Layer Sandwich

There's a lot I've forgotten from my high school photography class (a lot more than I remember, I'd wager...), but one thing I do remember is the unit we did on negative sandwiches. Since digital was still rather expensive, we worked exclusively with film photography (yes, I know that sentence made me sound like I am reminiscing about the good ol' days when dirt was invented). The idea is to load two negatives into the enlarger and simultaneously create an exposure of both images.

The task is harder than it sounds, though--some photos work better than others: the contrast, how busy the background is, location of the subject in each photo, and a range of other factors determine whether you end up with a really cool image, or just a blob of indistinguishable nonsense. I seem to recall wasting rather a lot of expensive photo paper working to create a decent negative sandwich.

Much as I enjoy developing my own film, one of the beautiful things about digital photography is that I can create hundreds of terrible negative sandwiches without paying through the nose for my experiments. So, using layers in GIMP, I decided to throw together a few negative sandwiches--or perhaps layer sandwiches is more appropriate for digital? I've spared you the worst of them, but I think a few came out pretty well. Below are a few of the creations, as well as the original layered images. Some of these I think came out well. Others I think are examples of poor attempts.

As always, feedback is appreciated. I'd love to get your thoughts!

 

An angel statue from the Berliner Dom with the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe layered over it

View from under the arches of the Eiffel Tower, with view of the city from on top of the Tower layered on top

Building on a corner in Montemartre, Paris with a view of the city from Sacre Coeur layered on top 

View of a mountain in Alaska with an image of the state flower, Forget-Me-Nots, layered on top.

Fun with Filters

As you probably already know if you've been following my blog, I've been invited to contribute a photo collage to a calendar for charity (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out my previous post). The theme of the calendar is what peace means to each artist, and everyone else is contributing either a painting or a drawing. In order to make my collage fit with the rest of the calendar stylistically, I decided to teach myself all about filters for this project. For those who are reading my blog to pick up a few tips, you may find the next few paragraphs to be handy. For those who just want to see some pictures, this entry is particularly full of them! Below, I've posted the original photo (some with tweaks such as slight overexposure to make to make the filters work better), followed by the version I edited using filters. I've also posted two versions of the collage--same photos, arranged in different ways. I would really love some feedback if you have a strong initial reaction in favor of one versus the other. Finally, there are a few photos that aren't related to the collage--I just edited them for fun!

So, now to the technical tips. GIMP didn't come with some of the filters I was interested in applying, so I had to search around on the GIMP registry for a bit before I found the scripts I was looking for. I found these to be particularly useful. You'll need to have Python properly installed for these extra scripts to work, though (if you're confused by that statement, check out this entry). Download the second file (_246c.zip) and follow the instructions in the enclosed read me file. I will say, the scripts folder was not exactly where he said it would be, so I had to dig around a bit. I promise, though, it's there! Just snoop around in the GIMP files until you find it. If you're already running GIMP, you'll need to restart it before the scripts show up.

Ok, so you have your script installed. Now what? If you have a photo you're interested in editing open, take a look in the Script-fu menu option--you should see a bunch of new options under Photo Effects. There are also a few hidden in the regular filters menu for some reason--for example, the Stamp option, which gives you the ability to make a photo in the style of the iconic Che Guevara image, is hidden in Filters-->Decor-->Photo Effects-->Artist. No idea why. At any rate, just start playing around with all of these filters--me describing them in painful detail will never be as good as you fiddling around until you figure out what each little slider button on each filter does. A few pointers before you begin, though:

1. Don't save over your original! Give your experiment a new file name. Hopefully this is an obvious tip, but it's worth repeating...

2. One filter is probably not enough. On some of the photos below, I applied 10+ filters before I arrived at a photo I was happy with. For example, pastel, unsharp mask, oil painting, unsharp mask.

3. Don't be afraid to fiddle with the colors and really crank up the saturation--obviously it depends on the look you are going for, but I found that some of the images still looked way too much like photos until I started applying more vibrant colors. I actually did some color adjustments in Lightroom and then moved back to GIMP between filters for a few of the photos. The photo of the street below is a good example of this.

4. As you may have guessed from tip #2, I like to apply unsharp mask a lot. Turn the threshold down and the radius up quite a bit and it can really help to define the subject of the photo if applying an artistic filter made it look like a big ugly blob. Doesn't always work, but give it a shot.

5. I occasionally needed to edit a photo for color/contrast/exposure before editing to get the effect to work in the desired manner. The filters will be particularly uninspiring on low contrast or dark images. Don't be afraid to slightly overexpose or underexpose an image so that it will pop when you apply a filter.

6. I often use the smudge tool to remove some detail. Likewise, you may want to clone out some of the details. The photo of the children on the grey background and the buildings on the pastel street below are two good examples of this. Sometimes too much detail gives it away as a photo--try ditching some detail.

Alright, enough talk! Time for some photos.

Before:

 

After:

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Collage version 1:

Collage version 2:

And some extras, just for fun!

