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GIMPing along

Mar 252011

After GIMP treatment

As a software developer, by trade, I know how much time it takes to do software and how frustrating, and exhilarating it can be at the same time. When I leave my office, the last thing that I’m thinking about is writing more code. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t even come into the thought process …

The current price of Adobe Photoshop CS5 is $699 for a full version. Quite pricey. Given, I think, that most photographers don’t need all of the power available in CS5, Lightroom will do. It’s what I use for 99.95% of my editing, though I do own a copy of CS4.

While I was in Texas visiting my friend, Richard, he asked me about GIMP and how it compared to Photoshop. I had to answer honestly: I have no idea. However, I made him a promise that I’d check it out and get back with him about it. This is my attempt, in writing, to do that.

I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time trying to do all sorts of cool things because, quite frankly, I don’t know how to do all sorts of cool things in Photoshop. Why try it with GIMP?

This morning when I got out of my car, I took a photograph of some light coming into the window of a bar close to the lot. I liked the photo and decided to spend a bit of time getting it to look like I really wanted. Mind you, this is an iPhone shot.

As you can see, the before and after are quite a bit different. I was going for an early morning feel, complete with somewhat mysterious and inky shadows. I like inky shadows a lot … just enough to make you wonder what’s in them. Here’s what I did with the photo:

Cropped out the ATM machine and the automobile reflections as well as my own reflection.
Changed aspect ratio from 4:3 to 3:2
Changed the levels to give the inky feeling.
Straightened the image.
Adjusted curves, slightly, to give more contrast.
Added another layer with Gaussian blur to give it that dreamy look. I forget what that technique is called.
Used the eyedropper to pull in the color of the wall near the vases.
Used the air brush to fill in those burned out areas on the wall, just a little bit and give it a warmer feeling.
Used layer masks to lighten the shadows in selected areas.

Now, that’s about as far as I will usually go when modifying a photo. Fortunately, I can do most of that in Lightroom, save for the air brush stuff.

All in all, it took me about 45 minutes. It wouldn’t have taken that long if I had known exactly where the tools were, how they worked, and how to set certain parameters that I wanted to set.

In short, these developers have done a fantastic job in making it pretty easy for a PS user to come over and use GIMP, a free product that gets the job done!

For you raw shooters: I shoot JPEG. So sue me! I don’t know, nor do I care, if GIMP supports raw files. Please, no flames. Can’t we all just get along??? LOL!

In the end, Richard, it’s worth checking out. It will get the job done and I’m sure that there is so much more that you can do with it that are far beyond my abilities or learning.

Now how do you use this damn thing?

Humor, Photography, Techy Stuff 12 Responses »

Jan 082010

Evening Flight

Standing calmly near the edge of the Ashley River, waiting with eager anticipation as the sun began to drop below the horizon, I mounted my D300 on the tripod, framed up the scene before me and then a thought occurred to me. I’ve not used auto bracketing in a long, long, time. As the contrast was fairly high, I figured that this would be a good thing to do. Later, I could come back home and combine a couple of exposures using Photoshop and have a nice looking image.

For some reason, my mind would only bring up memories of how to do it on my D2X, which I sold more than a year ago. I hunted through the various menus and could not remember how to do it. Damn! I always carry my book with me, but I never want to waste time when the sun is sinking trying to thumb through a book and figure something out!

All of my simplifying left me a bit clueless. Suddenly, I started laughing out loud and thinking to myself: Dufus! What would you do if you had a film camera that didn’t have all of that cool technology in it? Of course, I’d change it to manual and kick it old school, which is exactly what I did.

Sometimes that guy behind the camera is so funny! What a knucklehead! Of course, when I got home, one of the first things that I did, while the photos were being copied to the computer, was look to see how to do bracketing. Maybe I’ll be ready the next time, assuming that it isn’t too long between those times.

Oddly enough, there were a few of the bracketed ones that I liked, but none quite as much as this one, which isn’t bracketed. I was looking at the clouds after the sun had dipped below the horizon and noticed this jet flying through what looked like a corridor between the clouds.

Discontinued

Photography, Techy Stuff 13 Responses »

Oct 152009

Well, it seems as if the commercially viable life of a digital camera is about 18 months, perhaps 2 years, depending upon how fast technology moves. The D300 was introduced in August of 2007. I bought mine in February of 2008.

