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!

About a two months ago I was approached by Victor Grigas, a video producer for the Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit that supports Wikipedia), about using some of the techniques I had previously discussed to create 2.5D parallax video images from single photographs. The intention was to use these 2.5D videos as part of their first ever “Year in Review” video:

Some of you may be familiar with G’MIC, the rather extensive image processing language created by David Tschumperlé that has a very popular plug-in for GIMP.

If you’re a fan, here’s a nice little treat for you. David has started a blog about image processing with open source software:

http://opensource.graphics

If you’d like a front seat to some of the more technically interesting things going on behind the scenes at G’MIC, this would be a good blog to follow I think. He’s already come out of the gate with a neat 3D colorcube investigation of some images (seen above, Mairi).

So Jehan Pages contacted me a little while ago about participating in a project to produce a “Libre Calendar”. Once he described the idea, it was an easy choice to join up and help out!

Through his non-profit LILA in France, he has assembled 6 artists to produce works specifically for this calendar (Disclaimer: I’m one of the artists):

I was working on the About page over on PIXLS.US the other night. I was including some headshots of myself and one of Rolf Steinort when I got pulled off onto yet another tangent (this happens often to me).

This time I was thinking of those awesome hand-painted(!) portraits used by the Wall Street Journal by the artist Randy Glass.

Of course, the problem was that I had neither the time or skill to hand paint a portrait in this style.

I’ve been working on something, and I figured that I should share it with anyone who actually reads the stuff I publish here.

I originally started writing here as a small attempt at bringing tutorials for doing high-quality photography using F/OSS to everyone. So far, it’s been amazing and I’ve really loved meeting and getting to know many like-minded folks.

I’m not leaving. Having just re-read that previous paragraph makes it sound like I am. I’m not.

I was thinking about other ways I fiddle with Luminosity Masks recently, and I thought it might be fun to talk about some other ways to use them when looking at your images.

My previous ramblings about Luminosity Masks:

• Getting Around in GIMP - Luminosity Masks
• Getting Around in GIMP - Luminosity Masks Revisited

If you remember from my previous look at Luminosity Masks, the idea is to create masks that correspond to different luminous levels in your image (roughly the lightness of tones). Once you have these masks, you can make adjustments to your image and isolate their effect to particular tonal regions easily.

So, the last time I talked about LinuxPro Magazine was about having a simple give-away of the promotional copies I had received of their GIMP Handbook issue. At that time, I joked with the editor that surely it couldn’t be complete without anything written by me. :)

Then he called me out on my joke and asked me if I wanted to write an article for them.

So, I’ve got an article in LinuxPro Magazine Special Edition #18: Free From XP!

Yes, more fun things you can do with Wavelet Scales.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a bit (or just read through any of my previous postprocessing tutorials), then you should be familiar with Wavelet Decompose. I use them all the time for skin retouching as well as other things. I find that being able to think of your images in terms of detail scales opens up a new way of approaching problems (and some interesting solutions).

A short discussion on the GIMP Users G+ community led the member +Marty Keil to suggest a tutorial on using wavelets for other things (particularly sharpening). Since I tend to use wavelet scales often in my processing (including sharpening), I figured I would sit down and enumerate some ways to use them, like:

• Skin Smoothing & Retouching
• Sharpening and Local Contrast Enhancement
• Removing Stains/Colors/Tones

I know that I primarily write about photography here, but sometimes something comes along that’s too important to pass up talking about.

Krita just happens to be one of those things. Krita is a digital painting and sketching software by artists for artists. While I love GIMP and have seen some incredible work by talented artists using it for painting and sketching, sometimes it’s better to use a dedicated tool for the job. This is where Krita really shines.