Meet the GIMP

Episode 191: PNG or JPG – The Big Fight

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue May 24 2012 22:00:00 +0000

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

Episode 190: JPEG and PNG, what’s in it?

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue Apr 09 2013 22:00:00 +0000

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.

Episode 189: Currywurst for Beginners

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Wed Mar 27 2013 22:00:00 +0000

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 .

Episode 188: The Book

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sun Mar 17 2013 15:00:00 +0000

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. ;-)

Episode 187: Cleaning Up

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue Feb 26 2013 23:00:00 +0000

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.

Episode 186: A new Face!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue Feb 12 2013 19:00:00 +0000

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

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri Sep 21 2012 18:00:00 +0000

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)

Episode 184: Scraping the Web!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Aug 30 2012 17:00:00 +0000

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 http://meetthegimp.org.

Episode 183: Dynamics!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sun, Aug 05 2012 10:00:00 +0000

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.

Episode 182: A Special Day

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Jul 24 2012 00:01:00 +0000

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 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 181: 2.8, 2.9 and Counting!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sun, May 13 2012 19:00:00 +0000

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. 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

Episode 180: Not for Grown Ups!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sat, Apr 28 2012 14:30:00 +0000

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

Episode 179: Corners and Edges

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sun, Mar 18 2012 23:30:00 +0000

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.

Episode 178: Lurking in the Shadow

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sat, Mar 10 2012 23:30:00 +0000

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.

Episode 177: Take 2 and GIMP!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Feb 21 2012 20:00:00 +0000

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 – there is 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.

Episode 176: Double Photivo

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sat, Feb 11 2012 19:00:00 +0000

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.

Episode 175: Polygonal Blob

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sat, Jan 28 2012 14:00:00 +0000

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 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 174: Wilber in a Can

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Dec 24 2011 19:00:00 +0000

To get something festive to drink over the holidays I have ordered a special MTG-Beer from a brewery. It’s finest Pils in a can with Wilber on it! (Why a can and not a bottle – there is no “Make a Bottle Filter” in GIMP.) In this episode I explore the Map to Object filter. It can render an image on a plane, a box, a sphere and a cylinder. The default dimensions of the cylinder are that of a beer can. Quite significant insight into the world of programmers. (BTW, the box preset is a cube, not a pizza box…..) The image used in the show is stolen from Steve Czajka. But before that is a look back onto the last show. Saul Goode shows a much easier way to generate patterns with the clipboard and I explain how I got the dots of different sizes in the blog image. For all of you a happy holiday! I hope to be back still in this year, so I’ll keep the new year wishes for later. As a distraction the 28c3 is coming up 10 minutes away from my home. I got no tickets but hope to get in there at night and watch some stream on the day. The TOC 00:30 The Clipboard is a Pattern! 03:45 Create a Layer from a Brush 05:00 Pull things around on the UI 05:10 Pattern with variable dot size 06:55 Gimpressionist – to be explored later 07:10 Steve Czajka’s Calligraphy 08:00 “Map to Object” Filter: Plane, Box, Spere and Cylinder 10:50 Light in the Map to Object filter 11:50 Material in the Map to Object filter 14:30 again Light in the Map to Object filter 17:20 Making a second copy of an image by pulling it on the tool box 18:00 Adding a border to the top and bottom

Episode 173: Lots of Dots

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Dec 13 2011 22:00:00 +0000

Meet the GIMP is on Youtube! Mike AKA Eppic has started this channel and is uploading all the old episodes. Thank You! I need some dot patterns for a project with Moiré. And so this episode is deveted to building dot patterns out of a grid without grid lines. Misterious? Have a look at the video! The video ends a bit abrupt. Cinelerra went on strike with the last part of the footage. So some stuff is left as an exercise for you! The TOC 00:20 We are on YouTube! 01:00 The Importance of Dots 02:00 The Grid filter makes crosses 03:00 Blurr and Threshold to make circles 04:25 Colour to Alpha making white transparent 04:55 Patterns for the Bucket Fill 05:50 Measurements in the pattern 06:25 Cropping 07:00 Saving as .pat 08:45 Cropping again same but different 10:00 Moiree demo 11:00 Getting smaller dots 11:15 No Threshold Tool on transparency 11:20 Curves tool on Alpha Channel 13:30 Cinelerra on strike

Episode 172: Chasing Ducks

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sat, Dec 3 2011 15:00:00 +0000

In this show I explore the Color Balance tool to get the right mood into an image shot just after sunrise. These sliders push the colors around in the RGB color space. But how to push? Then I compare the Curves and Levels tool and give both o them a shot at the image. Both results are fine on some parts of the image – just combine the two parts with a layer mask. An finally cloning out a disturbing sign at the edge of the canal. After the recording I decided to do a crop of the image. You can see it on 23 and on flickr. The TOC 00:20 Greetings 01:10 Morning at the Teltow Canal 01:50 Level or not? Measurement and perception 03:50 Mixed lighting by the morning sky 04:15 Colour sample points 06:10 Colour balance tool 12:30 Remove Colour sample points 13:15 Levels or Curves tool? 13:30 Curves applied 15:00 Curves explained 16:10 Levels applied 18:20 Levels explained 20:00 Layer mask for combining the images 22:45 Cloning out a sign 24:30 Good bye

Episode 171: Nightmare Staircase

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sat, Nov 19 2011 16:00:00 +0000

While proofreading a new GIMP book as a “technical reviewer” I came across an interesting deviation of the presented recipe. Making a nightmarish effect. It’s really easy, very flexible and you can learn a lot about some layer modes while playing around. The original image is from my new Android phone, the quality is really good. So much progress in the last years. You can find it in the companion file and at Google+. ISO 1250, on a phone….. Sorry, no TOC up to now….

Episode 170: Set the Presets!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort)

A nice feature crept into GIMP 2.7 under my Radar – presets for the tools in the toolbox. You can store all the settings, give them a name and recall them later. I show how to make some for rotating an image and cropping in different aspect ratios. GIMP 2.7 includes also a system for tagging brushes. A combination of tags and presets allows a big but manageable collection of special brushes. This needs further exploring. Then I have to brag about the low light capabilities my new X100 – ISO 2000 and nearly no noise. There is no torrent file for the moment, because we still have to resolve these tracker issues. And beware of the companion file – I think it is only useful for you if you want to tinker with the RAW file or check out an image out of a X100. The TOC 00:30 GIMP Version numbers 02:00 Saving presets with the rotate tool 03:40 Presets for different crop settings 05:35 The Preset dockable dialogue 05:55 Prests for the text tool 07:30 Using preset tools 08:25 Curves tool – low S-curve 10:00 Bragging about the X100 in low light

Episode 169: Garamond

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Oct 14 2011 21:00:00 +0000

And again a reference to Show #167. Pascal wrote in a comment that he didn’t like the font I used and pointed me to a nice free font called EBGaramond. This episode is about getting and using the font. The font goes back into the 16th century. Claude Garamond was a famous typesetter and publisher in Paris. He invented the apostrophe and designed a typeface that is still around. A lot of font designers have derived their fonts from his work. You can be sure to find a Garamond typeface in every word processor font package. Fonts are highly copyrighted and so Georg Duffner and his helpers went to the original source to cut a new, free version of a Garamond. A cursive font is under development too. The font development is done with Font Forge.Just a short look at that program will convince you that type design is a serious business. In the video I show how to install a font and how to use the new text tool in GIMP 2.7 with the on canvas editing.

