Average Book Covers and a New (official) GIMP Website (maybe)

A little while back I had a big streak of averaging anything I could get my hands on. I am still working on a couple of larger averaging projects (here's a small sneak peek - guess the movie?):








I'm trying out visualizing a movie by mean averaging all of the cuts. Turns out movies have way more than I thought - so it might be a while until I finish this one... :)

On the other hand, here's something neat that is recently finished...

JungleBook: Simple Kindle Ebook Cover Analysis

Jason van Gumster just posted this morning about a neat project he'd been toying with that is along similar lines of the Netflix Top 50 Covers by Genre, but takes it to a deeper level. He's written code to average the top 50 ebook covers on Amazon by genre:



By itself this is really pretty (to me - not sure if anyone else likes these things as much as I do) but Jason takes it further by providing some analysis and commentary on the resulting images in the context of ebook sales and popularity (visually) to people.

I highly recommend you visit Jason's post and read the whole post (it's not too long). It's really neat!

The GIMP Website

I had this note on my to-do list for ages to tinker with the GIMP website. I finally got off my butt and started a couple of weeks ago. I did a quick mockup to get a feel for the overall direction I wanted to head:

I've been hacking at it for a couple of weeks now and I kind of like how it's turning out. I'm still in the process of migrating old site content and making sure that legacy URI's aren't going to change. It may end up being a new site for GIMP. It also may not, so please don't hold your breath... :)

Here's where I am at the moment for a front page:

Yes, that image is a link. The link will lead you to the page as I build it: http://static.gimp.org. See? It's like a prize for people who bother to read to the end! Feel free to hit me up with ideas or if you want to donate any artwork for the new page while I build it. I can't promise that I'll use anything anyone sends me, but if I do I will be sure to properly attribute! (Please consider a permissive license if you decide to send me something).

Skin Retouching with Wavelets on PIXLS.US

Anyone who has been reading here for a little bit knows that I tend to spend most of my skin retouching time with wavelet scales. I've written about it originally here, then revisited it as part of an Open Source Portrait tutorial, and even touched upon the theme one more time (sorry about that - I couldn't resist the “touching” pun).

Because I haven’t possibly beat this horse dead enough yet, I have now also compiled all of those thoughts into a new post over on PIXLS.US that is now pretty much done:

PIXLS.US: Skin Retouching with Wavelet Decompose

Of course, we get another view of the always lovely Mairi before & after (from an older tutorial that some may recognize):

As well as the lovely Nikki before & after:

Even if you've read the other material before this might be worth re-visiting.

Don't forget, Ian Hex has an awesome tutorial on using luminosity masks in darktable, as well as the port of my old digital B&W article! These can all be found at the moment on the Articles page of the site.

The Other Blog

Don't forget that I also have a blog I'm starting up over on PIXLS.US that documents what I'm up to as I build the site and news about new articles and posts as they get published! You can follow the blog on the site here:

PIXLS.US: Blog

There's also an RSS feed there if you use a feed reader (RSS).

Write For PIXLS

I am also entertaining ideas from folks who might like to publish a tutorial or article for the site. If you might be interested feel free to contact me with your idea! Spread the love! :)

Wikipedia #Edit2014 Video

About a two months ago I was approached by Victor Grigas, a video producer for the Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit that supports Wikipedia), about using some of the techniques I had previously discussed to create 2.5D parallax video images from single photographs. The intention was to use these 2.5D videos as part of their first ever "Year in Review" video:



For reference, this was my previous result using F/OSS to create the 2.5D parallax effect with still images:



For the Wikipedia video, Victor asked if I could use some images from Wiki Loves Monuments (apparently the worlds largest photo competition according to the Guiness World Records). How could I say no? (Disclaimer: I donate every year during their funding drives).

So I agreed, and after a short wait for the finalists from the competition to be chosen, was sent these two awesome images to turn into 2.5D parallax videos:

"Wat Phra That Khao Noi" by K.Phothiwijit - Own work.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

"Faisal Mosque Photography by Ali Mujtaba 12" by Alimujtaba79 (Ali Mujtaba) - Own work.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

After a bit of slicing and dicing, I ended up with these short segments that ended up in the final video. As before, I did the main plane separations in GIMP manually. I divided the planes to best accommodate the anticipated camera movement through the scene (simple dolly pans). Once I had the planes separated, it was a simple process to bring them into Blender and offset the planes as the camera tracked across the scene:





This was a fun project to work on, and I want to thank the Wikimedia Foundation for giving me a chance to play with some gorgeous images and hopefully to help out in my own small way with the final outcome!

