Photo and Pictures

This is an old interview but its nice to have in mind that digital photo and editing is always developing. Even though you should stay clear of being to technical and think more of the picture than having the right equipment.

Robert Scoble interviews Marc Levoy of Stanford University on the future of technology in the remediation of images. It is very exciting to be able to tighten up the image afterwards. The question is how far can technology take photography. Whatever camera you will probably not be able to compose the image aesthetically, or create something with feeling. Maybe a baboon can take a equivalent photo as you…

Aviary is an online editing service that now is free to use. They have taken a step forward to make the service greater and for you to use online. I think they are having difficulties with lots of competers like Fotoflexer, Pixlr and at least Photoshop. All want a piece of the cake.

Aviary are taking the step making editing your way to earn money of a small piece of the puzzle. Making editing fun and letting you have a piece of the fortune. They want us to create and become more together wether your designing photo, art or sound.

Use Gimp and G’mic to warholize your own photo. I took my photo and used the filters in G’mic to make it like this. Using G’Mic is both fun and can be useful. I use it both to get rid of noise and sharpen my images, but of course you can have fun with alot of different filters.

I strongly recommend that you use filters like this and play around with layers. You better learn the fundamentals of your editing program since it will learn how to make your photos pop. The old masters like Ansel Adams stayed very long in the darkroom. Your darkroom will be your editing program.

Nothing is making you picture more into it than editing your photo. What program you use is of less importance but it will make your photo so much better. The same picture can really make it if you edit it to create your style.

I newly used Twtpoll where you can create a poll making a connection with your readers on Twitter. Where i am on now and then. You can probably find me and a good photo link on Paradox66. Here is the poll.

The thing about the service is that you can relative easy get some results over a question and i did that with some Pictures to prove a point. Namely that editing do can lift your picture but you probably get the same result. Not all will like it since our taste is different. Some like chocolate and some like vanilla.

Inkscape is a vector-drawing program, which is open source and free to use. 0.47 version was released last year and there are a lot of exciting upgrades have been made. You can use the Gaussian Blur filter in, ie you can do things you mark blurry. Additionally, it has increased the speed with which it is displayed on the screen. The best is still the major improvement has been made to vectorize photos in color. The program has become easier to use and faster. Now 0.48 is planned in 2010.

Background Information
Vector graphics are different from bitmap and on the way to store simple vector graphics elements to it to be displayed rather than each pixel. So a line is stored, therefore, that a description of the line. This means that vector graphics are scalable both up and down without making it ugly.

The program is easy to use and it is also very easy to do gradient fills. If you start with two colors so it’s easy to add colors that are shades between them. It’s also easy to control how the gradient looks.

I have been thinking of making stickers to the car and when I do not think it is good enough to enlarge my banner outright. It will be ugly and pixelate. Therefore, I tested to vectorize my log so I can send it to the press. The printer can scale my banner so I can get it in the right size.

You pull up your image in Inkscape and then you get it in a frame When you vectorizes bitmap in Inkskape makes about 15 Scans, Colors and Tick tick off “Smooth”, you should get a nice vectorization. Here you get to experiment as it depends on the original image, and how detailed you want it.

Rawtherapee, which are one of many free raw converters there is. Development have taken a new course and lets hope its fasten its development. Now its a good software and everything is steered widely another way. This is the program to use if you shoot Raw and want free software.

Lets hope it is up to standard because Adobe is releasing good upgrades all the time. I myself have start using Bibble 5 Pro since its organising features. But we need a good organiser editing softawrae that is open source too.

Lets hope it will push the software producers to new heights and don’t let them relax too much. The features roadmap seems extensively and we hope that the open source community welcomes its new member.

Roadmap of algorithm changes planned for V3.0 (approximately in sequence of implementation):

– new curve editor with parametric curve support

– per-image selectable demosaicing method + brand new demosaicing methods

– new color denoising method

– new luminance denoising method

– automatic C/A correction

– purple fringing correction

– perspective correction

– bad pixel removal

Foto: Henningklevjer. Raw or rawformat have been used for so long as digital SLRs have been. Few compact digital cameras have the option of saving in Raw, although there are some who can. Rawformat or Raw will look different depending on which camera you have chosen, but the idea is that you post the setting with the white balance, temperature, contrast and much more so that you can concentrate on image composition.

