Could this be the ultimate black and white converter??

Converting digital images to B&W is a bit like the Swiss fondue recipe: everyone has a different version and each person is convinced to have the best. I previously blogged about the subject with a “blind comparison” between different methods – with the comparison’s result.

Now during the recent Libre Graphics Meeting, there was a short talk (I don’t remember the speaker) about “What’s new in GIMP 2.6?” and one of the hotness is the very explicitly named c2g feature, conveniently buried in the GEGL operations (sub-)menu.

And guess what? c2g is a black and white converter… maybe the ultimate one.

Phraymd – an image collection manager

This little thing called Real Life (TM) got in the way again so my April 1st joke stayed there much longer than planned. To the point that it isn’t funny anymore (thanks Andrew for pointing it out ). A while ago, I received an email from Damien Moore introducing Phraymd an image manager that he is working on. Although Damien described Phraymd as “as buggy as all hell” (and the name is still temporary), the program is so interesting it deserves a mention.

Basically, Phraymd is an image collection management tool: it allows you to work on your images metadata – tags, titles, copyright, etc which is stored inside the image itself. You can then search through your image collection, modify metadata in batch, etc.

An offer I couldn’t refuse…

A week ago, I received the following email which I (obviously) thought was an hoax – I even had to look through my Trash to find it back:

Dear Joel,

We stumbled upon your “Linux Photography” blog a few months ago and have been following your posts for some time. While your attempts are valiant, they are also somewhat pathetic – or so we feel.

We at Apple, don’t sit around criticizing others. Rather we deliver solutions. Therefore, we have shipped to your place a brand new MacBook Pro with the latest Mac OS X. It comes loaded with Apple Aperture and (as a special treat from our partner Adobe) Photoshop CS4. This will show you what state of the art operating system / photographic software can do for photographic work.

We hope you will appreciate this gift and look forward to your next blog entries.

Best regards,

XXX, Apple Marketing

Now today (and to my complete astonishment), the UPS man rang at my door and brought me a huge box shipped from Cupertino… after unpacking and plugging in, all I can say is “Wow!” – the hardware, the OS and the photography functionalities just look stunning.

At that stage, I am not too sure when I’ll reboot one of my Linux computers…

Monitor calibration: the dispcalGUI way

Mramshaw mentioned dispcalGUI in a comment – while I was keeping an eye on lprof to offer a GUI for monitor calibration. So today I decided it was time to check how dispcalGUI does its job. And it does it well. Kudos to dispcalGUI’s author: Florian Höch

The idea

ArgyllCMS (blog 1, 2) is a Linux / Windows / Mac OS X set of command line utilities for color management – including but not limited to monitor calibration. So dispcalGUI is a make-your-life-easier frontend to Argyll which allows monitor calibration. This is especially handy since creating a profile with Argyll involves several steps with quite a few command line options – “dispcal -v -q l -y c samsung” anyone?

Support the Libre Graphics Meeting

Libre Graphics Meeting is happening May 6 to 9 2009 in Montréal… and needs your help, if you can. Thanks!

And if you are coming, Montréal is a beautifull city, full of shooting opportunities. So much, in fact that Popular Photography has it on its list of photo treks.

Using Linux for Photography, Can we make it better?

Following my post “Using Linux for Photography, where we stand“, Svetoslav Trochev sent me an email inquiring about Photography oriented Linux distribution. Months later, I received another email from Svetoslav: he hadn’t abandoned the project but rather had given it lots of thoughts and wanted to share his  reflexion with the community. It is my pleasure to have him as the first external contributor to Linux & Photography blog. Thanks a lot!

RawSpeed and Rawstudio: exciting projects

These are exciting times for photography on Linux. With Krita 2.0 round the corner and GIMP getting (some) higher bit depth functionalities in its next 2.8 version.

Rawstudio is not sitting still either with a couple of great projects down the line.

G’MIC, next-gen GREYCstoration

I received an email from David Tschumperlé (interview, web) the author of GREYCstoration (blog), introducing G’MIC, GREYC’s Magic Image Converter. GREYCstoration’s capabilities (read: algorithms) have been moved to this new high potential framework: all the operations are now filters written in an easier-to-program macro language (gmic). That makes it more simple to add new custom made filters while retaining the power and infrastructure of G’MIC.

G’MIC is available here as a command-line tool or as a GIMP plug-in.

News from Krita

Boudewijn Rempt just published a long (4000 words) blog post about the state of Krita: where it is coming from and what it is up to for the upcoming 2.0 release. Lots of cool new features that I am looking forward to play with.

Well worth reading and kudos to the team!!

PS: and in the meantime, it looks like GIMP 2.8 will have some support for 16bits / pixel. Exciting times ahead.

An exclusive interview with Martin Nordholts

For a long time I wanted to do an interview with one of the GIMP developers. Then I came across Martin Nordholts (aka enselic) website and read the following description of his involvement with GIMP:

Here is my list of most critical features GIMP needs and which I intend to help bring into existance:

• High bit deepth editing through GEGL
• Non-destructive editing through GEGL
• A completely color managed workflow
• Native CMYK and spot color support

I decided he was the man and bugged him for an interview. So here is one of the core contributors to GIMP telling us about the current state of affairs, helping us to understand what is going on deep inside the GIMP (and GEGL) as well as lifting a corner of the veil about what is to come.