Creating a Collage

As you know if you read my previous post, I've been invited to contribute a photo collage to a 2013 calendar focused on the subject of peace. Obviously this will be occupying most of my creative time for the next few weeks, especially since I've never used GIMP to create a photo collage. So, if you're wondering how it's done, here goes:

1. In GIMP, select File-->New to create a new file

2. Select Image-->Scale Image and set the dimensions for your collage. You can set the dimensions in pixels, inches, etc in the first drop down menu on the right (next to the boxes where you can enter the width/height. Note: the aspect ratio is locked by default. To change this so that it doesn't automatically adjust the width when you set the height (or vice versa), click on the box that looks like chain next to the boxes for entering the value for width and height. Click the "scale" button at the bottom when you are satisfied with the dimensions.

3. You're ready to add photos now! I'd recommend using photos that have already been adjusted for contrast, tone, etc as a starting point. So, how do you add photos? Well, you'll need to select File-->Open As Layers for each image you want to add.

4. If your photo isn't the size you want it to be (and most likely it's not), you'll need to adjust the size of the layer (NOT scale image, but scale layer). How? In the layers dockable dialog box. This is a little moveable toolbox that says "layers" at the top, and it should have one entry for each pictures you import, plus an entry for your background. The layers dialog box should open as a default in GIMP, but if it doesn't you can go to Windows-->Dockable Dialogs-->Layers.

5. In the layers dialog box, right click on the image you want to resize. From the menu that appears, select "scale layer". Now you can resize the image just as you normally would. You will need to do this for each photo that is not the right size.

6. Lastly, move everything around and fiddle with the background colors until you are happy with the appearance. That's it!


My photo collage is very much still a work in progress, but I figured I'd go ahead and share what I have so far. I'm still working on shooting/editing photos to add, and obviously I still have some work to do arranging the photos. I am the only photographer in the calendar, and since everyone else is painting or drawing, I've been using artistic filters to edit my photos to fit with the stylistic theme. I'd love some feedback if you have any initial reactions/suggestions :)

A Timely Contribution to Charity

I know I've been rambling on quite a bit lately about how to find an audience and get some artistic criticism, but I think I've failed to pay proper homage to the importance of having a supportive group of family and friends. I think I would have given up on the idea that my work might be enjoyable to anyone but me many times over were it not for the encouragement I've received from my amazing family and friends. For instance, my Uncle Steve recommended that I start this blog. And now, thanks to my fabulous grandmother, I am pleased to report that I've been invited by her friend Jolene DeLisa to contribute a photo collage for a 2013 charity calendar revolving around the theme of peace.

Please indulge me as I depart, for a moment, from the theme of photography in order to give you a bit of background information on the Great Peace March, which is the inspiration for the calendar. In 1986, approximately 1,200 gathered in Los Angeles, California with the intention of marching to Washington, D.C. to demonstrate their commitment to and passion about nuclear disarmament. In the face of substantial adversity, a core of between 300 and 400 of the original marchers, in addition to several hundred more who joined along the way, arrived in D.C. in November of 1986. My grandmother, Connie Fledderjohann, was among the core of marchers who made the full trip; she has co-authored a book about the Great Peace March (yes, she is THAT awesome), and her friend Jolene from the march, as part of her continuing commitment to peace, has decided to make a calendar for charity centered on the the theme of peace. She is seeking artists from around the world, and hoping that the theme of peace will relate to the artist's specific cultural context. The calendar is called The World at Peace, and it will be available for purchase on Amazon.

I'm excited to be a part of the project, and I'm looking forward to learning some new editing techniques in the process. I've never made a photo collage in GIMP before, so you can bet I'll be posting what I learn soon!

Therapee for Photographers

As you know if you've been following my blog, I'm a girl on a budget, which means that my general philosophy when it comes to photo editing software is cheaper=better, free=best.  Of course, it's not a hard and fast rule; obviously a free program that doesn't do what you need it to do is pretty much worthless.  That being said, there are lovely, smart people out on the interwebs who have designed freeware that, admittedly, isn't quite as flashy and straightforward as the Adobe equivalent software, but still does an excellent job of performing the same functions as the very expensive Adobe software.  GIMP is the obvious example, here--the freeware answer to Adobe Photoshop.  Turns out, though, that there's also a freeware equivalent of Lightroom (you may recall I've been using Lightroom on a free 30 day trial, and my last post outlines some of the basic functions of the program if you're interested).  The program is called Raw Therapee, and it's available for download here if you'd like to try it out for yourself.

My initial impression of the program is, overall, positive.  The developers of Raw Therapee have clearly gone out of their way to make the program similar to Lightroom in layout and appearance, and a lot of the controls work in a pretty intuitive way: much like Lightroom, there are sliding bars for most of the functions, and you can enter a numerical value or simply click and drag to make adjustments to your photos.  The program also appears to have all of my favorite Lightroom functions--highlight recovery, luminance recovery, the ability to alter the black point separate from adjusting contrast, etc.  On the downside, the program seems to be struggling to open some of my photos--not many, but a few appear to be compacted, with the gap between the compacted photo and the original size of the photo filled by vertical lines.  Disproportionately this is happening with photos that have been scanned, but it has happened with a few I shot digitally as well, and, in some cases, it can display the original scanned photo fine, but struggles with versions I have edited in GIMP.  I've provided an example so you can see what I'm talking about below.  I'm not sure why this is happening, but it is a definite strike against Raw Therapee; I haven't had any problems like this with Lightroom. 