Also, Victor does a nice interview with the Wikimedia blog about producing the overall video. Great work everyone!

Something Wicked This Way Comes...

I've been working on something, and I figured that I should share it with anyone who actually reads the stuff I publish here.

I originally started writing here as a small attempt at bringing tutorials for doing high-quality photography using F/OSS to everyone. So far, it's been amazing and I've really loved meeting and getting to know many like-minded folks.

I'm not leaving. Having just re-read that previous paragraph makes it sound like I am. I'm not.

I am, however, working on something new that I'd like to share with you, though. I've called it:

PIXLS.US

I've been writing to hopefully help fill in some gaps on high-quality photographic processes using all of the amazing F/OSS tools that so many great groups have built, and now I think it's time to move that effort into its own home.

F/OSS photography deserves its own site focused on demonstrating just how amazing these projects are and how fantastic the results can be when using them.

I'm hoping pixls.us can be that home. Pixel-editing for all of us!

I'm been building the site in my spare time over the past couple of weeks (I'm building it from scratch, so it's going a little slower than just slapping up a wordpess/blogger/CMS site). I want the new site to focus on the content above all else, and to make it as accessible and attractive as possible for users. I also want to keep the quality of the content as high as possible.

If anyone would like to contribute anything to help out: expertise, artwork, images, tutorials and more, please feel free to contact me and let me know. I'm in the process of porting my old GIMP tutorials over to the new site (and probably updating/re-writing a bunch of it as well), so we can have at least some content to start out with.

If you want to follow along my progress at the moment while I build out the site, I'm blogging about it on the site itself at http://pixls.us/blog. As mentioned in the comments, I actually do have an RSS feed for the blog posts, I just hadn't linked to it yet (working on it quickly). The location (should your feedreader not pick it up automatically now) is: http://pixls.us/blog/feed.xml.

If you happen to subscribe in a feedreader, please let me know if anything looks off or broken so I can fix it! :)

Things are in a constant state of flux at the moment (did I mention that I'm still building out the back end?), so please bear with me. Please don't hesitate for a moment to let me know if something looks strange, or with any suggestions as well!

When it's ready to go, I'm going to ask for everyones help to get the word out, link to it, talk about it, etc. The sooner I can get it ready to go, the sooner we can help folks find out just how great these projects are and what they can do with them!

Excelsior!

Free From XP (LinuxPro Magazine) GIMP Article

So, the last time I talked about LinuxPro Magazine was about having a simple give-away of the promotional copies I had received of their GIMP Handbook issue. At that time, I joked with the editor that surely it couldn’t be complete without anything written by me. :)

Then he called me out on my joke and asked me if I wanted to write an article for them.

So, I’ve got an article in LinuxPro Magazine Special Edition #18: Free From XP!

The article is aimed at new users switching over from XP to Linux, so the stuff I cover is relatively basic, like:

• The Interface
• Cropping
• Rotating
• Correcting Levels
• Brightness/Contrast
• Color Levels
• Curves
• Resizing
• Sharpening
• Saving & Exporting

Still, if you know someone who could use a hand switching, it certainly can’t hurt to pick a copy up! (You can get print and digital copies from their website: LinuxPro Magazine).

Here’s a quick preview of the first page of the article:

My hair doesn’t look anywhere near as fabulous as this image would have you believe...

Also, if anyone sees a copy on a newsstand, it would be awesome if you could send me a quick snap of it.

Wavelet Decompose (Again)

Yes, more fun things you can do with Wavelet Scales.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a bit (or just read through any of my previous postprocessing tutorials), then you should be familiar with Wavelet Decompose. I use them all the time for skin retouching as well as other things. I find that being able to think of your images in terms of detail scales opens up a new way of approaching problems (and some interesting solutions).

A short discussion on the GIMP Users G+ community led the member +Marty Keil to suggest a tutorial on using wavelets for other things (particularly sharpening). Since I tend to use wavelet scales often in my processing (including sharpening), I figured I would sit down and enumerate some ways to use them, like:

• Skin Smoothing & Retouching
• Sharpening and Local Contrast Enhancement
• Removing Stains/Colors/Tones

Linux Pro Magazine GIMP Handbook Special Edition

I received a few Promo copies of the Linux Pro Magazine GIMP Handbook Special Edition in the mail a couple of weeks ago. I’ve just been too busy to sit down and have a look at it in depth.