Although I am about a month late in hearing about it, I see that Nikon has discontinued the D300, in favor of the D300s. The main differences between the two are the the ‘s’ model has HD video and a Live View button. The sensor and, for the most part, the entire camera are the same. Oh, and the D300 supports dual card slots. One for a CF card, the other for an SD card. There’s nothing here that would make me want to trade.

There is an interesting feature, Quiet Shutter Release mode. From Nikon’s site they say:

Also added to the D300s is a Quiet Shutter Release mode, which substantially reduces the sound of the mirror while shooting. Quickly accessed by selecting “Q” on the release mode dial, this feature is ideal for the photographer who wishes to remain unobtrusive.

I wonder how much quieter it would really be. Certainly not as quiet as a rangefinder! Anyway, I’ll be keeping mine, after all, basketball season is around the corner!

Geomet’r GPS: Remarkably accurate

Photography, Techy Stuff 7 Responses »

Apr 152009

Field of dreams
Some months ago I purchased a Geomet’r GPS for my camera. Thanks for my good buddy, Earl, who has every possible gadget that I guy could want, I decided to buy one. Actually, it didn’t take much arm bending to do it.

For the most part, it just sits in the bag and waits to be used. It’s not an every day tool. It is useful, however, for marking your location very accurately. Combine that with the ability to click, from within Lightroom, and go directly to Google maps and it’s pretty amazing. Click in the above image to see where I took this picture. It is my little field across the street that I’ve been writing about. If you zoom down to the street level view, by clicking on the little yellow guy, you’ll see it. If you drag and rotate the image, you’ll see my apartment building. It’s the first one next to the parking lot! How’s that for accuracy? The coordinates where the pin was placed is almost exactly where I was standing!

I could have really used this when I went to White Sands National Monument. Do you have an idea of how much one sand dune looks like another!

Not a bad little gadget for $149 USD. They seem to be out of stock everywhere, though. Not much to say today. It’s April 15th and the tax man cometh and taketh away from me!

Exposing to the right

Photography, Techy Stuff 10 Responses »

Apr 022009

Mouse over image to see ‘exposed to right’.
I find that paper towels are not a very interesting subject, in and of themselves. I’ve never pursued one in the wild. I guess that they could be interesting if you were a product photographer for a company like Bounty or perhaps Brawny. However, they do serve a useful purpose photographically. No, I’m not talking about wiping off your camera after a bit of mist or rain, but in getting the most out of your camera’s exposure capabilities.

I’ve seen this article before. If you’ve not read it, head on over and check it out. It is interesting reading, I think. I kept meaning to try it one day, but never did. A couple of weeks ago, I finally did try it and that experiment put together a few pieces that had been floating around in my head. It was, so to speak, the missing piece of the puzzle.

Histograms and stuff
I’m not going to get technical here, but this bears mentioning. Most digital cameras have a mode where you can view the histogram, which shows a distribution of the light levels of a particular shot. Conventional wisdom says to expose ‘right’, which means get your histogram as close to the right side as you can without blowing out pixels. There is also another mode, highlights, that will blink if you are blowing out pixels. I’ve found that on my Nikon cameras, this highlight mode is very conservative, warning you almost a full stop, seemingly 2, before you really start to lose pixels. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.

But what does this have to do with paper towels?
Well… If you do the paper towel test with your camera, you’ll find out how much leeway you have on the highlight side for exposure. Using this test you can see where your camera stops producing highlight details. For my D300 that’s about 3.3 stops of over exposure. Should I go beyond that, I start to lose highlight detail.

But you’ll have to use your spot meter!
In order to get the best advantage out of this, you’ll have to use the spot meter capability on your camera. If you’ve never used it before, it can be a new experience for you and quite useful. You simply point your camera at the brightest highlight area where you’d like to keep detail, take what the meter says, dial it up 3 more stops, take the picture.

Why is this important?
It seems that digital cameras are much more forgiving on the high side of things. Once you start to get into the shadows, you have to compete with digital noise, making shadow detail pretty dicey, especially at the higher ISO settings. In the above image, the sunlight was starting to shine pretty brightly and the contrast was pretty high, so I placed the camera in spot meter mode, pointed it at the clump of clover, which was the brightest part of the scene, set the camera to overexpose by 2 stops, and took the picture. Of course, the highlight warning was blinking, but I simply ignored it.