Episode 168: ZOOMING IN!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri, Oct 7 2011 12:00:00 +0000

The blog post image of the last episode was “recursive”, the image contained the image in it which contained the image in …… Bert wondered how I did it – and here is the video about it. For this blog post I decided to make a much more annoying recursive image – an animation. (Click on the image for a really annoying version ) To do this was way more complicated than I had anticipated before. Details inside. GAP (GIMP Animation Package) would have made the stuff a lot easier, I assume. If you want your image on top of the blog – make one (1000 × 288 pixels) and send it to me at info@meetthegimp.org! A big Thank You! goes out to the guys from the Białostocka Grupa Użytkowników Linuksa, who are donating the server for the Meet the GIMP video files. The TOC 00:30 Header images 01:40 Making a recursive image 02:55 Start with a screenshot 03:30 Screenshot with GIMP 04:40 Copy the layer and scale down 06:00 repeat until enough.... 08:20 Scaling down 09:15 Animate it - with a plan 12:00 Making layer copies 12:45 Scaling the layers 14:00 Aligning the layers 14:15 Measuring 15:00 Making a grid for adjustments 16:15 Really aligning the layers 18:10 Cropping away the invible parts of the layers 18:45 Scaling down 19:00 Setting the image mode to indexed 19:15 Optimizing for GIF animation 20:00 Exporting as GIF 20:10 Thank you to "Białostocka Grupa Użytkowników Linuksa" http://bgul.org/

Episode 167: Exporting Grumpy Bears

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Wed, Sep 28 2011 20:00:00 +0000

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 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.

Episode 166: Shotwell revisited

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Sep 20 2011 19:00:00 +0000

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.

Episode 165: Vertigo

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Aug 8 2011 13:00:00 +0000

You’ll get a bit dizzy this time. Nachbarnebenan is showing how to make a vertigo effect. But before that I show off the results of a spending spree and have a link to a great video tutorial by Steve Czajka. He combines GIMP, Inkscape and Calligraphy into one well designed learning package. I hope there will be more! (If you can’t see the videos on his site – my Chromium shows just black fields, Firefox is working, try his Youtube Channel.) And now a bit of Vertigo. Watch for the scenes where our Hero looks down the staircase. I have a bit of height anxiety and this scene scared me like nothing else the first time I saw this film.To get this on film you need a camera with zoom lens, a dolly (that’s the tripod on rails) and a perfect coordination of focal length, dolly position, focal distance and aperture. Mr. Hitchcock had it perfect. Doing it with a still camera needs only the zoom lens, two shots and some layer magic.

Episode 164: High Pass Sharpening

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri, Jul 29 2011 16:00:00 +0000

Sharpening is a part of nearly every image processing. Selective sharpening allows to sharpen the important structures without to “enhance” the noise in the image. Already in Episode 6 I have shown a way to do this. And here is another way, High Pass Sharpening. It is often used in Photoshop tutorials and has no standard entry in the GIMP menus. One step involves blurring – and this leads to a lot of different possibilities to change the effect. I explore asymmetric sharpening by blurring only into one direction. Of course there are plugins available at the GIMP plugin registry. A description of several sharpening methods is in our Wiki, I’ll add the high pass method today. I got the recipe for this from a (very good) German book by Jürgen Wolf. The TOC 01:48 Good German book: Jürgen Wolf, GIMP 2.6 02:00 GIMP 2.8 release late in 2011! 02:20 Preparing the image 02:40 Rotate 03:30 Crop 04:10 Contrast, black point and white point adjustment with the curves tool 05:30 The recipe for Highpass Sharpening 05:40 Duplicate the layer twice 05:50 Invert the colours 06:00 Set layer mode to Grain Merge 06:10 Blurring 07:00 Merge the top layer down and set the layer mode to Overlay 07:50 Adjusting the effect with the opacity of the sharpening layer 08:00 Sharpening in only one direction 09:50 What is Grain Merge doing? 11:00 How does this work? 14:50 Scripts at the http://registry.gimp.org 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 163: Colour Curves

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Wed, Jul 20 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Years ago I bought a used Peleng Fisheye and never used it much. So I took it for a walk and shot some scenes here in Berlin. At the top is an image of the famous TV tower at the Alexanderplatz. After a bit of ramblings about Fisheye lenses I process a shot from a hall in the subway station below the Alexanderplatz. There I use the curve tool to get the colours "right". Not "right" as in "true to reality" but as in "the right atmosphere". Tweaking the red, green and blue colour channels can change an image quite a lot. Never stack curve operations - do it in one step. A little experiment shows the result of not following that advice. A nice recall feature in the curves dialog allows it to reload the last curves. In case of an error just Undo and tweak your curve. I am absolutely not sure how to sharpen the image. Help me in the forum! The TOC 00:30 Peleng Fisheye Lens 05:00 Image loaded in GIMP 05:10 Rotating and cropping 06:15 GIMP 2.7.3 remebers the window settings! 06:30 Rotate tool in corrective mode 07:42 Inside out crop 09:20 Copy the layer for backup 09:30 Contrast correction with the curves tool 10:20 A click to early 10:30 Curve operations are stored - easily redone 10:50 RGB colour channels 11:00 Reducing a red colour cast 12:00 Undo changes - not with "Reset" 12:20 Change blue and green in the shadows 14:00 Experiment: One curve operation vs. a series of 16:00 Sharpening the image 17:00 Saving the image 17:30 The Meet the GIMP Forum 18:50 The End

Episode 162: Rubber Stamped!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sun, Jul 10 2011 12:00:00 +0000

BTW, I am back. In this video I’ll review the “GIMP 2.6 Cookbook” by Juan Manuel Ferreyra. It is available as e-book and “dead tree edition”. The book is filled with dozens of easy to follow recipes (with a few glitches in them), covering creating graphics, working on photos and doing stuff for web design. There is not much background information in there, you have to be the right learning type to enjoy it. (I got a free e-book for review.) To test the book I “cooked” the recipe for making a rubber stamp. It worked out quite well. On the way I found a filter that I had never seen before. Finally I show how much the print dialogue in GIMP 2.7 has improved since 2.6. A lot of usability thoughts have gone in there. The video filesize is too large – I am working on shrinking i further. But I wanted to get the show out.

