Episode 181: 2.8, 2.9 and Counting!

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A week of news: GIMP 2.8 is out, we have again a modern stable version of GIMP. Gratulation to the developers, this was good and hard work. But instead of relaxing a bit they threw at the same moment Version 2.9 into the world. High bit depth, not only the 16 bits everybody wanted, 32 bits integer and floating point modes are suddenly available. But be aware, this is a field of bugs and crashes, don’t expect any productive results yet.

In a first look at 2.8 I show the shiny new brushes, explain how to use the new sliders and the tagging system for brushes, gradients and patterns. For the lazy I add a bit of calculations in input fields.

Then nachbarnebenan takes you for a tour through 2.9, presenting the lossless operation of the layer stack and other stuff. But again, this is not for the faint at heart. If you want to compile 2.9 on Debian, here is a How To in our Wiki. (The link address says still 2.7, but it is 2.9….)

The TOC

00:20 News about 2.8 and 2.9
04:40 Starting GIMP 2.8.0
05:00 Single Window Mode
05:25 A new brush set – brush controls
07:10 The new slider controls
08:10 Ressource tagging for brushes, gradients and patterns
10:45 Calculations in input fields
11:45 Goat Invasion! Outlook to 2.9 (nachbarnebenan)
11:50 A layer stack in 2.8 – 8 Bit depth
14:50 The same in 2.9 – 32? Bit Floating Point
18:20 Soft Light and Overlay – the Bug is gone!
19:20 Not all is using GEGL yet
22:30 Final words from Rolf

Creative Commons License
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.

Episode 180: Not for Grown Ups!

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Tuxpaint is a painting software for kids between 3 and 100+. Well, the targeted audience ends at an age of 12, but it is still fun to use when you are older. Tuxpaint is available for Linux, Mac OS X and all Windows flavours. Of course it is under the GPL and so free to get and to be shared. The ease of use beats everything I have seen in the professional educational market and I am considering to get it into my school.

The user interface and availability of tools in Tuxpaint can be configured to adapt to the skill level of the user and the level of annoyance the environment is willing to tolerate. There are nice sound effects, but how often can you stand

“QUAAAAAAAKQUAAAAAAAKQUAAAAAAAK DUCK”?

Also printing can be disabled because space on the fridge and ink cartridges have limits. The configuration is done with a separate program which can be kept outside of the reach of the little end-user.

The show starts and ends with some information about the upcoming GIMP Magazine. I am somehow involved in the team now but I promise to keep my priorities on this project here.

And then there is an invasion of goats int GIMP and 16 bits and more are in reach.

If you want to become a member of the forum, just drop me a mail at info@meetthegimp.org and tell me your intended user name.

The TOC

01:00 GIMP Magazine
02:00 Goat Invasion – GIMP will get a lot of progress soon
03:00 16 and 32 Bit already running in the Goat Invasion branch
05:10 Tuxpaint
05:55 Setting Tuxpaint up
09:00 The Toolset
10:00 Painting and brushes
11:10 Lines
11:45 New canvas
12:20 Shapes
13:35 Stamps
16:40 Text
17:30 Magic! (scripts and filters in a mixed bag)
20:20 Saving and recovering images
20:40 Templates for coloring
22:50 GIMP Magazine

Creative Commons License
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.

Call for Content – GIMP Magazine is here!

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(Steve asked me to publish this – sounds like a very good idea!)
A quarterly magazine for GIMP users to include: next gen software features (and road ahead type articles), tips and tricks, tutorials, and most importantly a magazine to show off your stunning art, photography and graphic design works created in GIMP or related open source software.  All of this wrapped in some really cool and professional looking graphic design and layout.  Everyone will be able to download this magazine completely free as it should be!  Follow us on twitter for details www.twitter.com/GIMPMagazine.

The theme for the first issue is “Next Gen GIMP”

We need your help to contribute to this magazine:
Continue reading →

Progress by Accident

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On my way to bed I stumbled across a blog post by Michael Natterer (Mitch), one of the core developers of GIMP. Øyvind Kolås (Pippin) and he tinkered around with the GIMP core and GEGL. By accident (or sheer genius) they found a way to integrate GEGL into the ancient GIMP core. “After a few hours of hacking, Pippin had the GimpTileBackendTileManager working, and I went ahead replacing some legacy code with GEGL code, using the new backend. And it simply worked!”. Well, it took some weeks from that to get a lot of stuff adapted to GEGL. “What was planned as a one week visit turned into 3 weeks of GEGL porting madness. At the time this article is written, about 90% of the GIMP application’s core are ported to GEGL, and the only thing really missing are GeglOperations for all layer modes.”