When I got it back into Lightroom, I moved the slider to ‘underexpose’ the image by 2 stops and that brought back all of the details. Then, I could use the exposure brush to bring back the shadows to the right place. This technique has come in very handy, especially with brightly lit skies having cloud detail that I’d like to keep.

Another technique to add to your arsenal!

Nikon D300:An all weather camera.

D300 Impressions, Photography, SoFoBoMo 09, Techy Stuff 8 Responses »

Apr 012009

Singing in the rain
First, let me start with a disclaimer. I’m not advocating that you use your camera the way that I use mine. You have to do you and let me do me. Now, on with the show:

When I had my Nikon D2x, since it was Nikon’s flagship camera at the time, I used to take it out into the rain, and, snow, humidity, whatever. I figured that if they said that it was sealed against the weather, then it dang will better be, and it was! It was a great camera. Unfailing. Well, the D300 comes from good lineage! Nikon says of the D300:

Rugged magnesium-alloy construction: Along with advanced dust and moisture protection and a durable shutter mechanism: The D300 has been tested to 150,000 cycles making it the perfect choice for photographers who demand high performance and agility.

Hmmm: Advanced dust and moisture protection. Well, that sounds like a challenge to me. I’ve seen a few places where people talk about the weather proofing of the D300, but didn’t see where anyone had actually tried it. I saw on Luminous Landscape where Michael Reichmann talked about his experience on his Antarctic trip and how well the Nikon cameras did as a group in some tough conditions, but never had I seen any direct experience.

Three of the last four weekends, it has rained in Charlotte and I took advantage of every one of them. When I say rained, I mean it rained! The type of rain that would have you soaked in less than a minute or two. Unrelenting rain. Downpour! Perfect. I simply put on my boots, went out, found a place to take pictures, and let Nature have its way with me and my camera. I was not concerned about the camera, but was a little concerned about the lens. Both came through the ordeals just fine.

It was quite comical, to me at least, to see people cruising by in their cars, slowing down to see what moron was out shooting in heavy rain. Well, that moron was me. I was happily shooting away. Water was running over and off of my camera in small streams, down my forehead, around and through my eyes. I kept the sunshade on the lens and the camera pointed downward so as not to have to dry the lens … that would have been kind of tough anyway because there was barely a strip of dry cloth on me anywhere. I was soaked. Next time, I could use a rain poncho for myself! However, I’m pretty waterproof.

Anyway, it was a fun time in the rain. The temperature was about 70 degrees (21 degrees C for my Metric friends) and the rain was nice and warm. So, three times in a row, the D300 proved itself under less than ideal conditions … as did the Tamron 18-270mm! Well done, guys!

No. I do not use any type of cover over the camera. I guess that you could say that I trust Nikon’s statement! So far, no leaks and no dust on the sensor in a whole year! Not a speck of dust that I can see! I had thought of doing something about shooting in the rain for SoFoBoMo, but I cannot trust that it will rain a lot in may or June!

Lightroom 2.3 released

Photography, Techy Stuff 5 Responses »

Mar 032009

Wet Paint!
I cannot believe that I got this posted before Earl. He must be sleeping!

I just downloaded and installed the new version of Lightroom for Mac. Here are the fixes, according to Adobe:

In the Windows 64-bit version of Lightroom an sFTP upload process could cause Lightroom to crash.
Slideshows could return to the first image randomly during playback.
A memory leak could cause Lightroom to crash while attempting to process files with local adjustments.
Canon EOS 5D Mk II sRAW files could process with artifacts in Lightroom 2.2.
Lightroom 2.2 could cause disc burning to fail for Windows customers.

I see that they fixed the memory leak in the Windoze version, which I complained about in this post. I’m sure that the Windoze users will be happy about it. I’m happy to say that I’m no longer a Windoze user! Well, not quite true. I still have my desktop … for now.

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Paul Lester Photo

GIMPing along

Now how do you use this damn thing?

Discontinued

Geomet’r GPS: Remarkably accurate

Exposing to the right

Nikon D300:An all weather camera.

Lightroom 2.3 released

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