Meet the GIMP

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

G’MIC is a lot of things that do stuff with images. You have a stand alone program with a complete image manipulation and analysis programming language, an online service and a GIMP plugin that gives easy access to (nearly) the whole package. Don’t get G’MIC from other sources than their pages – the update cycle is so fast that package maintainers can’t keep up. The version recorded in the video is already outdated twice at the time of the publication. G’MIC is mostly developed by Dr. David Tschumperlé of the GREYC, an institute at the University of Caen in France that is also part of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research). So definitely no hobbyist project. I met David and his friend and colleague Jérôme – also a scientist AKA Dr. Jérôme Boulanger – at the LGM in Leipzig. Very nice guys! See Pat David’s wonderful blog post for more images and a report. You can find information about G’MIC at their site in the very good and complete manual, at YouTUBE from G’MIC and David, at Pat David’s Blog and all over the Internets. The second part of the video is a promotion for Ramón Miranda‘s very good training DVD “Muses”. It goes through the whole process of learning Krita – a graphics program under Linux and Windows, which is much better for painters than GIMP – up to finishing a real digital painting. You can buy the DVD at the Krita shop, 32.50€ is comparable to other kinds of such DVDs and the proceeds support the Krita Foundation. I got this one for free – and I will give it away! If you want to have it, write a comment to this blog post before Episode 200 is published. Get your mail address right (it will only be visible to me) and mention that you want the DVD. After the deadline I’ll have some supposedly innocent children draw a winner. The TOC 00:00:00 Start of video 00:01:10 Installing the G’MIC Plugin for GIMP 00:03:00 Installing and using G’MIC as a stand alone program 00:10:00 G’MIC Online service 00:10:40 Using the G’MIC GIMP Plugin 00:13:40 Pencil Drawing emulation as an example 00:18:10 Film emulations and grain as an example 00:25:15 Spectral filters – Fourrier included 00:26:20 Plotting Graphs with G’MIC 00:26:50 Conclusion 00:29:20 Ramon Miranda’s Krita tutorial DVD 00:33:10 EOF

“darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.” I cant say it better than this bit from their page. I had tested darktable in 2010 and found it promising – but stayed with f-spot and later Shotwell. But now I’ll switch to darktable. These 42 minutes are a rigorously cut down version of my nearly 2 hours long walk through darktable – I was distracted so much by the endless modules and possibilities that I forgot the time. This will not be my last darktable video, I’ll try to focus a bit more on usable stuff in them. ;-)

In this video I try to change history and put myself in an old image of the first electronic computer, the ENIAC. The original image is an US ARMY Photo under Public Domain, downloaded from Wikimedia. As this is intended to be the base for a class project, I don’t go into the depth of GIMP but try to cover a lot of ground on a beginners level. And of course I make some mistakes…..