Episode 192: Look Down! – A Challenge

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Rolf

192 Download the Video! (45:45, 86.9 MB)
Download the template! (0.06 MB)
Download my sidewalk images! ( 18.1 MB)

There was no show for quite some time – and there will be a gap until the end of summer. I move back to Bremen – and that takes a lot of time and creativity away. But in Bremen I will have nearly 2 hours more time each day, because I can walk to school and don’t need to ride the famous Berlin S-Bahn Ring Line.

In the meantime I have a challenge for you! Present the place where you live to us – but look down on the sidewalk for that! The best results will be published in the GIMP Magazine #5 and of course here on the blog. The exact rules are below.

This Challenge is a perfect rip off from a challenge by Andrés (Twitter) (Website), an illustrator from Buenos Aires, in the now closed forum of Tips from the Top Floor. Make a mosaik of images of the sidewalks in your city and try to transport the atmosphere.

This is my take on the Silvio-Meier-Strasse around the corner from my flat in Berlin.

The Rules

Make a mosaic of at least 3×3 images.
All images have to be shot straight down
All images are in the same scale, use the same distance to the ground and the same focal length.
All images have to be linked to each other in their theme by being from one city, one journey …..
Publish your image online and post a link to it before September 1st in the comments to this blog post.
License your image as CC-BY or better and allow this site and the GIMP Magazine to publish your image under CC-BY (here) or CC-BY-SA (GIMP Magazine).
Rules 1 to 4 may be broken, 5, 6 and 7 have to be followed exactly.

You may download the template for my version from above or build your own one. You are free to make other forms than a square – circles or a spiral anyone?

There will be hopefully a discussion in our forum.

The TOC

The video uses chapter marks, you can jump between TOC entrys!

00:00:00 Pause until end of August
00:02:05 A contest for you – introduction
00:03:42 The contest rules
00:04:50 My example
00:06:04 Selecting the images
00:08:00 Scaling down and exporting in Shotwell
00:08:40 Calculating the image size
00:09:30 Create the file
00:10:20 Save as XCF.gz – compressed to save space
00:11:05 Creating a “Contact Sheet” for reference with Imagemagick
00:13:00 Make a movable layer mask with “multiply mode”
00:16:00 Building a stack of layer groups and fill it with images
00:23:00 Filling images into the layer stack
00:26:45 Isolate the layer groups with “lighten only mode”
00:27:55 What do these layer modes do? Blackboard explanation
00:33:08 The last image – a Memory to Edith and Tina Wolff
00:34:30 Fine tuning the mosaic – exchange images
00:36:08 Adjusting contrast between the images with the curves tool
00:39:20 THE CHALLENGE
00:41:05 Variations: Soften the borders between fields
00:43:08 Final words about the Challenge
00:44:15 Exporting and scaling down for publication
00:45:45 End of video

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

Episode 191: PNG or JPG – The Big Fight

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Rolf

This is a PNG in JPG look Download the Video! (26:07 49.7MB)

In the last Episode I looked under the hood of JP(E)G and PNG. This time it gets a bit more practical – which is better for what?

I tackle two examples from the GIMP Magazine web site and test, if they would be better saved as JPG or PNG. The Plugin “Save for Web” is really usefull for this task.(The image for this blog entry is a PNG by the way, showing JPG compression artifacts. As a JPG it would be five times the size. )

I “developed” a method for comparing two layers – just set the top layer mode to “difference”, make a new layer from visible and check that with the threshold tool for pixels, that are not completely black. After locating the problematic zones in an image with this tool, one can decide what settings are “good enough”.

Conclusion: It depends. It depends on the file, your use case, your level of “good enough” and your compassion for people on a mobile device in EDGE-Hell.

The show starts with a little extension of the last show, Pascal mentioned some options for saving a JPG file that I had overlooked.

