Category Archives: Other OS software

Episode 182: A Special Day

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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.

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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Download the Video! (23:24 46.4MB)

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.

Episode 176: Double Photivo

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Download the Video! (34:04 67.9MB)
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.

Episode 175: Polygonal Blob

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Download the Video! (20:10 40.0MB)
After a visit to Libre Graphics World with a report about the state of GIMP 2.8 and a look into the future.

I tackle a question I was asked at the 28c3. Is there a way to draw geometric figures in GIMP? Well, I found three.

The selection tools provide a variety of ways to make a geometric selection which later can be stroked or filled with a colour or pattern. The paths tool can be handy too, I didn’t cover it in this show.

The Gfig plugin allows the construction and editing of such figures, but there are a lot of drawbacks and some risk of fatal crashes.

And finally – is GIMP the right tool? Why not take Inkscape, dabble a bit and export the result to GIMP? Inkscape is easy to use for simple tasks – they have a really good user interface. For more complicated stuff there are the tutorials at screencasters.com. Long time no show there, but perhaps Richard and heathenx can be pestered into making some more. They haven’t given up but gone into hibernation a bit.

And if you are in or around Toronto – Steve Czajka is holding an interesting course there.

The TOC

00:40 State of GIMP 2.8 – http://libregraphicsworld.org/
01:55 28c3 in Berlin
02:30 Drawing geometric figures – a missing feature?
03:30 Select and stroke
03:35 Rectangle, Ellipse and Free Hand selection tool
04:15 Help from Guides and the Grid
05:00 Stroke
05:50 Combining selections
06:20 Subtracting selections
07:10 gfig plugin
07:30 Lines,rectangles, circles, arcs, polygons, stars and more
08:10 Limits and drawbacks
09:00 Editing
11:00 CRASH!!!!
11:30 Don’t use GIMP! Use Inkscape!
15:30 Getting the work back to GIMP.
16:00 Making a colour transparent
17:00 Choose the right tool
18:00 Version control for GIMP – not yet

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 167: Exporting Grumpy Bears

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Download the Video! (14:25 27.5MB)
Download the torrent file! (Now available)
Download the companion file!(5.1 MB)

This Blog needed a header image – and it still needs a lot of header images to rotate through. So I created one out of an image of a Berlin Subway station. Nothing much new in here – rotating, cropping to the needed aspect ratio, a bit of curves for better contrast and colours, scaling and sharpening. Finally I added a text layer with the image credits.

If you want your image on top of the blog – make one (1000 × 288 pixels) and send it to me at info@meetthegimp.org!

But before that I took a little excursion into Shotwell again and explored the Flickr export function. On the day of the last show, Shotwell released a new version. So it’s no need to compile the trunk code – just download the full package.

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 166: Shotwell revisited

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Download the Video! (10:22 19.8MB)
Download the torrent file!

Just a short show about the newest version of Shotwell (0.11.1+trunk of September 19, 2011). They got hierarchical tags implemented – the only feature I really missed in comparison to F-Spot.

The features list (which I simply stole from their site…. )

  • Tags can now be organized into hierarchical trees
  • Paired RAW + JPEG images are treated as a single photo when imported from a camera
  • Select different developers for RAW photos: use the development produced by Shotwell or by your camera
  • Shotwell now uses GSettings instead of GConf to store its configuration information
  • “Hide Photos Already Imported” setting persists between imports
  • Several all-new saved search options
  • JPEG mimics of RAW images are no longer stored in your home directory, and are now created on demand
  • Shotwell now supports Windows Bitmap (.bmp) images

Try their precompiled packages or roll your own.

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 160: Photivo

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Download the Video! (22:16 42.3 MB)
Download the mobile version (22:16 21.6 MB)
Download the companion file! (13.0 MB)
Download the torrent file!

Let’s quote the website:

About Photivo

Photivo is a free and open source (GPL3) photo processor. It handles your RAW files as well as your bitmap files in a non-destructive 16 bit processing pipe with gimp workflow integration and batch mode.

Photivo tries to provide the best algorithms available; even if this implies some redundancy. So, to my knowledge, it offers the most flexible and powerful denoise, sharpen and local contrast (fake HDR) algorithms in the open source world. (If not, let’s port them ;-) ) Although, to get the desired results, there may be a quite steep learning curve ;-) .

Photivo is just a developer, no manager and no “Gimp”. It is intended to be used in a workflow together with digiKam/F-Spot/Shotwell and Gimp. It needs a quite strong computer and is not aimed at beginners.

Processed with Photivo

Basically it’s an image processing assembly line. You set the parameters, throw your RAW file in on top, wait for a moment and catch your image when it falls out of the machine.

Today I give it a try and rescue an image of a kite with it. It’s an impressive tool with a quite unique but understandable user interface. I’ll explore this further, perhaps it will enter my workflow.

The companion file contains both used RAW files and all the setting files created by Photivo.

Sorry, there is no TOC up to now.

Kite

JPEG out of camera

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.

New Darktable Screencasts and a Release

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Over at Pascals’s site are new screencasts about the basics of using Darktable. And they have a new release, 0.7.1. Has it become a bit faster? ;-)

How to modify the F-Spot database

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On my new Linux installation I wanted to have all my images in one folder. Due to some mishaps F-Spot had stored the images in three different locations. I looked a bit around and then found a forum post which described an easy way to do this.

Find your photos.db database. It’s usually in ./config/f-spot/. Then use sqlite3 to extract the information into a text file:

sqlite3 ~/.config/f-spot/photos.db .dump > f-spot.dump

If you stare wondering at a “bash: sqlite3: command not found”, just install the package “sqlite3-tools”.

Now open this file in your text editor (not word processor…..) of choice. You’ll see a lot of lines, among them images with paths. Just change these paths with search and replace to the new scheme.

INSERT INTO "photos" VALUES(4243,1243489564,'file:///home/rs/Pictures/Photos/2009/05/28/','RLF_9743.JPG','Rolf Steinort rolf.steinort@gmail.com',38,1,0);

Take care to only change the paths, don’t delete or change any of the other stuff. It can break everything. ;-)

Now make a backup of your database and import the changed data back into the database.


mv ~/.config/f-spot/photos.db photos.db.backup
sqlite3 ~/.config/f-spot/photos.db < f-spot.dump

This is only working when no database is there, so make the backup! If you run into an error, delete the new database.

Of course you should only start F-Spot again if you are sure that all the files have reached their new destinations safely.

Other news: Shotwell imports F-Spot data and images without problems. And #150 has been recorded the third time and is just in the rendering tool chain. I'll know about the result in some moments.