I can’t get enough of playing with this image averaging, it seems.

Reddit user Janne mentioned in a post of mine about the idea of “Averageness”, and linked to the Wikipedia page describing it. This got me thinking about trying these commands on something like faces.

So I needed a set of faces that were all semi-similar enough to create good averages with. Well, if you haven’t seen the work of photographer Martin Schoeller you are missing out! He has a series of close-ups that are shot with very similar lighting styles and compositions of famous people (and not-famous), that is simply mesmerizing to see.

So I grabbed some random images to try this out with:

Back in 2003 Xeni Jardin posting on boingboing highlighted artist Jason Salavon’s work involving averaging together Playboy centerfolds by decade. The works he produced were haunting and beautiful to me (and a little geeky, too).

An interesting side effect of posting the Getting Around in GIMP tutorials has been meeting new people who are looking for help with images in some way.

I was fooling around again recently with some “Wee Planet” stereographic panoramas (previously mentioned here), and came across some tutorials on doing this with Photoshop/GIMP using a Polar Coordinate distortion filter.

I’ve got strange habits to fall asleep at night. I personally like to have a movie or tv show I’m really familiar with running to fall asleep to. In college I had a VHS tape(!) of Blade Runner that I would play every, single, night, to fall asleep to. If I assume I made it about halfway through before I fell asleep on average (sometimes I started it at a random point in the middle), that means I have seen Bladerunner about 700 times (give or take about 50) so far!

Lately it’s been Futurama for me.

In my previous post on Color Curves for Toning/Grading, I looked at the basics of what the Curves dialog lets you do in GIMP. I had been meaning to revisit the subject with a little more restraint (the color curve in that post was a little rough and gross, but it was for illustration so I hope it served its purpose).

I’m also trying something new for me for a change, and that is a video. I don’t normally like video tutorials personally, but in this case I thought it might help to illustrate the text below. You’ll find the video embedded at the end of the tutorial (or head over there right now to watch it).

I was in the process of including my last tutorial on curves in some forum posts around the internet when I visited gimpchat.com again. After I had posted my link I was perusing the tutorials board when I came across user lylejk’s post about implementing a true pseudo-grey on images in GIMP.

Color has this amazing ability to evoke emotional responses from us. From the warm glow of a sunny summer afternoon to a cool refreshing early evening in fall. We associate colors with certain moods, places, feelings, and memories (consciously or not).

Book have been written on color, and I am in no ways even remotely qualified to speak on it. So I won’t.

Instead I am here today to maybe help shed some light on the use of the Curves tool in GIMP.

A while back I was too cheap (lazy?) to get around to purchasing some speedlights and in typical DIY fashion for me, I figured I could replicate most results using nothing more than a flashlight. So one evening with my friend Sean and his wife, we decided to try out some long exposure light painting ideas.

To be clear, the term “light painting” is often used to describe painting light onto an image where the bulb is visible, and used to create something visual in the final result. This is NOT what I am referring to here. I’ve seen plenty that are nice, but I don’t personally have much interest in doing this:

I recently shot a wedding for a friend and found myself with a few hundred images in RAW format, of which I processed the handful that I liked. Due to Flickr increasing the maximum file sizes you can upload to 50MB, I went ahead and saved my final results as lossless PNG images.

However, I also wanted to upload the images to a photo printing service that apparently does not accept PNGs as a valid photo file. (stupid AdoramaPix…).

So the question became, how can I batch convert all of the PNG images into JPG images on the windows command line?