I just glanced over it (on my way to bed – ALARM at 0600 – that’s in 6:44hours…. ;-) ) but there is this promising sentences in there: “GIMP 2.10’s core will be 100% ported to GEGL, and all of the legacy pixel fiddling API for plug-ins is going to be deprecated. Once the core is completely ported, it will be a minor effort to simply “switch on” high bit depths and whatever color models we’d like to see.”

:-)

Mitch asks for support of the Libre Graphics Meeting - shower them in money! This is one of thew hubs of GIMP progress. And I want it to run fast! ;-)

PS: Next show is in the works.

Monsters!

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A long time ago we had a tutorial by Bert about autostereoscopic images. Now I got pointed to these beauties. All hand drawn and very impressive.

The class trip was great, the kids behaved quite reasonably for being around 14 and we had enough wine for the night watch. ;-) The weather was less good as announced while we had indoor activities but turned to sunshine the moment we started our bike ride and other outdoor sports. I found out that I am not that bad as an archer.

Episode 179: Corners and Edges

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I am on my way to a class trip an so you get only a short episode about the corners and edges around the canvas. There is a menu button, a zoom mode button, a navigator and the quick mask for selections. And of course there are the rulers with the guides and control points to pull out.

All this after a quick update on the histogram from the last show.

Sorry, no TOC, it’s too late now….

Creative Commons License
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.

Episode 178: Lurking in the Shadow

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Download the companion file! (27.4MB)
You are in for a night-time trip to one of the most secret places on the earth – until 23 years ago. The former Stasi headquarter is only 2 subway stations east of my home and I quite like the morbid, spooky atmosphere there. It’s a really huge areal, lots of office space and other buildings. Some of them are used as a museum and as the archive for all the Stasi files. Others are rented out or are simply empty.
My image missed some details in the shadows. I used a modified “burn with a layer in Overlay Mode” technique to get a bit of light into them. Instead of painting on the layer I used the L-part of the LAB colour model. I got the idea for this from the Darktable Blog.

UPDATE Mar 18: There is a nice way to use the histogram with selections. Select the dark region and look at the histogram – it shows only the data from the selection. The histogram tool is “selection-sensitive”.

Thanks to GIMPel for the tip.

The TOC

00:30 The Stasi Headquarter
05:00 Start of the image processing
05:20 Rotate the image – what is vertical?
08:00 Cropping
09:40 Planning where to work on the shadows
10:00 Measure the darkness with curves tool
10:45 A quick try with the curves tool
11:30 A layer in Overlay Mode to brighten shadows up
12:00 Decomposing the image to get the “L” from LAB
14:30 Invert the colours
14:50 Generate a layer mask
15:50 Constructing the “Lighten Only” layer
17:00 Optimizing the effect
17:50 Blurring the overlay layer improves the effect
22:30 Compare to simple burning
24:50 Recap
27:45 http://darktable.org gave the idea to this

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

Episode 177: Take 2 and GIMP!

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Download the companion file from Episode 176!
Nachbarnebenan continues his tutorial from the last episode. He isolated his model from the a bit to vivid background by making two images from his RAW file. One is crisp and colourful – best for the model. The other one is soft and a bit dull – this tones the background down.
In this episode he combines them to one image with a layer mask.

Did you know that there is a filter in GIMP to emulate the look of an image for colour blind people? Nachbarnebenan shows how to use it. It’s no so important for photography – but think of all the graphics work done with GIMP. By using this filter you can make a difference in accessibility

If you want to get into programming plugins for GIMP in Python – here is the link to this great HD video from Gimpusers.com.

And for the next episode you’ll need a Trench coat and dark glasses – we’ll enter the Stasi headquaters at night.

Sorry, no TOC up to now, but at around 15:30 is the great segment about GIMP and colour blindness.

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

Episode 176: Double Photivo

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Download the companion file! (97.8MB)
It’s time for a guest again. Nachbarnebenan shows how to process a RAW image in the current (well, it was November…) version of Photivo. Photivo has a very different approach to image processing from GIMP and others. It’s more stacking up and tweaking of algorithms instead of making a series of changes one after the other. Fully non destructive and very powerful.

To isolate the model from the a bit to vivid background Nachbarnebenan produces two images from his RAW file. One is crisp and colourful – best for the model. The other one is soft and a bit dull – this tones the background down.
In the next episode he will show how to combine these two images in GIMP into one.

I am still looking for “Bad Good Images” from Phones and other not so good cameras!

Sorry, no TOC up to now.

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