Episodes
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Nearly all colour laser printers leave a pattern of tiny yellow dots all over the paper. These dots contain information about the printer and perhaps also about the time and date of the print, the IP of your computer and who knows what else. These codes are in there for at least a decade and the EFF has complained in vain. Reality Winner got cought with these dots – but perhaps they would have found out about her a bit later without them.
I have a laser printer in my office at school. What does it tell about me? I research that with help of GIMP 2.9 – which looks terrific and has a lot of nice new stuff on board.
And of course you get to see some of these new features. -
And here is the mythical Episode 200 - in a quite different form than planned. Years later, shabby audio and short. I am still on a steep conversion course with my workflow - and completely out of routine. Even the video is partly out of focus....
This Sunday (tomorrow!) is the Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.
In the video I demonstrate a quick and dirty way to convert an expensive digitial camera to a cheap quality pinhole camera. -
Missing episodes?
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G’MIC is a lot of things that do stuff with images. You have a stand alone program with a complete image manipulation and analysis programming language, an online service and a GIMP plugin that gives easy access to (nearly) the whole package. Don’t get G’MIC from other sources than their pages – the update cycle is so fast that package maintainers can’t keep up. The version recorded in the video is already outdated twice at the time of the publication.
G’MIC is mostly developed by Dr. David Tschumperlé of the GREYC, an institute at the University of Caen in France that is also part of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research). So definitely no hobbyist project.
I met David and his friend and colleague Jérôme – also a scientist AKA Dr. Jérôme Boulanger – at the LGM in Leipzig. Very nice guys! See Pat David’s wonderful blog post for more images and a report.
You can find information about G’MIC at their site in the very good and complete manual, at YouTUBE from G’MIC and David, at Pat David’s Blog and all over the Internets.
The second part of the video is a promotion for Ramón Miranda‘s very good training DVD “Muses”. It goes through the whole process of learning Krita – a graphics program under Linux and Windows, which is much better for painters than GIMP – up to finishing a real digital painting. You can buy the DVD at the Krita shop, 32.50€ is comparable to other kinds of such DVDs and the proceeds support the Krita Foundation.
I got this one for free – and I will give it away! If you want to have it, write a comment to this blog post before Episode 200 is published. Get your mail address right (it will only be visible to me) and mention that you want the DVD. After the deadline I’ll have some supposedly innocent children draw a winner.
The TOC
00:00:00 Start of video
00:01:10 Installing the G’MIC Plugin for GIMP
00:03:00 Installing and using G’MIC as a stand alone program
00:10:00 G’MIC Online service
00:10:40 Using the G’MIC GIMP Plugin
00:13:40 Pencil Drawing emulation as an example
00:18:10 Film emulations and grain as an example
00:25:15 Spectral filters – Fourrier included
00:26:20 Plotting Graphs with G’MIC
00:26:50 Conclusion
00:29:20 Ramon Miranda’s Krita tutorial DVD
00:33:10 EOF -
“darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.”
I cant say it better than this bit from their page.
I had tested darktable in 2010 and found it promising – but stayed with f-spot and later Shotwell. But now I’ll switch to darktable.
These 42 minutes are a rigorously cut down version of my nearly 2 hours long walk through darktable – I was distracted so much by the endless modules and possibilities that I forgot the time. This will not be my last darktable video, I’ll try to focus a bit more on usable stuff in them. ;-) -
In this video I try to change history and put myself in an old image of the first electronic computer, the ENIAC.
The original image is an US ARMY Photo under Public Domain, downloaded from Wikimedia.
As this is intended to be the base for a class project, I don’t go into the depth of GIMP but try to cover a lot of ground on a beginners level. And of course I make some mistakes….. -
Colo(u)r ist the topic this time. You are in for a ride from the electromagnetic spectrum to the biology of color vision and the infamous Mantis Shrimp. (Link to the fabulous Oatmeal!)
Grassmann’s Law gives a clue how to create a color sensation in the brain by mixing up some wavelengths out of the spectrum. The CIE finally defines what is visible for a “Standard Observer” and Microsoft & HP (sRGB) and Adobe (Adobe RGB) build their color spaces on that foundation.