Rawformat is different depending on which camera you have, but what are the files containing information from the CCD or CMOS element that captures light and recorded as a voltage. It is actual the tension that is stored in raw file. It makes you get all the information and can process it later. Rawformat require conversion so that you get an extra step forward to the finished image.

Most cameras are otherwise store images in JPG format. It is important to be aware that the Jpg is a lossy format that is if you save an image several times, then the compressed and thus destroy the information each time. So if you upload a jpg image in your image editing program so the image becomes more compressed and therefore have less information when you then save it again as jpg. If you make the process, the picture continues to deteriorate. Try it. This is not true with Gimp, but many other programs.

Which format should I then use the Raw or Jpg?
It depends a little on how you shoot and what you want with your photos. In the beginning when I had bought my camera so I photographed lots and LOTS pictures were weird and blurry. I recommend novice photographers to shoot jpg and shoot lots. It also enables you also see directly what the settings do for the image. Use jpg-format early to get to know your camera and the various options. Additionally, the workflow becomes easier because the image does not need any pretreatment. You probably get back to Jpg as you learn to expose right.

When one begins to learn to deal with his camera and its image-editing tools so I think you definitely should move on to take photos in Rawformat. Mainly because you are not so dependent on you after the event can adjust the picture as you want it without losing any information. Go back to Jpg if you shoot with Olympus, while Raw is better if you use Canon or Nikon.

When you want to get started, it is important to think about what they feed on their edits to streamline the whole thing. It so far has been a little circumstance is to handle many images at once. Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture for a simpler workflow with Rawformat.

Conclusion
Use jpgformat to learn your camera or if you are sure to use the images only on the Web or to the family album. Use Raw if you want to be sure of getting the right exposure and be able to work with the pictures afterwards. If you would like a fast workflow may still be preferable jpg and if you want full control as Raw is better. The only one who can say what you want to use you depending on your needs. There is no right or wrong.

Hint: Both IrfanView and XnView is good for an overview of your Rawbilder and manage simple, quick edits and transfers the images to jpg format.

Update: Rawtherapee 2.4.1 is free to download and use.

Lightroom costs about 2800 SEK.

Read more about Raw: Wikipedia, Wikipedia about Jpg; Luminous Landscape “Understanding Raw files”, Ken Rockwell about Jpg vs Raw, Photocritc says his meaning about Raw

Photomatix releases is product as Light version and you can see the difference from the fully fledge version. The budget version might come in as a good alternative for HDR.

Otherwise if you want to do HDR for free FDR tools and Qtpfsgui are the only free alternative and the results is often not so good if you don´t know what you are doing. There is of course a free trial you can use for awhile.

Most people covers the two or more pics in Photoshop and HDR software may be too complex for the common user. You could use Photoshop or Gimp for a cheap price and use layermasks to get a good exposure using two or more pics. People tend to overdo it because that they don’t know better.

Via: Photography Bay

It is very easy to smooth out an horistont with Gimp if you accidentally hold the camera angle. In the picture here you can see the horizon clearly is oblique. We choose measurement tool and it is the tool I am pointing to the left and the right is the rotation tool, which we shall use later. After selecting the measurement tool i drag out a line along the horizon. You can see down to the bottom edge to see how many degrees to the horizon leans.

Now select the rotation tool and get a menu where you can fill in how many degrees you should rotate with. You choose of course, the angle you’ve measured up. Once you have rotated the image or layer so you get a problem with empty spaces in the corners that you can remove either by cropping the image or clone from which i take some from the surrounding image. I did a little of each. The grass in the lower left corner cloned I get there a little grass from above the empty field.

Original Tutorial: Open Source Photography, where you’ll find more tutorials for the Gimp.

Paint.Net was clearly good when I tested it last and now it has been further developed. Just newly released in November there final release. Important to note is that the program requires Windows XP SP2 and no other system does it for. There are layers and curves, which features I myself think are very important tools in image processing. It can not so many image formats which can be restrictive, but it is easy to get started and working with images. One thing I thought was very nice was the history which clearly saw where we had to step.

You can use the magic wand to select areas in a simple manner. Cloning is also a feature and now to the latest beet, you can also draw gradients and you can let the levels to float together with odd-dated levels. There are just some of the features. Are you using Windows XP SP2, and looking for a simple, free image editing program Paint.Net is definitely something for you. It seems also developed a lot and has a lively forum with lots of users who offers tips on how to use the program. I myself is using Gimp for sure.