The day Goats invaded the GIMP

Unless you have been living in a cave for about 10 years, you know that the next big thing in GIMP is called GEGL – that library has been in development for several years and aims to be the new engine that will launch GIMP to the stratosphere of image editing (more or less…)

News?

I know this has been a very long time (I barely remembered my wordpress password) but here we go: a new article. Don’t expect much at that point though – if you were still expecting anything, that is.

But here is the thing: Pentaxforums has recently run a give away along the lines of “write a technical blogpost related to photography – we’ll pick the best one(s) and offer goodies up to $1000 thanks to sponsoring by B&H”.

Guess what? I submitted an entry Linux for photography, 3 years down the line which aimed to revisit my previous article on the topic. And it got selected among the 15 finalists.

Now why do I tell all that right now? Two things:

1. if you want to help my “cause” read the article (the more hits, the higher my chances) or even better (if you are a subscriber to Pentaxforums – and any true Pentaxian should be) vote for me. Don’t tell me you didn’t se that one coming 😛
2. this was also an opportunity to remember that blogging is time consuming, but also a lot of fun. So here is the idea: help me get a higher rank in PentaxForums give away and I’ll resume blogging 🙂 The first article will be about GIMP being invaded by goats…

 PS: no, this is not bribing: Adam (PF administrator) encouraged us to “share this voting thread with your friends, together with a link to your article”. I am just obeying 🙂

Rapid Photo Downloader: making your life easier

Have you ever had a couple (or more) memory cards full of images that you quickly want to download to your hard drive while making an extra backup copy and rename all files according to a certain pattern?  And all of this as quickly as possible because you are here to take pictures, not to process your digital files? Damon Lynch has created Rapid Photo Downloader, a tool that does just that… and a bit more.

Gnome Color Manager is born

Richard Hughes is next in line to become another hero of Open Source Software for photography. After giving it some thoughts, he implemented a first draft of a Gnome Color Manager. It lives in Gnome GIT for now so it is not quite ready for prime time, but hey, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” (ref)

Attitudes

Two links for your consideration:

Michael Reichmann – The Leica M9, a field review

Joe McNally – a photographer’s best piece of equipment (youtube video)

Comment anyone?

Gimp 2.8 in a single window?

Martin Nordholt (interview) started a thread on GIMP’s developers mailing list saying:

We are making pretty good progress towards GIMP 2.8 which has turned into an “everything but GEGL” release. I think it would make sense to also go for a single-window mode in 2.8 and not 2.10 as originally planned.

[…]

I intend to start working on this asap, and peter will work on a UI spec as soon as he gets time. If you have objections, please speak up.

/ Martin

Obviously, quite a few people spoke up (read the thread).

This also prompted Peter Sikking (GIMP’s UI designer) to blog about the issue: why this is desirable, what are the advantages and problems, etc. Peter also introduces the “image parade” to see the currently open and recently used images. Very interesting stuff (ie: read the blog post).

While it is always good to see progress in open source software, my personal taste would have been to get 16 bits support so that GIMP gets actually *usable* for photographic work. Still, kudos to the GIMP’s team for their work and best of luck with GIMP 2.8.

(But hey, based on how constant I am at updating this blog, who am I to lecture others??)

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?