It’s About Time

For almost a decade I had been using blogger to host my personal website. That just didn’t seem to make sense any more, and I wanted an opportunity to fiddle with things a bit. I thought it might be fun to put some constraints on designing a new site for myself while migrating to something better.

I’m leaving these images of P!nk that I used during my initial design and styling because I like them. If I have to keep looking at temp images while fixing CSS rules, they might as well be ones I enjoy looking at. (And I enjoy looking at them because they remind me of my wife - not the other way around…)

A little while back I had a big streak of averaging anything I could get my hands on. I am still working on a couple of larger averaging projects (here’s a small sneak peek - guess the movie?):

I’m trying out visualizing a movie by mean averaging all of the cuts. Turns out movies have way more than I thought - so it might be a while until I finish this one… :)

On the other hand, here’s something neat that is recently finished…

What’s been going on?! A bunch!

In case you’ve not noticed around here, I’ve been transitioning tutorials and photography related stuff over to PIXLS.US.

I built that site from scratch, so it’s taken a bit of my time… I’ve also been slowly porting some of my older tutorials that I thought would still be useful over there. I’ve also been convincing all sorts of awesome folks from the community to help out by writing/recording tutorials for everyone, and we’ve already got quite a few nice ones over there:

I checked the first post I had made on PIXLS.US while I was building it, and it appears it was around the end of August, 2014. I had probably been working on it for at least a few weeks before that. Basically, it’s almost been about 10 months since I started this crazy idea.

Finally, we are “officially” launched and live. Phew!

Help!

I don’t normally ask for things from folks who read what I write here. I’m going to make an exception this time. I spent a lot of time building the infrastructure for what I hope will be an awesome community for free-software photographers.

David Tschumperlé has a blog over at OpenSource.graphics and it appears that after releasing G’MIC 1.6.2.0 he had some time to write down and share some thoughts about the last 10 months of working on G’MIC.

He covers a lot of ground in this post (as you can imagine for not having reported anything in a long time while working hard on the project). He talks about some neat new functionality and filters added like color curves in others colorspaces, comics colorization, color transfer (from one image to another), website for film emulation (yay!), foreground extraction, engrave, triangulation, and much more.

After a bunch of hard work by someone not me (darix), there’s finally a neat solution for commenting on PIXLS.US. An awesome side effect is that we get a great forum along with it.

Discourse

On the advice from the same guy that convinced me to build PIXLS using a static site generator (see above), I ended up looking into, and finally going with, a Discourse forum.

The actual forum location will be at: discuss.pixls.us

Anyone who has been reading here for a little bit knows that I tend to spend most of my skin retouching time with wavelet scales. I’ve written about it originally here, then revisited it as part of an Open Source Portrait tutorial, and even touched upon the theme one more time (sorry about that - I couldn’t resist the “touching” pun).

Because I haven’t possibly beat this horse dead enough yet, I have now also compiled all of those thoughts into a new post over on PIXLS.US that is now pretty much done:

This is old news but I just realized that I hadn’t really addressed it before. The previous work I had done on Film Emulation with G’MIC in GIMP (here and here) are also now available in RawTherapee directly! You’ll want to visit this page on the RawTherapee wiki to see how it works, and to download the film emulation collection to use.

This is handy for those that may work purely in RawTherapee or that don’t want to jump into GIMP just to do some color toning. It’s a pretty big collection of emulations, so hopefully you’ll be able to find something that you like. Here’s the list of what I think is in the package (there may be more there now):

Photographer Ian Hex was kind enough to be a guest writer over on PIXLS.US with a fantastic tutorial on creating and using Luminosity Masks in the raw processing software darktable.

You can find the new tutorial over on PIXLS.US:

PIXLS.US: Luminosity Masking in darktable

Readers who’ve been here for a little while might recognize my friend Mairi, who has modeled for me before. This time I had a brief opportunity for her to sit for me again for a few shots before she jet-setted her way over to Italy for a while.

I was specifically looking to produce the lede image you see above, Mairi Troisième. In particular, I was chasing some chiaroscuro portrait lighting that I had in mind for a while and I was quite happy with the final result!