Episode 161: Playing with Wavelets

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, May 22 2011 19:00:00 +0000

The human skin isn’t as smooth and even as it used to be. At least if you are older than 12 or so. One way to keep up the illusion of eternal youth is image manipulation. Today I explore one way to smooth skin and keep it looking natural. That’s the problem with overly done make up and postprocessing – if you overdo it, faces look like made out of plastic. There is a difference in size between “good” and “bad” skin structures. The Wavelet Decompose plugin can divide an image into “scales” and a “residual”. Each scale contains a part of the image with structures of a similar size. If you work on one of these scales, you are changing only these structures, not the smaller and larger ones. The plugin website does a better job of explaining this. The show starts with a look back at Photivo and some comments I got in their Flickr group. “What’s wrong with some people?” – Well, some people haven’t read the Nettiquette…… The TOC 00:20 Photivo revisited 01:25 GUI setup of Photivo 03:00 Right mouse button everywhere! 03:00 Detail curve depending on colour 05:20 Portrait “Make up” 06:40 Smoothing skin with Gaussian Blur 07:40 Masking out the eyes of the blur 08:20 Wavelet decompose 09:35 Plugin registry 11:35 Decomposing the image 13:20 A lot of ways to proceed 14:00 Painting with gray to hide details 14:40 Changing the opacity of some of the scales 15:15 Adding a layer mask 17:00 Looking at the scales in normal mode 17:25 Increasing contrast with a curve … 18:50 …sharpens the image 19:00 There is much more!

Episode 160: Photivo

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, May 11 2011 23:00:00 +0000

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.

Episode 159: EMERGENCY!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Mar 16 2011 19:00:00 +0000

No, no real emergency here, just an emergency switch in a Berlin subway station. It needed some attention concerning colour and contrast to get it a bit more creepy. I go through the whole image processing with cropping and changing the colours in several layers. Nothing new technically, but the basics about layer masks explained again. The TOC 00:20 Hi! And some comments about the state of this project. 03:25 Cropping inside out 07:50 Automatic white balance 08:40 Adding a layer group 09:50 Curves to make weird colours 11:25 A second layer for colour adjustments 12:10 Generating a layer mask out of a colour channel and basic use of layer masks 20:05 More strange colours with the curves tool colour channels 22:00 New layer, same layer mask 23:50 Adjusting colours again with the curves tool … 25:20 .. but the threshold tool is better here 27:10 Add red to the writing 29:00 Clearing up

Episode 158: Three kinds of Particles

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Mar 16 2011 19:00:00 +0000

There was a question left open in the last show: How to create a random pattern of particles that follow a gradient in density. I got three answers. One from Benton – just use a brush with absurdly high jitter. Then I got the help that I asked for from Philippe and finally thought about a way myself. I started with Philippe’s tutorial for making a starfield with HSV-noise .

Episode 157: Floating in the Air

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri, Mar 4 2011 19:00:00 +0000

I am doing some homework for school this time. Getting a balloon up into the air and making air molecules visible. All with GIMP. Take that - Photoshop! ;-) We have a new interactive white board at school. And I try to make a series of images of a balloon for a physics lesson. I am using layers, paths, selections and more – a lot of stuff for some simple drawings. Philippe could have done this better, I fear. ;-)

Episode 156: Chandra

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sun, Feb 13 2011 18:00:00 +0000

This time we are off into space, but still sitting in front of the monitor. I take X-Ray data from the Chandra Satellite and make a false colour image out of them. All I needed to know for that (and much much more) is on their album page. The files I have used and the tutorial I was inspired by are also on the Chandra website. While I was editing this show I thought about some different ways to process such an image. Feel free to comment if you also find something better. I’ll update this posting during the week. All images used in this posting and the video are made by NASA/CXC/SAO . The TOC 00:30 Chandra 0?:?? Electromagnetic spectrum 05:10 Data visualisation 09:38 FITS file format 10:30 Getting the data and opening the data files in GIMP as layers 13:00 Setting the image mode to RGB 13:20 Curves tool for adjusting the contrast in the layers 17:00 Smoothing with Gaussian Blur 18:30 Choosing colours from the colour wheel 19:30 Colorize tool 21:40 Changing the opacity of the layers 22:30 Duplicate a layer for enhancing it’s effect 23:00 Hue explained 23:40 Colorize Tool 24:40 Layer modes

Episode 155: Favicon

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Jan 26 2011 18:00:00 +0000

Just a short (itâ€™s grading hellâ€¦.) episode about the little icons in your browser window and the bookmarks. It was a Microsoftâ„¢ invention (yes, they invented something ;-) ) and so the most compatible file format is the Windowsâ„¢ icon .ico file. The TOC 00:40 Favicons 01:50 Getting a favicon file into GIMP 02:45 Image properties dialogue 04:20 Adding transparency 05:02 Looking at the work of others 06:50 How to 3D 08:20 Exporting to .ico

Episode 154: Compile!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Jan 11 2011 17:00:00 +0000

This episode is mostly about Linux and competition. We look at our challenge and the winning image and we have a look at the challenge at gimpusers.com. There you have to design a new splash screen for GIMP. I mention Linux Outlaws who ranted about Ubuntu and were quite right on the points I would make too. I tried PCLinuxOS, liked it and am now trying Debian Squeeze, the old fashioned Linux Dinosaur. Quite lively for such a beast. On this Debian installation I try (successfully :-) ) to compile and install GIMP 2.7.2 from the current sources. It is a single user installation, a recipe for a system wide installation can be found in the wiki. The wiki page I created in the video has been moved already in the wiki to the right location.

Episode 153: Brocade

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sun, Jan 5 2011 19:00:00 +0000

Again a trip to Thailand with a wonderful candid shot at a school festival by Peter. There is not much to enhance, just a crop, a bit of curves and the mutation of a blue trash bag into a gray one. Before that I talk about bracketing and “dedicated” vs. “drive by” photography. And I present the next addition to our poor webserver – a Wiki for the collected wisdom of you all. Link sits in the menu box on the top of the right sidebar. Give it a try – reading and writing.

Episode 152: Meditations about too much Light

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sun, Dec 5 2010 16:00:00 +0000

In March I got some images from Peter in Thailand. He lives there in a country full of photogenic sites and has often only the time to take a quick shot with his P&S camera without being able to work around some of the obstacles. Specially for the show he made some with the typical problems. In this case it is to much light – or better, too much dynamic range. The difference between tropical sun and deep shadows in this temple is too big. The blown out areas are not repairable, all the information is lost. I try to get more of the temple mood into the image (forget that I have not been there…….) by turning the overexposure into a glow on top of the Buddhas. If you can’t get rid of it, try more of it. ;-) A special “curtain vignette” improves the image a bit further. Of course one can take the puristic stand and say “Don’t rescue an image, do your photography properly!”. But often you’ll have no image then. Some things can be done in a hurry too: underexpose in such a situation. You’ll loose details in the shadows but gain them in the light. A good trade off in most cases. Be familiar with that button on the camera. The show starts with a look at the level in the donations hat, which is quite high after one and a half week. To get the concept of DONATE FOR MEET THE GIMP! even further into your heads I show how I made the gauge with Wilber slowly filling up. Wolfram Alpha is used to calculate the day of the death of the server. Then I get a bit into setting up the toolbox in GIMP 2.7 and show how to manage the docks after the “landing zones” have become invisible. And of course there is the challenge!