I did give it a few flip-throughs when I had a moment, though.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2014 in Leipzig, Germany

What an amazing trip!

Leipzig Market Little Planet Panorama

I was half joking when I mentioned to schumaml on irc a few months ago that I should come out to LGM2014 and do a photography workshop using GIMP. Half joking turned into half-serious, and half-serious turned into “holy crap, I better buy my plane tickets!”…

The LGM team accepted a workshop proposal by Tobias Ellinghaus and myself to talk about darktable and FL/OSS photography workflows. I was also presenting alongside David Tschumperlé and Jérome Boulanger on a retrospective look at G’MIC over the last couple of years! (The title of the presentation was “A 2012-2013 retrospective of the G’MIC project : New features from artists/developers collaborations”).

To say that I was excited is an understatement! I was finally going to get a chance to meet the GIMP team face to face (I idle in the GIMP channel on irc quite a bit)! I was also going to be able to hang out with David, who I collaborate quite often with. Also, none other than Rolf Steinort was also going to be there!

2.5D Parallax Animated Photo Tutorial (using Free Software)

I had been fiddling with creating these 2.5D parallax animated photos for quite a few years now, but there had recently been a neat post by Joe Fellows that brought it into the light again.

The reason I had originally played with the idea is part of a long, sad story involving my wedding and an out-of-focus camcorder that resulted in my not having any usable video of my wedding (in 2008). I did have all of the photographs, though. So as a present to my wife, I was going to re-create the wedding with these animated photos (I’m 99% sure she doesn't ever read my blog - so if anyone knows her don’t say anything! I can still make it a surprise!).

The rest of my GIMP tutorials can be found here:
Getting Around in GIMP

So I had been dabbling with creating these in my spare time over a few years, and it was really neat to see the work done by Joe Fellows for the World Wildlife Fund. Here is that video:

WWF PARALLAX SEQUENCE from Make Productions on Vimeo.

He followed that up with a great video walking through how he does it:



I'm writing here today to walk through the methods I had been using for a while to create the same effect, but entirely with Free/Open Source Software...

Libre Graphics Meeting 2014 in Leipzig, Germany (and a Workshop Announcement)

Ok, I’m sorry I’ve been so quiet! I’m not Missing in Action, I’ve just been busy with some other things...

As a matter of fact, here are those other things!

Libre Graphics Meeting

I’ve been helping out the Libre Graphics Meeting team where I can. If you’re not familiar with them, the Libre Graphics Meeting is the meeting opportunity for many open-source graphics related projects.

This is the meeting where the hackers, designers, users, and developers of many of the most popular FLOSS graphics tools meet to share ideas and to showcase works. For many projects this is the only time that the teams can actually meet face to face to discuss new ideas and progress.

Personally I’ve been trying to help by writing/copyediting posts on the LGM website. So I haven’t had an opportunity to write here as much these paste few weeks.

If you’re reading this, please consider chipping in anything that you can to help bring these great FLOSS project teams together! Seriously, just a few dollars from each person can really, really make a difference. These are the people that are building tools that make what I do here possible, and the only way to get quality software that respects our freedoms.

Donate to the Libre Graphics Meeting Pledgie Campaign!

FL/OSS Tools in a Photographic Workflow

Sounds fancy doesn’t it? Well, not only should you donate to LGM if you can, but if you have the means you should also attend! There’s a good reason to!

I’m going to be conducting a workshop at the meeting on using FL/OSS tools in a photography workflow. I’ve got a two hour block where I’ll be having a photowalk with attendees to talk about photographic processes and maybe techniques, and then back to the meeting to discuss various methods of processing and editing the photographs using a variety of FL/OSS tools (RawTherapee, darktable, Hugin, LuminanceHDR, G’MIC, Imagemagick, and more!).

Of course, GIMP is missing from that list because I wanted to address them separately.

The GIMP team is graciously sponsoring me to attend LGM this year!

I’ve been slowly updating the tutorials on the GIMP website and attaching much more liberal licenses to them so they can be reused freely. (Yet another reason I’ve been unable to post new stuff here lately, but a good reason!). I was thinking that a look at my photographic retouching process using GIMP might be fun and helpful.

