33:35 Good bye

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I have played around with digikam and F-Spot (for the non-Linux crowd - these are image administration programs with database, tagging, simple edits and so on.) I like F-Spot more - it integrates perfectly in my Gnome Desktop. (Digikam is great too - and I would prefer it if I would still use KDE.)

There was a lot of controvery about Mono, the programming framework that is used in F-Spot. It uses the C# language and the free parts of .NET, both Microsoft technologies. And of course there are fears about patents, lawsuits and becoming contaminated by the Dark Forces.

After some reading I think it is not EVIL and I can use it, but perhaps you have a different opinion?

Pascal de Bruijn has a cool blog about Ubuntu, photography and more. You find the feed for the latest entries of the photography section in the sidebar.

He has understood colour management and made a suite of programs available for Ubuntu. Simply add this

deb http://ubuntu.pcode.nl/ubuntu intrepid exiv2 lensfun ufraw argyll

to your repositories. His version of UFRaw uses a more up to date version of exiv2, which can write EXIF to TIFF, and integrates lensfun, which can do automatic lens correction during the raw conversion. ArgyllCMS can be used to calibrate screens using a colorimeter, even some affordable ones.

And he shows a way to make a icc profile for your own camera. You need a not so cheap (Wolfgang Faust does sell reasonably priced camera targets (C1) for 30EUR including shipping for Europe) target and good sun. Perhaps some people are interested in sharing such targets?

I’ll follow that closely!

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Philippe takes a forum thread about “texture wrapping” and turns it into a tutorial. During the process he got a real nice tree bark.

With texture wrapping you can give a flat texture the look of being on the surface of a 3-dimensional body. This is the domain of Raytracers and 3D programs like Blender. But for that you need a mathematical model of the body in question. This is not available in photographies.

The TOC

00:50 - Concept
02;50 - Forum discussion
05:00 - Accentuating value contrast
06:10 - Choosing and resizing a texture
08:20 - Masking
16:10 - Giving volume to the texture
22:00 - Setting layer mode and tuning
22:40 - Enhancing the shadows using a contrasted color channel

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Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

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This week Rolf tries to explain layers, the layers dialogue  and layer modes. The image on the left is a result of a little play with layers: a layer with a screen shot of GIMP was duplicated, set to “Grain Extract” mode, shifted two pixels to the left and top and than duplicated again. Looks nice - but why?

Layers are an important tool in image manipulation. You can isolate different parts of an image with layer masks and so avoid negative consequences of your actions to other parts of the image. And you can play work with different layer modes to achieve effects from a little contrast manipulation to complex changes.

We need Tables of Content for the back episodes. You can help by joining this thread in the Forum.

TOC

00:30 The helpers
03:18 The TOC Project - Help Kevin!
05:10 Layers
05:20 What’s an image?
07:00 Alpha Channel
08:30 Locking a layer
08:50 Layer modes
10:20 Documentation at gimp.org
13:10 Tips in the forum: Contrast reduction
17:10 Visibility toggling
18:00 Changing  the layer order
18:40 Protect the alpha channel
19:00 Creating new layers
20:40 Layer masks
23:30 Showing and disabeling layer masks
24:15 Text layers
26:40 Editing a text layer
27:30 Loosing the text properties
29:00 Learning by doing

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Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

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Today we have a guest on the “from scratch” slot. Max from Munich shows ho to make an envelope like this one. His Homepage is at http://milian-web.byto.de

The TOC

(Times are coming up)

Background
Texture for paper
Link to the original PS tutorial PSDTUTS (Vintage Fifties Letter)
Gimpressionist for paper texture
Airmail border pattern
Pattern fill from clipboard
Make the border
Grunge on the border with Plasma
Create a stamp
Make the perforation with a spaced paint brush
King Wilber on the stamp
Creating a rubber stamp
Waving lines with the Curve Bend filter
Smushing the ink stamp
Adress
Font from “dafont.com”
Aging the letter with a bump map
Use in a web logo

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Have a look!

Congratulations!

I don’t expect to see some of them here. We get a lot of Dutch coins, but this will not be in circulation but will end in collections.

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The People of the USA are electing a new President. And we wanted to publish this Election Special some hours ahead of the schedule - but the technology was against us. Encoding problems at midnight and an alarmclock set to 0635 don’t work well together.

We wish the US (and the World) a good choice and a not so bleak future as it looks at the moment.

Philippe shows how to make the animated flag you see here.

Rolf steals a trick to enhance an image with a layer copy first converted to monochrome and then set to “value” as the layer mode.

And with the next show we’ll perhaps know who will be sitting in that nice house here in 2009. (We know it: Congratulations to Barack Obama and all the people in the USA.)

The TOC

00:20 US presidential election
01:02 Animated US flag
01:55 - Create the mapping layer
04:00 - Create the animation layers
04:20 - Displacement and bump mapping
06:20 - Move the background
07:10 - Repeat on all the layers
08:35 - Perspective distortion
09:35 - Background image
11:10 - Add the animation layers
12:04 - Flag pole
14:38 - Save the animation
17:05 Forum - increasing contrast
19:25 Trying the new technique
20:10 - Make a monochrome layer
21:48 - Layer mode to value
24:34 The End

TOC made by paynekj

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Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

One of the first Blogs worldwide to link to this project was “ang pilipino GIMP” from the Philipines. And now I am linking back.

He describes a new packet called gimp-plugin-registry in the repositories of Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), that contains 14 useful plugins. Among them stuff for making exposure blends, monochrome images with film look and feel, David’s Batch Processor, Liquid Rescale and GREYCstoration. Look at his posting for more details.

Hugin has changed enormously in the two years since the 0.6.1 release, hardly any part of the code has remained untouched. There have been many many bug-fixes, improvements to the interface and lots of new features. We had a show about this panorama building software way back - seems to be time for a new one.

There is a new help system, new assistants, improved handling of images and correction of exposure. HDR is integrated and a lot more. Get the full thing here.

GIMP has released 2.6.2 - a lot of bugs have been killed. The version from Getdeb doesn’t install on Ubuntu Hardy - but I’ll switch to the Ibex soon.