Episode 151: #150 reloaded!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Nov 24 2010 18:00:00 +0000

This week I am solving last weeks problem with a layer group. In #150 I painted over the saturation information without looking at the original data. This time I use Mathias’ method with a layer group. Layer groups are a cool new feature of GIMP 2.7. The work is not yet finished, but they are already usable. 2.7 is “mostly stable” now, you should consider the switch. And I put again the hat on the street to collect money for the server costs for 2011. See the right sidebar for details.

Episode 150: Saturate!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Oct 16 2010 22:00:00 +0000

Finally a new episode – I never had one with more obstacles! But here ist is. (And now I even have no time for a proper blog post, because I am going on a class trip tomorrow.) I explore two new features of GIMP 2.7.2 – I a amazed at the progress. Then I adapt the often used (and often showed here) technique of dodging and burning with a layer mask to fiddeling with the saturation of an image. I don’t recall to have seen this described anywhere – but I am sure I am not the first one to use this. Has someone a link?

Episode 149: Lens Flares Ahead!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Thu, Oct 14 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Every time you have a bright light shining into your lens you get a lens flare. This can look nice or horrible. You can avoid much of it with a lens hood – and with paying more money for better coated lenses. But when you have these nasty spots on the image – there are ways in GIMP to heal them. Some are discussed in the forum thread where I also got the image for this show. My preferred way to tackle a problem is to understand the source of it. Solving the problem is often much easier then. (This is the theory, often I just poke around…..;-) ) So I start with a bit of backboard – showing that a lens flare is only added light, The original image leis below and the flare can be (in theory) substracted from it. In GIMP I do this with comparing similar coulours in and outside of the flare. A bit of layer magic and the flare is gone. Except for the fringe where my patience ran out. The TOC 00:20 Greetings, Flattr 01:45 Lens flares 02:20 Origin of lens flares 12:10 Avoid lens flare with a lens hood and lens coating 13:05 “Digital” lenses 14:20 Solution: substract light 16:00 Curves to correct the contrast 19:45 Substracting light from the flare 19:45 How much light was added in the flare? 22:00 Sample points 23:05 Docking a dialogue 23:30 Mixing the correction colour 27:25 Correcting the second flare 33:00 Recap 35:15 A quick crop 36:30 Why layers?

Episode 148: A Shot at Shotwell

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Oct 05 2010 23:00:00 +0000

With Ubuntu 10.10 coming up there will be a change in the standard photo managing program. It will change from F-Spot to Shotwell. I installed the release candidate of Ubuntu in a virtual machine and gave Shotwell a try. Not bad, really not bad. :-) I assume there will be more to Shotwell here soon, this was really my very first impression of the current version. The experience with the version in Ubuntu 10.4 was quite, ehm, underwhelming. But they did a lot for the new one. I had not much time to do this show, so there are some editing gaffes and no TOC.

Episode 147: The Looming Tower

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sun, Sep 26 2010 17:00:00 +0000

I took an image of the Czech embassy here in Berlin from an angle where it looked really oppressing and alien. And in this episode I try to make the image much more oppressing and alien. After finding a suitable crop I try two ways to achieve this. Changing the overall contrast and the colours with the curves tool and then a monochrome version with the GEGL filter c2g. All images used are in the companion file. If you look at the image at the right and compare it to the original you’ll miss the pattern in the left window. It’s a moire effect that I saw in the zoomed out image on my screen. I kept it in the image by downscaling it in “linear” mode and not with one of the fancier ones that one would use by standard. In the beginning I talked about the need for a poster for the courses of the Aurora ARTWorks. I’ll post more about this in the following week.

Episode 146: Ripping Apart a PDF

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Thu, Sep 16 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Sorry, the first minute or so of the video has very bad sound. It gets better then! This week I rip apart a PDF based photography magazine using GIMP. GIMP can load a PDF and use the pages as layers or single images. You can then “steal” the content or modify it. I took Paul Wellner Bou‘s new magazine “Lighted Moments” and extracted a series of images from it. I want to use these images in a promo video for the magazine – where I plan to submit some pictures. For using portrait oriented images in a landscape format video I had to get the aspect ratio right, so I had to change the canvas size and add new background. One image needed to be combined out of two pages. Due to an error by me I also had to explain the difference between changing the canvas size and scaling the image content.

Episode 145: Pictures at an Exhibition

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Thu, Sep 09 2010 20:00:00 +0000

Here I am again, but now from Berlin! In this episode I visit an exhibition of images by Oliver from the forum. You’ll see a bit from Berlin, the exhibition, Oliver (sorry Oliver, I had to take exactly that part of the footage…. ;-) ), how to fix frames to a wall without leaving traces and about fakemulating a matte. Then I try to make an image ready for printing including getting the size right and making a faked emulated matte. The maps in the videos are from the Open Street Map Project.

Episode 144: Greek Scripts

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sat, Jul 18 2010 21:30:00 +0000

This is the first episode made by Philipp (note the missing “e”) and he has done an entire hour with two topics. First he develops a script in Python for applying a vignette effect to your images. It shows that he is a much better programmer than me. In the second part he has a shot of a “For Sale” poster (the self made ones with the phone number at the bottom for tearing off) in Greek and shows, how to make a version with your own believable text out of it. You can get his original image and the script in the companion file. The XCF is lost, sorry. My only contribution is slapping the music and bumpers on and the image on the right which has a vignette and Python written in Greek. ;-) If you like Phillip’s show, shower him with nice comments here. Perhaps he will make more shows then. :-) Meet the GIMP will make a video publication break until the first week in September. I’ll use the time to move and settle, clear up the blog and server, work out the feed and torrent problems, get the mobile version running again and hopefully produce some shows in advance for filling weeks suffering of time theft. Then I’ll be back on a regular one week schedule – it is better for me and you.

Episode 143: One Window and Round Prints

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri, Jul 2 2010 17:00:00 +0000

This show covers the single window mode of GIMP 2.7.1 with a video (which sat some weeks here) from nachbarnebenan. I just installed the new version on my machine and I like it. Then I scratch an itch I had – Printing DVDs with GIMP. The sound in this episode in not as good as usual. Sorry. 00:20 Berlin and you 01:45 Single window mode demo 06:00 Printing on CD/DVDs 06:50 Defining the media size in Turbo Print 08:20 Defining a new image template 11:30 Starting a new image from the template 12:20 A layer with guide lines 16:15 New layer(s) for content 16:50 Inserting a source image 17:40 Scaling down of the new layer 20:00 A gradient background 21:00 Blending the layers with a mask 24:20 Adding text 25:50 Printing 28:50 Recap and more background about units