I tend to use many different software depending on what I need to do, but of course I always find myself in GIMP at the end... :)

Consider Attending LGM

So, if you’re able to - consider coming over to Leipzig, Germany April 2-5 to join us! The meeting is free to attend, and there will be many great things to see and learn about. For instance:

• G’MIC
Yep, David Tschumperle (creator of G’MIC) will be in attendance along with Jérôme Boulanger! They are going to be giving a great overview of G’MIC along with some looks at the incredible filters available with the language (and how they can push these new filters so quickly out to the community due to a tight relationship with the artists that use it). I believe I’ll also be joining them in this presentation briefly to talk about the film emulation effects released last year.
• Rolf Steinort / Meet the GIMP
I’ve heard from the man himself, Rolf (of Meet the GIMP of course), that he’ll also be attending this year! I’m going to try and get an autograph!
• darktable
Tobias Ellinghaus will be bringing darktable to its first LGM as well! I know many people using free software for photography use darktable - so here’s a chance to interact with the great folks at darktable!
• Magic Lantern
Yep, the folks that are able to bring amazing new powers to Canon cameras through a custom firmware will be attending their first LGM as well! In fact, if you bring your Canon camera with you, they will helpfully get you setup with the firmware while you’re there.

These are just a few of the many, many things that will be presented at this years LGM. There’s tons more, and as I get the time I’m updating the LGM website to showcase new sneak peeks at what’s to come.

Oh, and just to help remind you, don’t forget to donate a little something if you can:

Donate to the Libre Graphics Meeting Pledgie Campaign!

GIMP Magazine Issue 5 Released

The team over at GIMP Magazine have released their latest issue, and check out that handsome gentleman on the cover!

“I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking.”
— Derek Zoolander

Yep, +Steve Czajka and crew have pushed out yet another great issue of the magazine, and I’m not just saying that because my ugly mug is gracing the cover. This issue has my portrait retouching tutorial with the wonderful Mairi, and a really neat tutorial for emulating the results of an old analog photographic process (really old), Gum over Palladium, by +Christopher Perez.  +Debi Dalio also reviews Tux Paint for kids!

Personally, I would have gone for a better looking cover model, like Mairi from the tutorial:

Faking an ND Filter for Long Exposure Photography

So, I’ve had this idea bouncing around in my head for a bit, and figured it might help me to get off my ass and actually try it out if I described my thought process.

Long Exposure - Shanklin by Richard 'Tenspeed' Heaven, (cb)
5 sec  f/32 ISO 100

I’ve been wanting to get some ND filters to experiment with daytime long exposures for a while now. The problem is that I’m lazy. So when I say “for a while now”, I really mean that it’s been like 3 years.

Film Emulation Presets in G'MIC (GIMP)

Color toning/grading can be a heck of a rabbit-hole sometimes. You start innocently enough, but hours later you’ll find yourself still fiddling with one particular point in one particular channel. Just a little bit more to get it just right! Just a slight bump to saturation in this color! Push the hue a little more this way!

Mairi. Kodak Portra 400 NC Emulation (Strongest setting)
(mouseover for original)

It may seem trivial, but these tiny differences can mean the world to obsessive-compulsive types. I’m speaking from experience because I just finished clawing my way out of the rabbit hole...

I brought some things back with me, though.

A Simple Headshot (of Myself)

I needed a new headshot for something recently, and I figured it might be fun to expand a little on something I started playing with while shooting my friend Mairi. I wanted to work on getting my backgrounds blown out to pure white.

I think this was mostly due to reading the great Zack Arias “White Seamless Tutorial”, and trolling around on The Strobist again. I also just got my camera back, so it was as good a time as any to put it through some paces… (Plus, I needed the practice).

So first, here is the final result after all of my fiddling:

Could have been a lot worse, I think…

So my first desire in shooting this was to play with getting the background blown to pure white. I happened to have a whiteboard in my office conference room that I figured would be a good background to start with.

My Camera Broke...

Almost a month ago I headed out on a really hot day down here in the deep south* with coworkers for a day on the delta in Mobile, AL. I had brought along my (relatively) new OM-D E-M5 to take some nature/fun shots with everyone. However, after finally boarding our boat and pulling my camera out to take some shots, I was greeted by a completely white EVF when trying to shoot some photos...

 

My artists recreation of my viewfinder view...

