Digital Photography

Group meets at 9:30am - 4th Friday each month. Visitors welcome.

Entry to Monthly Reports & Members' Photo Galleries

Imaging Resource's New Comparometer

This tool now lets you compare reference images from digital cameras side-by-side. These images are JPEGs straight from the camera, and were taken under carefully-controlled conditions, to provide valid comparisons of camera capabilities in actual shooting situations. By clicking on and zooming into each image, you are able to closely compare a variety of indoor and outdoor images or the test patterns provided.

You can also download the images (using your browser's "save image as" function) and output them on your own printer, to see how the cameras involved will perform in your application. (See the copyright notice first though!). Check out the Comparometer now...

GIMP (= GNU Image Manipulation Program ; GNU = GNU is Not Unix ...)

At a recent club meeting, Peter Collard gave a very interesting talk on GIMP, this is the free graphics editor. This was an introductory talk but I'm sure it gave us the impetus to learn more. Peter's excellent tutorial follows:

The simplest way to get GIMP is from www.filehippo.com . This is the Windows version. Linux and portable versions behave identically. The program handles just about any image format, so is not limited to photographs. It is comparable to Photoshop, but a lot less expensive. It is a bit of a shock for those used to most Windows software, as it opens in THREE windows. Once you get used to it you can see why. If you have a lot of fonts it takes a little while to load.

Start it up and you see the toolbar on the left. The large number of tools explains why they don't appear as the usual top toolbar. On the right is the layers toolbar. Like Photoshop and other powerful editors GIMP handles layers (later). The centre is the main editing window. It is important to remember that a tool is always active, so don't click or drag your cursor over the image unless you know what tool is selected. Unfortunately it has a tendency to open a dialogue window behind others, so if you expect one use Alt + Tab to find it.

Before loading an image, let us go through the tools always available. When you select a tool the options available show in the lower half of the toolbar. In other editors you must go to another menu to set the options.

The top 7 are area selection tools - Rectangle, Ellipse, Lasso, and some more intelligent tools. Note that they have 4 modes - Select, add to, remove from or intersect with current selection. Tools 10-14 are geometrical manipulation (flip, rotate, ...). Tools 9, 16-22 are tools related to drawing, painting (fill, pen, airbrush …). 23-28 are tools used to repair photos, like removing unwanted bits, getting rid of wires, etc.

Now you can risk opening an image, select the eye-dropper tool (you can't do any damage with that) then open a file (File | Open). REMEMBER always work on a copy of your image. GIMP has multi-level undo, but not infinite, and not after saving!

Now try some selections, Use the third tool- Fuzzy Select and click on the sky. See what is selected, use the Select menu to select None, change the threshold value and try again. When you get most of the sky, and nothing else, change to Add to selection mode and include the clouds. Edit | Undo (or Ctrl/Z) will undo your last selection. You can see all the selection without the 'marquee' by using Del (then Ctrl/Z). Zoom in to pick out the last little bits. Now you can fiddle the sky, try Colors | Brightness & Contrast to adjust the sky. Ok, now Select | None and chose the Clone Tool. We can remove the wires using this. Select Alignment - Aligned and Ctrl/click near a wire. Now zoom in and select a Brush slightly larger than the wires, Ctrl/drag over the wire to get rid of it. If the sky has large variations in colour, leaving a noticeable colour change, you can reduce this with the Smudge tool and a larger brush.

Now we'll try something else. Open a photo of a sign, put some guides in by dragging the rulers. Now select the Perspective tool, and drag the corners of your sign so the edges are parallel with the guides. Click Transform, select the Scalpel tool and outline the sign, press Enter - voila. You can move or remove the guides using the Move tool outside the image area.

You will have noticed the Layers bar has a thumbnail copy of your picture called Background. Use the Move tool to move your picture. The chequerboard is emptiness, undo the move. Now select Layer | New Layer and make sure Transparency is selected. Select the paintbrush tool and scribble on your image. Click the eyes in the Layers toolbar, you can see the layers individually. The highlighted layer is the one you are working on. This is how you can swap heads. Select the head in one photo and delete it, copy the head from another and paste as a new layer, resize, move and rotate so it looks right, then save the image. To save as a JPEG you must first flatten the layers, GIMP will do this for you.

Enough of the simple things. Select the new layer and Layers | Delete layer. Now we look to scripts that perform pre-defined procedures. Try Filters | Light & Shadow | Drop Shadow and it will go to work making a layer with the shadow. Un-eye the background to see this. Delete this layer and try Filters Animation | Rippling. You'll have to save the new image (as GIF animation) to see the effect.

Some more things to try are in File | Create. You can make fancy banners, buttons, backgrounds and logos for web pages using these tools.

There's plenty more to try. I haven't touched the colour correction functions, but these are similar to many other photo editing programs and you shouldn't have trouble with them if you are already familiar with another program. Try things ON A COPY OF A PHOTO to see what can be done. Some of the effects can be seen better on smaller images, so resize to about 640x480 or smaller. This also reduces processing time (the animation above is very slow to process, save and load at full size!). Enjoy!

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GIMP adds interest with Creative In-picture Frames

This simple technique using the free GIMP image editor can quickly create in-picture frames to highlight or apply a 3D focus to enhance an image's subject. Easily add focus and interest to the subject of an otherwise lifeless picture. Be creative and try it now - you can view or print this easy to follow tutorial here...
Note: GIMP 2.6 was used for this exercise - the procedure may vary with earlier versions.

Report - September 2009

• Introduction

• Administration

• Next meeting 23^nd October, last 27^th November.
• Reports - mail list corrected, uploaded to website.
• Next year - Bill will book 4^th Friday January to November. Combine with Seniors in December (and December this year). April is Friday 23^rd, before long weekend.
• Updated software this month
• FileHippo Graphics Page

XNView	v1.96.5 from .4	http://www.xnview.com/en/history.html
Picasa	v3.5 from 3.1	http://picasa-readme.blogspot.com/