Episode 142: Waterfront

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Mon, Jun 7 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Parts of the old Bremen harbour (the Europahafen and the Überseehafen) have been closed and are rebuilt as a new part of the city, called “Überssestadt”. I took an image of the border between old and new. In the video I try to make the difference stronger by desaturating and colouring parts of the image. Not much success with the image, but the saturation and colour layer mode get explained. ;-) The TOC 03:25 Subscribe to the RSS feed 04:35 flattr 06:30 An image from the Europahafen 08:15 Goal: Enhance the contrast between old and new 08:25 Rotation correction 10:15 Saving as XCF 10:45 Cropping 11:25 Fixing the aspect ratio 13:15 Duplicating the layer before tweaking the colours 14:05 Adjusting the curve to get more contrast 15:35 Desaturationg parts of the image with a layer in saturation mode 20:00 Adding sepia colour 22:20 Colour layer mode

Episode 141: The Fourth Colour (Microsode 1)

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri, May 21 2010 20:00:00 +0000

This is the first Microsode of Meet the GIMP. This are short(er) videos that are produced ahead of publication and cover one topic – and no chit chat about my life, the site, the forum and so on. In this Microsode I talk about the fourth value of a pixel, the opacity or transparency. It turns up in layers, tool settings and in the concept of layer masks. The erase tool can erase to the background colour or to transparency. You can even lock the alpha channel of a layer and so keep the transparent parts while painting in the image. BTW, I think I forgot to mention the proper name of the fourth “colour” – alpha.

Episode 140: Double Deck Bus License

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sun, May 16 2010 11:00:00 +0000

I spent last week in England – but not on a vacation. In this episode I process one of the “tourist shots” made on the class trip following a workflow guide made from Bill in Belize. This guide will be published here in some time, there is still some work needed. It covers all the basic steps for polishing up an image. The second part of the show covers a question from Bill: How to publish something with keeping your claim to fame and giving others the option to improve your work. My answer: Creative Commons. Let’s see if Bill shares my opinion. You can license your images under Creative Commons too. We had an example of the advantages in the forum with this image. There is a list of all possible licenses on the site and a very nice “click your license” boilerplate license generator. I used it to make the license text below. One question I have for you: Should I drop the “Share Alike” part of the license for Meet the GIMP and leave only the “Attribution”? Please help me with discussing this in the forum.

Episode 139: Flight Cancelled!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Mon, Apr 26 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Finally there is a new show! This time I tackle an image shot at the airport here in Bremen. Before that I tell a bit about the dangers of being a teacher, an online paint program written in HTML5, content aware fill in TheOtherProgram and my new job in Berlin. I am looking for a flat there, by the way. The image from the Hamburg train station I had planed to process turned out to be marred by motion blurr. A short discussion about how to avoid this is in the show – I hope I recall this next time. Oh, and I’ll be in England the first week of May 2010. I may have time for a meeting in central London on May 6th – Election Day. Depends on how the kids behave. ;-) More on twitter. The TOC 00:20 Greetings and looking for a flat in Berlin 03:30 Content aware Fill in Photoshop – http://photwalkthrough.com 04:20 HTML5 graphics program 05:30 Train Station image and motion blurr 08:10 Baggage claimage area shot 08:50 Intentions of the image 09:40 Straighten the image 11:30 Finding a crop 14:30 First try: enhance contrast and colours 16:00 Using curves for reducing contrast 21:40 Selective sharpening 24:00 Function of a layer mask 25:00 Denoise the layer mask 26:30 Sharpen the top layer 31:00 Saving as XCF for further work 32:00 Rolf is in England next week – http://twitter.com/rstein The companion file contains the original shot in JPG and NEF and the XCF file in its present state. Still work to do. And I put the train station image in there too, perhaps somebody wants to play with it.

Episode 138: A mixed Bag

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri, Apr 9 2010 19:00:00 +0000

A really mixed bag today. First I reveal my criteria for selecting the images of the last show and tell, why I think that deleting of not so good images is a good idea. Then I show a bit of how I recorded the sound in Hamburg and how I used Cinelerra to include the sound in the show. This can be a good way to make a slide show out of your images. Add the stuff from "Cinelerra in Japan" and Michelle's instruction videos and you are set. Finally I "prove" that higher bit depths are important for editing - not for input or output.

Episode 137: A Trip to Hamburg

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Mar 27 2010 13:00:00 +0000

This time I have made an experiment. You can look over my shoulder while I select the images to keep from a trip to Hamburg. I use F-Spot for this task. I am not sure if this was a successful approach because I didn’t talk that much while selecting the images. Can you find out what I was looking for? What are your criteria? I found out again that shooting without a goal is fun, but has not that much good results. ;-) I mention two podcasts worth to follow. Jeff Curto’s “The History of Photography” and The World’s “Technology Podcast“. And then there is the Haus der Photographie in the Deichtorhallen, which has good exhibitions and a good bookstore. The map in the bbegin was provided by the Open Street Map Project. The TOC 00:20 A trip to Hamburg – Podcast Promo Jeff Curto 02:30 Where I wanted to shoot 03:50 Using F-Spot for grading images 04:30 Setting the date range 04:40 Going through the images 18:30 What were my criteria? 19:40 Discarding a lot 20:50 THROW AWAY 21:00 Second walk through the images 21:15 Fullscreen mode in F-Spot 21:45 Selecting images for more doing work on them 23:00 How to shoot good images – not like me. 24:15 Podcast Promo for the “World Technology Podcast” 25:00 Train ride home

Episode 136: Shrinking a Bass Player

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Mar 23 2010 13:00:00 +0000

I got the planned episode 136 nearly ready – a photography trip to Hamburg. But then came an urgent job from Chicago and overturned the schedule. (No, John, it wasn’t urgent, it was convenient to have a bit more time to edit the Hamburg show). A big portrait had to be downsized from 3504×2336 to 95×125 pixels. And of course this postage stamp then should still have some atmosphere and style. How much damage this does to the details is visible in the animation on the right. I never have done this before in such an extreme way and found out, that scaling down in steps is really better than doing one big step. Beware, this is not the last word about downscaling. There are plugins at the Plugin Registry and we have a discussion about this in the Forum. For making the image interseting and informative enough for web use I tried to change the contrast with the curve tool, burned and dodged and even made some duotone images. The TOC 01:48 Find a crop / crop tool and aspect ratio 03:00 What has to be in? 06:00 Cloning out a disturbance 08:20 Make a copy and add an alpha channel 08:40 Curves tool to change contrast 09:45 Dodge and burn to give more light to the bass 14:00 Second approach 14:15 Give names to layers 15:00 Curves again 16:15 Make a Duotone 17:00 Adding two layers with layer masks 18:30 Chose colours 20:00 Fine tuning with the opacity slider 20:30 Instructions for experiments 22:40 Scaling down 25:00 Correcting scaling artefacts 27:00 Better scaling down in steps 29:30 Why is it better?

