Liquid Rescaling – Very Cool.

Saw this excellent and interesting demo of something dubbed ‘Liquid Rescaling’. In essence it allows you to stretch or compress an image but keeps some semblance of proportion for the objects within the image. It’s hard to describe but imagine you had a 4×6 image, but there was an ugly garbage can on the right hand side. With this tool, you could crop off the right 2 inches (leaving you with a 4×4 image) but then stretch it back to 4×6 *without* fattening up the people in the picture.

It uses algorithms to detect areas in the photo where it can stretch while minimizing distortion. It’s really quite neat. Even neater is the fact that there is a plugin for the GIMP which uses the tool. If you watch the demo you will be amazed at what you can achieve.

I also believe that there is no equivalent tool in the beloved Photoshop that does this. 😉

Blogged with Flock

Photographic Inspiration

I haven’t done a lot of photography related posts lately. Unsurprisingly, that’s because I haven’t done a lot of photography lately. 😉

Not that I have lost interest mind you, but anybody who reads this blog regularly will know my interests shift around all the time. Sometimes it takes a little creative inspiration and awe to get me moving again on certain fronts. This gallery by Nick Brandt is just one of those things.

While his photographic subjects might be dramatic to start with (how often do you get to photograph lions, elephants and zebras in the wild?), his use of tone and somewhat dramatic burning and dodging techniques add a huge amount of drama to each and every image.

I’ve always been a fan of post-processing when it’s well done; and in Nick Brandt’s case, it sure is. And given the tools you get in the GIMP and Photoshop, applying these techniques to improve your own images is not so hard. I’ve always found John Arnold’s Photowalkthrough tutorials to be incredibly useful in teaching techniques that can really enhance your post processing work.

Expect to see more photography related posts here in the future.

Blogged with Flock

Inkscape Screencast 5 – Photo Popping Fun

I finally managed to find some time and figured out some (very) rudimentary video and audio editing skills so I put together my 5th Inkscape screencast. A few weeks back I read a post at instructables.com which described how to create a 3D effect with your photos using the GIMP or Photoshop. Naturally I thought I’d give it a try in Inkscape and lo and behold it was pretty darn easy. The toughest part is finding a suitable photograph that works well for this effect.

You’ll also have to indulge me for about the first minute or so of the screencast where I’ve created a *really really* hacked together intro using only 3 ingredients:

Inkscape + Beryl + Music

This past week, I found some really cool music by Arthur Yoria over at Magnatune. I purchased the album and used track 10 for the intro music **. Then I decided I’d simply use Inkscape to create a screencast video intro. I spiced it up a bit using the Beryl zoom feature as well ;). It’s a little over a minute of hacked together badness.

Don’t laugh too hard! And let me know how much you liked it or hated it. 😉

I also figured out how to use Avidemux to extract the audio tracks, Audacity to mix in the music and adjust levels and then Avidemux once again to create the final video. Hopefully you’ll find it somewhat interesting and helpful.

** If you watch the screencast and like the music, Magnatune allows me to legally provide full quality copies to 3 people. If you’re interested in getting the album (for free), send me an email (rfquerinATgmailDOTcom)and I will provide you with the link so you can download the album which is available in a wide variety of formats too. I’ve listened to it quite a bit this week and I really like it. Magnatune rocks!

Also, huge thanks to Alan Pope for his great post on creating screencasts which let me know exactly how to use Avidemux for my purposes – great stuff.

Here’s the screencast…

Antibiotics and Another Source of Inkscape/Gimp Goodness

It’s amazing how many people are getting sick around here these days. Both at work and at home I’ve watched people suffering with the flu, colds, pinkeye, and now I end up with a top-notch, Grade A ear infection. It’s so easy to forget how much a throbbing earache can stand in the way of getting things accomplished.

Anyways, I’m poppin’ the antibiotics as of this morning and I feel another Inkscape screencast in me waiting to get out. Look for something this weekend (maybe).

On the subject of Inkscape, check out Ryan Lerch’s blog which gives a good dose of GIMP and Inkscape goodness to those interested.

Gimparoo!

From the “Why hasn’t this been done before?” file…

If you’re a fan of the GIMP image editing program, you might want to check out Gimparoo! which, besides having an ultra-cool name, is a new blog dedicated to “Adapting Photoshop tutorials for The GIMP”. I found it via the Ubuntu Blog. He’s currently basking in his new found popularity so give him a visit and continue to make his day 🙂

It looks to be a very useful feed for those looking to expand their GIMP repertoire.

Working Tablet + GIMP = :)

Back about a week ago, I posted about the trouble I was having getting my Wacom tablet to work correctly with the GIMP. It wasn’t moving over the full extents of the screen, and it wasn’t getting recognized as an extended input device in the GIMP (which lets you use pressure-sensitivity).

As you can see by the image above, I now have it working. But I almost forgot to post about getting it to work. Thanks to Donncha for sending me a comment on that previous post which reminded me. BTW there are some awesome photos on Donncha’s blog, you should check them out.

So here’s the story. I cleaned up my xorg.conf file so that any references to serial or tablet-pc based entries in the wacom sections of the file were deleted. I also uninstalled and reinstalled the wacom-tools package as well.

But I’m not sure which (if any) of those things were the problem. My other problem was (and is) is that restarting X after each modification didn’t seem to work properly. Normally (for the Ubuntu distro anyway) you hit Ctrl-Backspace to restart X. On my machine, this logs me out, returns me to the GDM login prompt as expected. But on re-logging in, it can never get back to the desktop. I end up stuck at a light blue screen with full mouse movement but no desktop to speak of. The only option left is to reboot.

So being the newbie that I am, I was making changes to my xorg.conf file and then logging out and logging back in. Apparently, this does NOT restart the Xserver which means any of the changes I had made were not ‘taking’.

The long and short of it is that I cleaned up the xorg.conf file, reinstalled the wacom-tools package and then the next morning when I started up the machine, the tablet was working fine. The Gimp recognized it and full pressure sensitivity was enabled.

Sorry there was no magical answer here. But I can say that there are several good threads on getting tablet devices to work. If you want to see what my current xorg.conf file looks like, I posted it right here in a message thread on ubuntuforums.org. It seems to work flawlessly for me right now so check it out if you’re having problems.

Note: I have a Wacom Graphire3 tablet, a miniature notebook sized MS mouse (for my daughter), and a normal sized mouse, all of which are USB( and all of which are always hooked up and all of which seem to work perfectly now). I’m running Ubuntu Edgy with Beryl installed. If you have a serial model or are using a different distribution or setup your mileage may vary.