Crap. Looking around online yielded nothing relevant, so off to Olympus service she went. I was so angry at the problem I just didn't want to think about photographs until I could get it back.

I needed to vent some creativity, and turned to something else I enjoy playing with, 3D rendering/modeling! So a few days during my lunch breaks I tried my hand at speed modeling in Blender. In particular learning to use the new dynamic topology sculpting tools (dyntopo).

So I thought it might be fun to share what I came up with here (I had already posted these on Google+, but figured it might be fun to share them here as well).

Bear in mind, I'm not really a whiz at Blender, I just happen to know enough to have fun playing with it and doodling (which is really all these are). I tried to keep everything in Cycles for the most part, and was just having fun...

No, I have no idea. Just playing around...

Mostly just working out materials that I liked here.

Trying something a little different. Sort of an "Alien"-esque thingy (with a vagina for a mouth apparently).

Finally getting something a little more cohesive.

Yes, it's a carrot. I didn't think he was grumpy when I made him, but he does look sort of grumpy.

Testing particle grass on an icosphere - worked out pretty well!

The lightbulb finally managed to fly.

A radish search party.

Of course, now my camera is back, so not sure if I will continue with these. I had a couple of other ideas kicking around that I may go ahead and finish, though.

I did at least manage to use some neat tricks for creating these, though. I did some rudimentary network rendering by passing off a few of these to different machines, rendering different frames with the seed value in Cycles set to #frame. This gave me a different noise pattern for each frame. Of course, I brought them together in GIMP and used G'MIC to mean average the layers together, which really cut down on the noise and smoothed things out nicely!

For example, here's a single frame from the "Radish Search Party" image:

Quite a bit noisier in a single frame

The nice thing about rendering/averaging these frames is that if at any time I want it to be a bit cleaner, I can just render a few more new frames until I am happy with the result.

The $30,429,899 Photograph

So, here is a view of the most expensive image ever (that doesn't really exist - except for now because I made it):

The $30,429,899 Photograph by Pat David

This is an amalgam of 16 (out of 18) of the most expensive photographs ever sold, all at once (based on the list at Wikipedia).

I averaged all of the images in Imagemagick, and brought them into GIMP for some level adjustments and minor processing.

Mr. Presidents

I've been pretty busy lately, and haven't had a chance to post anything, but that doesn't mean I haven't been fooling around when I can! Here's a finished blended amalgam from the other night:

Mr. Presidents by Pat David (cc-by-nc-sa)

This is every one of the U.S. Presidential portraits (except one) all blended in Imagemagick. Once using an average, and a second one using median blending. I brought these into GIMP and overlayed the median blend at 50% opacity.

Using Imagemagick to Create Contact Sheets (Montage)

In my previous post on postprocessing my Open Source portrait, I had shown a couple of contact sheets that I had generated to help me narrow down which images I liked. That contact sheet looked like this:

Contact sheets are a great holdover from the days of film, when you wanted a big overview of all the shots on a strip of film. After developing the film, you could just lay a sheet of photo paper under the enlarger, lay your strips of film on top, put a glass plate over the whole thing to hold them down, and then expose with white light for a small amount of time.

A Quick Look at Quality (Google+ vs. Flickr)

I had recently taken some photos of my friend Mairi, and wanted to share them. Lately I've been using Google+ more and more (they just make it too easy to use), and photographers seem to be one of the larger groups of users.

So I decided to see what my images would look like on Google+ as compared to Flickr (my mainstay), or even 500px. I've been a Flickr user for years (I think the $25USD/year for a Pro account is a pretty good deal for what it offers), and it's been my reference for a while.

So, let's take a look!

Reference

I'm using a recent photo of my friend Mairi as a reference. Specifically, the final 100% jpg output at full size when I was done playing with it in GIMP.

My reference image.

This is the same image I initially uploaded to Google+ and Flickr in full resolution, at 100% JPG quality, optimized, progressive, DCT Floating Point, Subsampling 4:4:4.

I resized the image in GIMP before uploading here to 550px wide, and used Sinc (Lanczos3) resizing (don't worry, I'm just putting this up here for reference), and exported as PNG using RIOT.

Mairi

I finally got a chance recently to quickly photograph my friend Mairi.

Mairi 6 by Pat David on Flickr

She's a beautiful woman who happens to be a keen-eyed photographer as well. The best part, though, is that she has modeled in the past, which made her the perfect person to shoot with!