The TOC

00:00:00 Start of video
00:01:00 Progressive mode in JPEG
00:04:09 Progressive mode is not fully supported by browsers
00:04:23 Optimized mode
00:05:56 Baseline?
00:06:17 The quality setting
00:07:09 GIMPMagazine and MTG header image – PNG or JPG?
00:09:23 Checking for quality loss in JPG
00:10:03 Comparing two layers with difference mode
00:10:48 Using the histogram for analysis of the amount of difference
00:11:25 Locating the differences
00:13:50 Trying 85, 75 and 90 as quality settings
00:16:13 When in doubt, compare different settings
00:16:36 Save your work as XCF.GZ
00:17:12 Second example – a drawing
00:19:56 Conclusion
00:23:19 Stay at 4:4:4 for subsampling with photos
00:25:16 Final words of wisdom
00:26:07 End of video

Episode 189: Currywurst for Beginners

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Rolf

189 Download the Video! (53:45 107MB)

Download the Companion File! (19.9MB)

This is an episode completely in “Beginners Level”, some of you have asked for such a thing. I go through the editing of an image and cover a lot of topics. Nothing really in depth, but you should be able to work your way through other material after viewing this one.

I start with a short tour through the user interface of GIMP, you find more about that in the GIMP documentation and other places. In between there is a bit about saving vs. exporting an image – without the nasty and pointless discussion.

The image itself has to be rotated a bit, cropped, treated with a bit of curves, burned, and dodged, given more omphh with a layer in overlay mode that of course has to be modified with a layer mask. Finally the image will be scaled down, sharpened and exported as a JPEG while the original XCF file is conserved. Quite a tour – so I needed nearly an hour.

(I’ll update the links here later.)

The TOC

00:00:00 Intro
00:00:56 Comments about the GAP problems
00:01:43 This episode is for beginners
00:02:58 Currywurst and Friedrichshain
00:04:18 The user interface – a short tour
00:04:35 The window header and saving into XCF
00:05:30 Exporting an image as JPG or PNG
00:06:50 Fullscreen and single window mode
00:07:20 Menues, Toolbox, Docks, Tabs
00:09:23 The image area with the canvas, rulers, sliders and buttons
00:10:20 Moving around in the image and zooming
00:12:00 Single window mode vs. multi window mode
00:13:01 TAB to switch the Toolbox and Docks on and off
00:13:32 The image – back story
00:15:30 What has to be done – making a plan
00:16:40 Rotate the image to straighten it
00:19:17 Cropping to a 3:2 aspect ratio
00:19:57 Inside Out Cropping
00:22:50 Make a backup layer
00:23:20 Curves Tool for contrast changes
00:27:30 Burning and Dodging with a layer in Soft Light Mode for local brightness changes
00:30:50 An extra layer for notes
00:33:30 Burning and Dodging
00:38:00 The Smudge Tool
00:41:27 Increasing contrast with a layer copy in Soft Light Mode
00:43:30 Adding a layer mask to apply the effect selectively
00:45:50 Softening the layer mask with a Gaussian Blur
00:47:45 Saving the image
00:48:03 Reducing the size for the Web
00:49:30 Sharpening
00:51:38 Exporting to JPEG
00:53:45 End of video

Episode 188: The Book

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Rolf

188 Download the Video! (37:10 74.1MB)

Download the Companion File! (0.3MB)

This episode is about using GAP, the GIMP Animation Package, and “The Book of GIMP”. I walk through one of the tutorials of the book and create a multi layered animation that will be used in a cleaned up form for these videos. I can not praise the book enough, you can read more in a former blog post. GAP showed some flaws, but this may be the problem of the Debian package that I used.

“The Book of GIMP” has also a reference part. I compare that to the official GIMP documentation while looking for information about the Convolution Matrix.

Before all that I tell you about a GIMP plugin for exporting a layer as a PDF file and I defend my new camera – 36 Megapixels may not be too much, they only show the limits of the lenses….. Cameras with smaller sensor sizes of course hit a barrier with more and more MP.

The next episode will have animated lower thirds and a proper automatically generated title screen.