Episode 135: Darktable

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Wed, Mar 10 2010 20:00:00 +0000

Late – but here is #135. ;-) Darktable is a new RAW converter, photo editor and image manager for Linux and MacOS. It is in early development and has some really cool features. most of them I only have partially explored, but what I saw was promising. You find Darktable for Ubuntu at Pascal’s ppa. The TOC 04:10 Darktable 04:50 Overview of interface 05:30 The lighttable 06:20 Zooming 08:00 Selections 08:20 Tagging 09:00 The Darkroom 09:30 Profiles needed 10:50 Exposure 11:40 Reset 12:50 Curves 14:00 Clipping / cropping 14:40 Sharpening 16:10 More plugins 16:30 Lens correction 17:30 Colour correction 18:30 Monochrome 20:00 Equalizer 21:00 History 22:10 The Verdict

Episode 134: Dynamic Range Therrory

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Mon, Feb 22 2010 23:30:00 +0000

The German word “Therrorie” was coined by a kid in a Physics lesson of my late colleague Helmut Mohr in Hamburg. It is what it sounds like – and today’s video is full of it. No GIMP, no images, only the blackboard and me talking. Please consider this as a WARNING. ;-) We had a lively discussion in the forum about the theory behind making images, circling around the term “dynamic range”. There is a big difference between light and dark parts of our world, often more that a camera can catch. And nearly always more than fits onto paper or a computer screen. The process of squeezing this big range into the small output range is called Post Processing. Either you do it via RAW anf GIMP – or the smart chip in your camera does it while saving your iage as JPEG. What I forgot to say – if you do it, you can redo it. The RAW file still exists. If the chip does it, the RAW file is discarded and you are stuck with the version of the image made by the chip. I got a lot of information about this subject from a wonderful paper by Karl Lang at Adobe(R). Worth to download and read, even if you decide to skip the video this week. The TOC 02:04 Orders of Magnitude 04:00 How much light is in a scene? (Dynamic range ramp up) 06:00 There is no black and white 06:30 Dynamic range of a scene 06:50 Dynamic range of LCD and prints 08:50 Dynamic range of the camera 09:50 Exposure = slide the dynamic range 11:05 Post processing by the camera 12:15 RAW -> GIMP -> print 13:00 Slides and egatives in analog photography 15:05 A source at Adobe(R) 15:15 8 Bits – a problem (sometimes) 17:10 Why is it possible to make images? Because our eyes are no camera and our brain no computer.

Episode 133: The power of a Book

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sat, Feb 13 2010 23:30:00 +0000

This week I have a challenge for you. Do my homework and edit my shot from our Samba Carneval. You’ll find the JPEG and the NEF (RAW image by a Nikon D200) of a shot I did from my window. It is not a good photograph but catches a beautiful moment. Improve the image, store it somewhere on the Internet and post a link to it in the comments. You can embed a small version of it in a comment, just copy the HTML code from 23, flickr or other sites. It should be there in a box to cut and paste. Then I’ll tell you why you always shall set your camera settings to a defined standard state before you put your camera in the bag or cupboard. I didn’t and it has ruined a whole series of shots from this occasion. Have you ever wondered how to make a selection with a zig-zag border? Well, if you have, I have the answer. (Stolen from Saul Goode, BTW ;-) ) I was reminded that a Quickmask is an image and so can be editied much better than a selection. Making waves and sawteeth into it then is “elementary”. And finally I reveal how I built a dust free blackboard and chalk with GIMP. The blackboard from the “Basics” series looses its mystery.

Episode 132: Cinelerra in Japan!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Jan 22 2010 14:30:00 +0000

This week there is only a little bit of GIMP, but a lot more about the free video editor Cinelerra. I use it to make a kind of slide show video used to illustrate a short “bumper” for Martin Bailey’s blog and podcast about his (mostly nature) photography. Martin is living in Japan and has a lot to tell about photography and Japan. Highly recommended! Cinelerra is a full “non linear” video editor for Linux – and so perhaps a bit overkill for making a slide show. Non linear says that the program does not change the video and sound data and that you can access all your media easy and fast because only references are moved around. I forgot to introduce it properly at the start of the video. There are programs around for Windows and MacOS which do the same, I am sure. Cinelerra comes in a lot of different flavours. I take the version from cinelerra.org. The final version of the bumper, the used images and the Cinelerra XML file are in the companion file.

Episode 131: Automatic?

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Jan 14 2010 19:30:00 +0000

After a bit of “housekeeping”, which includes thanks to contributors and a nod over to the Focus Ring, I try to use the stuff hidden in the /Color/Auto menu. My results are not that good and I try to do it better with curves. Why did I fail? No idea, it may be the software or perhaps my choice of image was bad. Please share your experiences with this option. At the end of the show I lift the secret behind the numbers 1 – 1.4 – 2 – 2.8 – 4 – 5.6 – 11 – 16 – 22 …. – aperture numbers decoded.

Episode 130: Getting the Bugs out

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri, Dec 18 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Sorry, again a “Nerd Show”. I tackle some problems that have come up with the Python script of the last week and show my way to debug and test while making errors. My first error was to take a test case without colours – my script from last week changed all images to greyscale. Then I learn something useful about merging layers in Python. But the top of the show is even more nerdy – the Octave plugin allows to access the Octave math software from GIMP. Caluculate your images or do a FFT with them. The scripters crowd in the forum found a bug in GIMP, saulgoode reported it and it got fixed in a day. Take that, Adobe! ;-) Then I try to explain why the big blobs in the image featured two shows ago are not made with GIMP but with pure physics in the camera. You can see a Blender video I made about this for #200 of Chris Marquards Tips from the Top Floor show. My part starts at about 11:40 and contains an embarrassing error. Do you get it? The next show will be a simple, non-nerd walk through the post processing of an image. Promised.

Episode 129: Octave Sharpening Python Plugin

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sat, Dec 12 2009 19:00:00 +0000

This is the second time I try to get into Python scripting for GIMP. My script in the first show about scripting was simple, just saving some clicks. Now it is more complicated, variables, loops and floating points included. But no parrots! You find a better version of the programs in the companion file. Following a tip in our Forum I included a Undo Group. So the action can be undone, a behaviour that should have been included from the start. I mentioned some sources. Instant Python, the official Python Tutorial and the GIMP Python reference.

Episode 128: Beam it up, F-SPOT!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sat, Dec 05 2009 19:00:00 +0000

I was out on a photo walk with a GIMPer from Bremen. One of these shots is post processed in this show. Nothing special, just adjusting the colours with a curve in two different parts of the image. Of course a layer with mask is used to separate the different areas and explained again for the new GIMP users. The really new information is about uploading images from F-SPOT to 23 and flickr. You have to enable the exporter in the menu Edit/Mange Extensions/Export. 23 is covered by the flickr exporter, they use the same API. You can find the final image on 23 and flickr, both uploads worked like a charm. You can participate in episode planning in the Wave. It is open for everybody.