Elle Stone, Bruce Lindbloom and Cambridge in Colour help along the way, passing a Black Body emitting radiation according to Planck’s Law at 6500K just to give us a White Point.
Then I organize a shootout between sRGB and Adobe RGB – and I’ll stick to sRGB for the forseeable future.
Finally I cover the question of Intent while converting between different color spaces – Perceptual or Relative Colorimetric? -
This week nachbarnebenan shows how to use the KDE (and Windows) photo organizer digiKam. There is more to it, a second part will follow. I don’t know much about digiKam because I use Gnome Shell as my desktop environment and digiKam is made for KDE. It would run on my system, but I would have to install a lot of other stuff too. Linux users have a lot of desktop environments to choose from.
nachbarnebenan talks also about his 100 day photo challenge and has some valuable tips if you are up to a similar thing. He is also responsible for a lot of the content of the Meet the GIMP Wiki. -
After a too long summer break I give you a preview of one feature in the next version of GIMP – the unified transformation tool. It combines the tools for moving, rotating, scaling, shearing and for changing the perspective in one tool with a nice and sleek user interface.
The UI design has been done mostly by Peter Sikking. He has also had his hands in the nice free selection tool design.
This unified transformation tool shall be used with visual feedback on the canvas. The old tool will stay around for work where numbers are important. So this is not a replacement but an addition.
You can read a bit more in the developers mailing list and on the GUI wiki page. -
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.
Rolf's Example
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 -
I went to the Libre Graphics Meeting 2014 in Leipzig to get either a boost for my motivation or to find an end for this project. It turned out to be a booster.
It was a really good time – even with missing the first day and the (for me) most interesting talks because I had to work that day. Another day was spent at the Zoo with Pat David and his wife, more time in the coffee room, Milchbars and restaurants. All the time having good conversations and learning a lot.
And then I got the honors of shooting the traditional group image. I assume it was not my track record of famous group pictures but the 36 megapixel resolution of my D800 that led to that decision.
In this episode I cover the post processing of the image and how I blended my previously taken image into the group.
The TOC
00:00:00 Intro
00:01:14 The LGM Group Photo
00:04:05 Rotating the image
00:06:05 Adjusting contrast and brightness with the curves tool
00:09:23 Getting myself into the image
00:10:54 Registering the layers
00:14:38 Merging with a layer mask
00:17:55 Ways to change the brush size
00:18:50 Cleaning up the layer mask
00:20:38 Curves adjustments on a selection
00:24:28 Cropping the image
00:25:58 Sampling a fill colour out of the image
00:27:14 Sharpening with wavelets
00:31:12 Adding the SVG logo
00:34:04 Scaling down and exporting
00:36:38 Good bye!
00:37:06 EOF -
The last episode was for absolute beginners, this one is for Geeks. I try to explain (and understand on the way) how images are stored in PNG and JPEG files. PNG (pronounced “PING”) does this lossless, the image can be retrieved in the same quality as the original. PNG works wonders with graphics with a lot of lines and clear colour areas, comics and logos for example, but it creates monster files out of photos and similar images. JPEG looses details, aquires artefacts and generally mangles the image. But it has so beautifully small files and the losses are in most cases invisible – except in the area where PNG is good. So both have their niche to live in.
How is this done? I try to explain this without the math, using analogies, plaing with GIMP to reenact some stages and reducing the complexity a lot. If you want to know the exact facts, read up in Wikipedia, which was also my source of information, or look for other sources. I hope that I never crossed the border between simplification and telling wrong stuff – but I am really not sure. The math is really over my head, last time I had to tackle such a level a Pentax ME Super was still a new camera model. I am happy about any comments that improve my understanding – and all other comments too. -
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 . -
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 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. -
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 -
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) -
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.
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 https://meetthegimp.org. -
In the last episode was a short segment about the brush dynamics in Ramon Miranda’s GIMP Paint Studio. I wanted to read up a bit about this, but the GIMP documentation hasn’t held step with the development here.
So this video shows my exploration of the brush dynamics control. The possibilities are limitless, it seems.
The show starts with another GIMP theme by samj and a big misunderstanding. You can find everything about it at Gimp Chat. -
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. ;-)
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.
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 with a layer and brush
22:50 Burning 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 aCreative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://meetthegimp.org. -
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 - Show more