The TOC

00:00:00 Intro
00:00:14 GIMP Magazine #3
00:01:20 Plugin for PDF export of layers
00:01:48 Are 36 Megapixel too much? (Nikon D800)
00:04:08 Where are 6 Megapixels enough? Sensor sizes
00:05:40 The Book of GIMP review
00:07:12 Testing the animation chapter
00:08:27 GAP – Moving Along a Path
00:10:12 New image from template and transparent background
00:11:50 Planning the animation
00:12:16 Building a dummy
00:13:40 Selecting the border of a selection
00:15:55 Make a new image out of a layer
00:17:10 GAP: Duplicate a layer 20 times
00:18:00 GAP: Move Path Tool
00:28:50 GAP: VCR Playback
00:29:30 GAP: Exporting an animation
00:31:40 The Manual part of “The Book of GIMP”
00:32:00 “The Convolution Matrix” compared with docs.gimp.org
00:35:30 Help to improve the documentation!
00:36:00 The printed book and the final verdict

Episode 187: Cleaning Up

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Rolf

187 Download the Video! (35:45 68.1MB)

The last episode got a lot of comments – thank you all for them! And in this episode I try to follow all of the tips you gave me. I remember layer groups and drop shadows, see that Alpha to selection is really better and fight with Copy&Paste in the text tool.

I got a present too – a fine script in Scheme for generating the title screen. Of course that has to be explored. Did you know that you can export the content of a selection as a new image by key stroke? I found out about SHIFT-CTRL-V. Saul’s script gets also a first analytical look – Scheme looses its terror if you come close.

Matthias pointed to an other Colour Design site and the GIMP Magazine will publish a new issue next week.

And finally I take a good look at the “Blender Master Class”, a very fine book about the 3D software Blender.

The TOC

00:00:00 Intro
00:00:40 Using chapter marks in the video
00:01:30 Layer groups
00:05:23 Alpha to Selection – better than selecting by color
00:09:00 Drop shadow filter
00:10:10 Copy and Paste with the text tool is a bit broken
00:13:37 A script in Scheme
00:14:12 Exporting selections from GIMP as graphic image files / Create from clipboard
00:15:20 Exporting vs. saving – don’t discuss, just follow your orders!
00:16:30 Installing a Scheme (.scm) script
00:17:30 Testing the script
00:18:45 Comparing the results
00:19:30 Analyzing the script
00:25:40 Thanks to Saul Goode
00:26:16 Another Color Design website
00:26:45 GIMP Magazine launch ahead
00:27:30 Book review: Blender Master Class, Ben Simonds
00:35:45 End of video

Episode 186: A new Face!

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Rolf

186 Download the Video! (33:04 56.5MB)
Download the companion file!(0.9MB)

Long time no show – but this project is not dead. For the fresh start a new design for the intro is needed. And a new design needs new colours.

I used the Colorschemedesigner to create a palette of colours fitting the “Original MTG Orange” from the logo. Clever algorithms use old artists knowledge about colour combinations. This site even exports a GIMP palette file which is then imported into GIMP.

For the lettering I wanted some fresh fonts and found them at the League of Movable Type.

The TOC

The video now has chapters – you can jump to the TOC entries!

00:01:00 Finding a palette with Color Scheme Designer
00:04:58 Exporting the palette to GIMP
00:05:43 Find the directory for the palette
00:06:30 Using palettes in GIMP
00:08:20 Creating a new image template
00:09:45 Create a new image
00:10:28 Inserting the logo from a file
00:11:11 Setting guides to half and a third of the image
00:11:44 Move the logo with help of the guides
00:13:20 Free fonts from the League of Movable Type
00:14:10 Editing text in GIMP with the on canvas editor
00:16:24 A drop shadow for text
00:17:36 A drop shadow for the logo
00:18:55 Saving the image
00:19:28 Adding the CC-Logo – loading images from the web
00:20:35 Using layers for different versions of one text
00:27:16 Rapport – stacking layers exactly on top of each other
00:28:29 Moving a stack of “chained” layers
00:29:08 Can you help me with the design?
00:29:44 Outlook into the next episodes

Episode 185: The 52.02 €rror – Printing with Profiles

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Rolf

Download the Video! (36:50 73.4MB)
Download the companion file with my printer profiles! (3.9MB)