Episode 127: Octave Sharpening

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri, Nov 27 2009 20:00:00 +0000

A posting in the forum pointed me to a description of an interesting way to sharpen an image. This Octave Sharpening is useful when you have to do a lot of sharpening and want to avoid the typical halos around the edges. The secret lies in a combination of 4 USM sharpened layers with different opacity. As in the recipe I used an amount of 5 (500% in the Other Program), threshold 0 and 0.5, 1, 2 and 4 in the different layers. The opacity was set to 100%, 50%, 25% and 12.5%. The more sharpening the less impact in the image. But the traces of harsh sharpening give a bit of a gradient to the edges in the final image. Norman needs some information about old slide producers in Israel. Are you able to help? And I have started to use Google Wave for episod planning. If you want to participate, drop me a line at info@meetthegimp.org . I also have some invites. The TOC 00:30 Torrent for the first 100 shows 02:10 Grandfatherclock tutorial in writing at meetthegimp.org 03:10 Help for Norman 04:00 Google Wave 04:40 Octave sharpening 06:20 TAB hides the dialogs 06:50 Octave sharpening in action 08:00 50% Zoom for sharpening 08:10 Sharpen the 4 layers 11:20 setting the opacity 12:00 Looking at the result 13:15 Layer group workaround 14:30 Recap 17:10 Forum 17:00 Fund raising

Episode 126: Quick Karmic Frames

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Nov 12 2009 21:00:00 +0000

A short one this time – I upgraded to Karmic Koala and did a clean install with new partitions and EXT4 filesystem. And now I am getting the important stuff back on the disk and leave the cruft out. This meant that a lot of the files needed for a proper podcast are still on the external disks. I take a look a the new Folio by Jeff Curto at Lenswork – because it’s an example of printing an image on paper with a different aspect ratio, the images are really good and Jeff is a friend and I hope he sells a lot of them. Jeff does two podcasts in the Photocas Network, Camera Position and The History of Photography. The last is the only podcast where I have experienced a coffee break. I use an image from “wbool63″ from the forum to make some nice frames with G’MIC, the Swiss Knife plugin from France. And I have done…. The TOC 00:20 Greetings and Jeff Curto at lenswork 02:30 Using a white frame and text 03:10 Cropping an image 05:50 Getting a square crop 06:20 Eyes out of focus – no problem here 07:10 G’MIC plugin and frames No blackboard this time – and no mobile version yet. The upgrade broke the toolchain, I have to compile ffmpeg to get it running again. Software patents are really …….

Episode 125: Crop it! But How?

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, Nov 3 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Where to crop and which format to use. What to do with different image and paper formats. What happens in the camera when you change the ISO? Full text will follow tomorrow - it's too late now.

Episode 124: PS Translation Service

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Sat, Oct 24 2009 14:00:00 +0000

There are a lot of tutorials out there for “The Other Program”, also called Adobe(R) Photoshop(R). (I hope I got the Rs right, can’t find the page where Adobe(R) told the world how to call this program.) A lot of that stuff is easily translated to GIMP, but there are some serious differences. One are the “Adjustment(R) Layers(R)”. This is a way of applying a curve, gradient, hue or saturation change….. without changing the real image. You can come back later and tweak the curve or the slider – non destructive editing. There is an easy way to work around this: make a new layer of the visible image and work on that. You have to redo that, if you decide to change something in the lower layers. To show how to do this I have ripped out a part of John Arnold’s Photowalkthrough podcast and redone the same in GIMP. Photowalktrough is a really good resource for everybody who is into the digital darkroom – independent from the program used. And John has his #100 out! Congratulations! GIMP will have non destructive editing in a year or two – it’s the main reason for getting GEGL into GIMP and making this big effort of writing a lot of the program again. In the second part of the show I get the blackboard out and start a new segment in the show. I try to explain how film and sensors are working. I’ll expose you to some of these lessons for about 5 to 190 minutes and will then decide upon your reaction if I should keep this on. I’ll have them at the end of the show – if you are bored you can just skip the rest. Sorry, there is no TOC up to now.

Episode 123: Pimp my Photo! (2)

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Thu, Oct 15 2009 17:00:00 +0000

The results of the Book Challenge have been so interesting that I have made two shows out of them. This is the second part. If you want to buy Akkana Peck's book from amazon.com in the US, go to her website and use her link. She gets a bit more money out of it and you pay the same. It's worth to keep an eye on John Arnold's Photowalkthrough, perhaps something special is coming up there. ;-) The TOC 00:50 Threshold tool revisited 02:40 Ityker’s image 04:00 Selective decolorisation 05:00 Layer mask for selective decolorisation 05:00 Layer mask shortcuts 06:00 Duotone 08:45 Sample points 10:00 Preventing tonal change of the colorisation layer 11:10 Sharpening layer 12:50 Fake view cam cassete shadow 14:30 Mathias’ image 15:50 Image sources 17:00 Layers for ressources 18:40 Combining different exposures 19:25 Healing spots and bra straps 20:30 Layers for sculpting the hair 22:40 The sky – overlay mode 23:50 The sign 24:00 Layer groups 25:00 Dodge and burn on a layer in soft light mode 26:00 Unsharp mask for enhancing local and global contrast 27:20 The John Arnold Style Vignette(R) ;-)

Episode 122: Pimp my Photo! (1)

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri, Oct 09 2009 16:00:00 +0000

The results of the Book Challenge have been so interesting that I have made two shows out of them. This is the first part. If you want to buy Akkana Peck's book from amazon.com in the US, go to her website and use her link. She get's a bit more money out of it and you pay the same. It's worth to keep an eye on John Arnold's Photowalkthrough, perhaps something special is coming up there. ;-) The TOC 03:30 Kevin's image 04:00 Bracketing 05:30 Darkening parts of the image with curves and layer mask 06:30 Combining different images from the bracketed shots 09:00 image composition 10:00 Spray paint 10:10 Notes in a separate layer 12:00 jd24w9's image 12:00 Combining background and foreground from different shots 12:50 Don't merge your layers - keep them! 13:45 Better use a different shot for the sky - fake but easier 14:25 Ted's image 14:40 Tab toggles the toolbox on and off the screen 15:00 Divide the image in several parts and process them differently 16:30 Overlay Mode for enhancing brickwork 17:15 Making a surreal sky with multiply mode 18:45 Gimpel's image 20:00 Threshold tool for black and white 21:15 painting over the image 22:00 Wrapping up 22:35 Server problems and PCN

Episode 121: Transparent Transformations and Getting Rich with GIMP

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri, Oct 02 2009 23:00:00 +0000

I had not enough time this week to make a proper show about the results of my challenge. (Next week I'll have no school! :-) ) Instead I make the blog image for the next show in this one. You'll see a bit about the transform tools (rotate, scale, sheer and perspective) which have picked up a transparency slider somewhere since the show I made about them. Very nice to have! I was pointed to that by Jan Kardel's video. If you want to make an incredible amount of money it is a good idea to learn GIMP. Sergey Brin did that, created the logo of his startup and got rich. I downloaded the xcf and peeked under the hood. Just standard stuff - as you have seen by Philippe. ;-)

Episode 120: Two funny Accents in one Show!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri, Sep 25 2009 15:00:00 +0000

This week you’ll get both hosts of the show in one package. Philippe (southern France) and I (northern Germany) discuss the results of the Double Book Challenge in the “From Scratch” section. We use Skype and the connection is not as good as we were used to it between Chile and Germany. So expect some funny noises added to the accents. At the end of the show we both come up with a random number and calculate in a highly scientific way who wins the two books. I’ll give you all a chance to find out in the video if you have won and contact the winners later next week. And IF YOU have won, send me your contact data so that I can forward them to APRESS, who sponsor the prizes. All the images we talked about are in the companion file.

