I received a few Promo copies of the Linux Pro Magazine GIMP Handbook Special Edition in the mail a couple of weeks ago. I’ve just been too busy to sit down and have a look at it in depth.

I did give it a few flip-throughs when I had a moment, though.

Sarah has been shooting with my friend Brian for a while now. He and I recently tried to organize to shoot together, but unfortunately he was called away at the last moment. Which was a bummer, because I had also just purchased a 60" Photek Softlighter II, and was super-eager to put it through its paces…

Luckily Sarah was still good to do the shoot! (There were some initial hiccups, but we were able to sort them out and finally get started).

The world probably needs another DIY ringflash tutorial like they need a hole in the head. There’s already quite a few different tutorials around explaining how to create one…

So here’s mine! :)

At LGM this year I hacked together a quick ringflash using parts I picked up in a €1 store while walking through the city with Rolf (he helped me pick out and find parts - Thank You Rolf!). I built one while I was there because it was way less hassle than trying to bring mine from home all the way to Leipzig, Germany (they don’t really collapse into any sort of smaller size, so they’re cumbersome to transport).

So I was talking with G’MIC creator David Tschumperlé the other day and thought it might be handy to have a way to create a montage of images (similar to the montage command in Imagemagick), but to have more control over the montage layout with automatic image fitting.

In the past, if I wanted to montage a series of images of different sizes, I would do it manually in GIMP. What I was proposing to David was to programatically deal with fitting images given some manual input from the user.

I know that he usually works quite fast, but he blew me away with how quick he got into the idea this time. From describing it one afternoon, it was about a day to get something working. (Add another half a day after I gave him a hard time about making the edges fit regardless of padding… Sorry David!)

What an amazing trip!

I was half joking when I mentioned to schumaml on irc a few months ago that I should come out to LGM2014 and do a photography workshop using GIMP. Half joking turned into half-serious, and half-serious turned into “holy crap, I better buy my plane tickets!"…

The LGM team accepted a workshop proposal by Tobias Ellinghaus and myself to talk about darktable and FL/OSS photography workflows. I was also presenting alongside David Tschumperlé and Jérome Boulanger on a retrospective look at G’MIC over the last couple of years! (The title of the presentation was “A 2012-2013 retrospective of the G’MIC project : New features from artists/developers collaborations”).

I had been fiddling with creating these 2.5D parallax animated photos for quite a few years now, but there had recently been a neat post by Joe Fellows that brought it into the light again.

The reason I had originally played with the idea is part of a long, sad story involving my wedding and an out-of-focus camcorder that resulted in my not having any usable video of my wedding (in 2008). I did have all of the photographs, though. So as a present to my wife, I was going to re-create the wedding with these animated photos (I’m 99% sure she doesn’t ever read my blog - so if anyone knows her don’t say anything! I can still make it a surprise!).

So I had been dabbling with creating these in my spare time over a few years, and it was really neat to see the work done by Joe Fellows for the World Wildlife Fund. Here is that video:

WWF PARALLAX SEQUENCE from Make Productions on Vimeo.
He followed that up with a great video walking through how he does it:

I’m writing here today to walk through the methods I had been using for a while to create the same effect, but entirely with Free/Open Source Software…

I had written last week about building the latest G’MIC beta to test out the fancy-schmancy new patch-based inpainting algorithm that the team had cooked up. In the process of building it and testing it, I thought it might be useful for other GIMP users out there to briefly touch on the subject of installing and managing Script-Fu scripts and Plug-ins.

Plug-Ins/Scripts Folder Location

GIMP has a very handy feature that’s tucked away in the Preferences window, and that is the ability to have GIMP search for Plug-Ins and Scripts wherever you want to put them. You can access this through the Preferences:

One of the advantages of hanging around people smarter than me is that I get to see some really neat things as they are being developed. Lucky for me, +David Tschumperlé let’s me see interesting things that they are hacking on over at G’MIC.

Of course, if you’re reading me occasionally you’ll remember that last time I got a chance to work on something with G’MIC, we ended up making some fun film emulation presets. This time I’m not involved other than to play, and it’s really neat!

Ok, I’m sorry I’ve been so quiet! I’m not Missing in Action, I’ve just been busy with some other things…

As a matter of fact, here are those other things!

The team over at GIMP Magazine have released their latest issue, and check out that handsome gentleman on the cover!