I gave myself a real photo printer for the 5th anniversary of “Meet the GIMP!” and have now my work-flow ready to print in the “right” colors. One reason I shied away from printing for years were the costs. Original Printer Ink is one of the most costly fluids that are traded commercially (1544.54€/l (1) is not the highest price you can pay) and good paper is expensive. But now I have found a combination of a good printer, which is subsidized by small and expensive ink tanks and a good second party ink for 1/6 of the price. The ink is pigment based and so doesn’t bleach out in the light so fast as dye inks. Added to that two good but cheap papers for making beginners mistakes.

Of course the colors are off when I print with the usual TurboPrint driver. TurboPrint knows neither ink nor papers. So I needed two printer profiles – one of them was already payed for with the ink starter set. Well, I had to buy two more profiles because I had made a big mistake while printing the test sheets. Take care to switch off all color correction while printing calibration charts.

With the right ICC profiles GIMP can give you a Soft Proof of the image that is going to be printed. The look of the printed image is simulated on the screen and you can adapt the image to get your best result.
All you need to know (and much more) about calibration and the different “intents” is at Cambridge in Colour and at the Idea Machine.

(1) It’s even worse than I said in the video. The ink cartridge holds 11ml and costs 16.99€ Epson list price. That’s 1544.54 per liter. farbenwerk C7 runs up to 275€/l in the set and 230€/l for the ink only. Quite a difference.

The TOC

00:20 Gimp Magazine had a great start
01:10 New printer
03:00 Replacement ink by farbenwerk.com
03:50 Pigment ink vs. dye ink
05:50 Arguments for refillable inks
06:30 Filling of cartridges
09:20 Paper from Monochrom.de
11:20 Paper color changes the image
11:50 How printing works
16:00 Printer profiling explained
17:00 Profiling done
21:30 Getting the profile into TurboPrint
23:50 Soft proofing in GIMP
24:30 Out of gamut colors
25:40 Display filter for soft proof
26:30 Printing a real image with profile and soft proof
27:30 Adapting to printable colors with curves
30:10 Difference between LCD and paper / display intent
31:00 Printing in TurboPrint
34:15 6 colors – all black (Carbon ink for monochrome 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.

Episode 184: Scraping the Web!

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Rolf

Download the Video! (14:04 28.0MB)
I found a new feature in GIMP, no idea how long it has been hidden in the files menue. One can import a whole web page in one image! Better than a screen shot, because you don’t need to scroll down. The web site of the GIMP Magazine results in an image of 1024×16037 pixels, quite an extreme portrait format. It doesn’t work with all sites and sometimes results in render errors. But it is a nice tool.

The GIMP Magazine will have it’s launch in some days on September 5, you should know this by now.

I helped a bit publishing a book, working as a Technical Reviewer. I got the drafts of all the chapters as a Libre Office File and worked through it, filling it up with nasty comments. So I can claim that I have read every word in Michael J. Hammel’s book “Artist’s Guide to GIMP, 2nd Edition” that I have on the lab bench in the second part of the video.
It is not a text book but a collection of small and medium sized projects. You learn by doing stuff.
Of course I am a little bit biased, got some money, fun and a box of books, but I would also have recommended the first edition of this book. And the second one is better!

The TOC

Not really needed here – the show starts with creating an image from a web site and switches over to the book review at 7:40. Nothing more in it.

Episode 182: A Special Day

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Rolf

5 Years of Meet the GIMP! Download the Video! (30:37 61.1MB)
Download the companion file! (65.5MB)
It’s a special day today, five years ago I rolled out the very first episode of “Meet the GIMP!”. And now it is #182, that’s 0.7 episodes per week. Update: An error corrected below and the comments are working again!