Episode 119: Get your Palette!

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri, Sep 18 2009 15:00:00 +0000

This is a short show about how to extract the colours out of an image and put them into a palette. The next version of GIMP will allow the export of the palettes in a lot of designer and programmer friendly ways.

Episode 118: Looking in the Crystal Ball at GIMP 2.8

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Thu, Sep 8 2009 22:59:00 +0000

I take my big soft lens polishing cloth out of the cupboard and give my crystal ball a good rub. Usually I use it for writing reports about kids, but today I look at the upcoming GIMP 2.8. With the publication of version 2.7.1 and some mails from the developers mailing list one can predict fairly good what will be in 2.8. I have compiled version 2.7.1 and try the stuff that was described in the posting at gimpusers.com. I am looking forward to the publication of 2.8, even if it is not the “big step” and “16 Bit”. But it is the last stepping stone into that direction. I had only little time to make this episode. There are probably some editing glitches and I had no chance to make a TOC. Too late in the evening.

Episode 117: Digital GND?

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:00:00 +0000

This week I show you how to simulate a Graduated Neutral Density Filter with GIMP. This was started by a thread in the forum. And as I now need more time between recording and publishing, the thread has grown considerably and Bert has already made a script for this. So check it out in the forum! While trying to create a filter for the image I stole from Bert I tell you a bit about the Blend Tool and give (again) an introduction into layer masks. “White reveals and black conceals!” ;-)

Episode 116: _Color I_nfo?

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Today I explore the information that GIMP provides about colour. It’s the always helpful histogram, the border average which gives you a nice colour for a background for your image, the colour cube analysis and the smooth palette. The last two are quite exotic and I can think of no way to use them for me. As I have avoided to discuss Median, Mean and Standard Deviation, help yourself! ;-) And of course I remind you that the challenge is still open!

Episode 115: Jahshaka and a GAP

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:00:00 +0000

You may have noticed the new intro at the top of the show since we turned HD. It was made by Philippe with a combination of GIMP, Jahshaka and GAP, the GIMP Animation Package. Jahshaka is a video editing and special effects tool. I looked into it as an editor when I planned this podcast and preferred then Cinelerra instead. Jahshaka has matured a lot in the last two years but is still a pain to install under most Linuxes, but it seems to be fine with Windows and OS X. Philippe asked me to write here that this is just a short look into Jahshaka – no in depth tutorial. But I liked it a lot while I was editing the video. And think about our two challenges! We have already some entries for the photography department – but the “from scratch” area is still an empty canvas. Well, it takes more time dto do something from scratch and the challenge is open up to September 9th.

Episode 114: Secrets of a Portaloo

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:00:00 +0000

You can win a book in our two contests - the exact rules will be published in the next posting. I continue to work on my project "Access Control". My target is a photo book by blurb.com. They accept PDF files for printing - which is important for me because most of the book making software of the printers doesn't work on Linux. Of course there is an Open Source program for making a PDF - Scribus. It is available for all OS, even OS/2. I'll tell you about my experience in one of the next episodes. There are a lot of photobooks to look at for inspiration at SOFOBOMO. Then I start to edit an image. The JPEG image is a bit overblown in the highlights and I have to go back to the RAW file. Cropping turns out to be difficult and the image needs a bit of a contrast boost in some parts. The final steps - sharpening and deciding about a vignette will be made when the layout of the book is clear. For sharpening one needs to kknow the output resolution and size - and I will have to scale the image to 300 DPI before putting it into the book. The vignette depends on the background of the page. The TOC 00:20 The Book Challenge 05:20 A Photo Book as the target for "Access Control" 07:50 Scribus for making PDF files 10:00 Photobooks to look at 10:35 Editing an image for the book 11:15 Blown out pixelss 11:45 RAW to the rescue with UFRaw 16:28 Comparing JPEG and UFRaw output 18:50 Correcting a colour cast in UFRaw 20:45 Straightening the image 23:00 Cropping the image 26:50 Improving contrast with a layer in overlay mode and a mask 33:20 Crooping more 35:00 What's left to do

Episode 113: Access Control

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:00:00 +0000

I hope this episode plays well on all computers and programs - the encoding should be supported by Quicktime and iTunes. Thanks to Tavo for figuring this out. There is no GIMP in this episode, there is a bit of F-Spot, but mostly it's about a new photography project I am starting. I want to make a series of images about means of "Access Control" and thought a bit about it in the video. (The content could have been better structured, but I was with my head more in video encoding and work flows than photography.) Is this still on topic of this show? I had requests for more photography centric stuff - but what do you think? Please write a comment here in the blog.

Episode 112: Two Candles

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 23:59:59 +0000

First show in HD! 2 Years Meet the GIMP!

Episode 111: All Ducks in a Row

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:00:00 +0000

The align tool

Episode 110: Some new Paths (2)

info@meetthegimp.org (Rolf Steinort) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:36:59 +0000

Today I go into the details of the path tool. It has a real lot of different modes and states – so one gets easily confused. I try to sort that out – but you’ll have to train yourself to master this.

Seth aka W_Nightshade has made a video about making ambigrams with paths. You see the one he did here on the side. I couldn’t make a show out of his video – but you’ll get a fast version of it with music in the video and if you are interested can download the whole package in the companion file. The music is from John Pazdan, the composer of the podcast music.

I start with a book review. Akkana Peck’s book “Beginning GIMP – from Novice to Professional” is gone into a second edition. And now it’s even better than before. If you are looking for a book about GIMP – this would be my first choice. Apress has given me the second edition book – I bought the first one before starting with this project.

And I have two of the books to give away. To you. We’ll make two challenges, one from Philippe, one from me. And Apress will send a book to each of the winners.

The TOC

01:00 Switch to HD
02:30 Ubuntu script for Wacom Tablets
03:45 Book review: Akkana Peck:
10:30 Path tool: Design mode
11:00 Adding nodes and moving them
12:30 Close a path
12:50 Add a second component to the path
13:45 Expanding a path
14:30 Selecting nodes and moving them together
15:00 Delete a node
15:30 Move a component
15:50 Tweak a segment
16:15 Move a segment
17:40 Interlude: Ambigrams by Seth (Video) and John Pazdan (Music: Solistice)
21:45 Edit mode with paths
22:15 Adding nodes
22:30 Pulling out handles
23:30 Removing handles and segemnts
24:40 Joining components of the path
25:10 Straightening out the curve at the node
26:30 Read the documentation at docs.gimp.org
27:50 What does Akkane Peck write about the path tool?
29:40 iTunes help needed

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.