But the show starts with an other anniversary. Twenty years ago these days Tim Berners-Lee (still without a “Sir” in front of his name) published the first photo on the World Wide Web. Up to then it had spent it’s first year or so text only. The users and servers were somehow connected to the CERN particle collider near Geneva. What’s better to put on an image in a nerdy environment than a band? An all female High Energy Rock Band, Les Horribles Cernettes, of course. So a quick and dirty Photoshop (Version 1) hack (yes, web sites were that ugly once…) intended as a base for an in house CD publication found it’s way to the computer of Berners-Lee and history was on it’s way. There seems to be quite a dispute about this just now. Why can’t people keep proper records when they are making history?

Some epsiodes of Meet the GIMP! have found their way into an education program of the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai (Bombay). They dub them with Indian English and publish them on their server. The project Spoken Tutorial is a great way to reach out and broaden education. And of course I am proud that my material is used that way.

I love the Greyscale Icon Theme by Eckhard M. Jäger of the “Linux for Designers” blog. Keeping the active icon in color is a nice touch.

Ramon Miranda has updated his GIMP Paint Studio. This is a collection of brushes, patterns, gradients and more, bound together by presets and dynamic settings for tablet users. (If you don’t have a tablet, get one now!)

The GIMP Magazine is taking up steam. I have seen the drafts, they are nearly complete and get better all the time. Expect the first issue in early September.

And finally I process an image of a small part of the steam engine 01 1066, which I found in the Hamburg Main Station. The processing is nothing spectacular, just cropping, curves, a bit of burning and dodging. But this time I am printing the image on my brand new printer – an Epson 1500W. An Episode about printing is coming up, just now I am just playing around.

UPDATE I made a blunder here and switched the terms dodging and burning – I got the reminder of proper dark room culture from Saul Goode in the forum.

Burning is letting more light from the enlarger onto the paper (as I told in the show) but as it is a negative projected on light sensitive paper the image gets darker. So I burned the lower right edge of the image.

Dodging is keeping light away from the paper and so making that part lighter, no light at all would result in unchanged white. I dodged the rust on the fitting in the center of the image.

And here comes the twist. A “burned out sky” is white on the final image because it has been “burned out” the negative, resulting in solid black there. I haven’t been in the dark room lab for decades, perhaps I’ll try it again after the printing fever has gone old. (BTW, my new pigment ink and refillable replacement cartridges arrived today…. )

A very good demonstration of burning and dodging is done in the film War Photographer about James Nachtwey. Worth watching, even without interest in dark room technique.

A big thank you to all of you for the support in these five years!

The TOC

00:20 Les Horribles Cernettes
03:15 20 years of images in the net
03:50 Meet the GIMP is dubbed in Indian English by spokentutorials.org in Mumbai
06:20 5 years of Meet the GIMP!
07:00 Installing a grey icon theme
08:00 Where is your personal GIMP directory?
09:00 Gimp Paint Studio by Ramon Miranda
10:50 The presets give additional value
11:20 Dynamic settings
13:00 Dampflok 101066 in Hamburg Central Station
14:45 Opening and analyzing the image
16:20 Cropping for a print with a fixed aspect ratio
18:45 Make a backup layer
19:00 Curve tool to get black black
20:45 ~~Dodging~~ Burning with a layer and brush
22:50 ~~Burning~~ Dodging with a layer and brush
26:05 Sharpening
27:30 Saving the image
28:10 Printing is new for me
29:00 The GIMP Magazine is coming in September
29:55 5 Years – a summary.

Episode 181: 2.8, 2.9 and Counting!

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Rolf

Download the Video! (24:08 48.1MB)
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

Meet the GIMP!

Video tutorials for GIMP and other free graphics programs

Category Archives: Gimp video tutorial

Episode 192: Look Down! – A Challenge

The Rules

The TOC

Episode 191: PNG or JPG – The Big Fight

The TOC

Episode 189: Currywurst for Beginners

The TOC

Episode 188: The Book

The TOC

Episode 187: Cleaning Up

The TOC

Episode 186: A new Face!

The TOC

Episode 185: The 52.02 €rror – Printing with Profiles

The TOC

Episode 184: Scraping the Web!

The TOC

Episode 182: A Special Day

The TOC

Episode 181: 2.8, 2.9 and Counting!

The TOC

The Rules

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