As you can see, though, the interface is fairly similar to the interface in Lightroom, so the program is fairly user friendly.  I haven't tested this out yet, but it is also supposed to tie in well with GIMP, and, like Lightroom, it allows you to develop images shot in RAW format (if you don't know what RAW format is, just ignore that; if you do, I'm guessing you already know what I mean by develop RAW images).  The other big drawback that I've found so far is that instead of exporting your edited image to the folder of your choosing without ever altering the original, Raw Therapee requires that you save the file using a "save as" function, which increases the likelihood that you could inadvertently save over your original image.  Another thing to note (this isn't necessarily a con for me, but could be for some people) is that there aren't a lot of preset edits in Raw Therapee (i.e. there is a massive list of adjustments--black and white 1, black and white 2, old fashioned, etc. that you can make in Lightroom), so if you rely on preset edits, you may need to do some digging online to find plugins for presets in Raw Therapee.  On the whole, though, it has a wide range of handy tools--as far as I can tell, you can do everything in Raw Therapee that you can do in Lightroom, and some that Lightroom doesn't have as well (and as soon as I can figure out what these tools do, I'll be more specific about that...).  I haven't found it as easy to figure out as Lightroom, but I'm sure with some concentrated time with the manual, things will become more apparent.  That said, I decided to run a quick test to see if the programs can produce the same results: I edited the image below twice--once in Lightroom, and once in Raw Therapee.  I leave you to judge for yourself (keep in mind I've spent about 15 more days with Lightroom than with Raw Therapee, so at least some of the differences you see are, I'm sure, due to my lack of expertise in Raw Therapee).

Lightroom:

Raw Therapee:

Dusting

Since about 2003 (I think), I've been shooting almost exclusively digital.  As much as I love the process of developing and printing with film photography, I simply don't have the resources for film photography these days.  Even beyond the cost of film, I don't have access to a darkroom, and who wants to take their precious photographs to the 1 Hour Photo booth?  Half the fun of shooting film is developing the film and enlarging!  So, my images generally go straight from camera to laptop these days. 

I did, however, pull a crazy all-night scanning session sometime during my transition from film to digital in order to digitize my favorite prints.  Well, my favorite prints of the ones I happened to be able to locate when I was struck with the scanning insanity (or, if you prefer, scansanity).  Anyway, it turns out that when you're sleep deprived and on a mission, you don't take really important steps like, say, cleaning the scanner.  So, as you can see below, I ended up with a big line down some of my photos, in addition to a lot of dust.  Bleh. 

So, time for some editing, I guess.  Now, the dust is a pain.  I did the editing on this between Lightroom and GIMP.  The dust was time-consuming, but easy enough.  Lightroom has a healing tool which allows you to adjust your selection tool size and select the area you want to "heal".  Lightroom then picks nearby pixels to clone over the spot in need of healing.  It's not always perfect--sometimes it does a really bad job of picking the best pixels to copy.  However, you can easily adjust the area it selects to copy from by dragging the selection circle to another area of your choosing.  The giant, ugly line, however, was not so easy.  Now, maybe there is a very simple way to get rid of a nasty streak in your photo that I'm just not aware of, but that pesky line took well over an hour zoomed in about 1500% with the clone tool...and a lot of CTRL + Z action (for those of you who don't know what that is, it's the shortcut to undo--very handy when you clone something, hate what you've done, and want to delete it...repeatedly).  As you can see below, I managed to get rid of the line and the dust--it's not perfect, but I'm pretty pleased (yes, I also cropped a bit while I was cleaning the photo up anyway).  Lesson learned, though!  Save yourself hours by cleaning the scanner first!

Let There Be Light...for 30 Days

I know I've been going on non-stop about GIMP, due largely to the fact that it is 1) powerful and 2) free.  However, I've been persuaded to try Lightroom by Adobe on a free 30 day trial, and, I have to confess, I'm impressed.  Obviously there are a lot of things that can be done in GIMP--in fact, it may be that GIMP can do everything Lightroom can.  If so, I just haven't found a way of doing some specific things in GIMP yet.  That being said, I'm really enjoying Lightroom.  Granted, I haven't completed any tutorials, and I've only been playing around with the program for about two days.  Even so, here's my run-down, followed by some before and after examples so you can see what I'm talking about:

Pros:
1) The program is pretty intuitive and user-friendly.  As I said, I haven't done any tutorials yet, and I've been happily editing for two days.

2) The recovery feature is AWESOME if you have photos with high dynamic range.  In other words, there's a tool that allows you to tone down some of the highlights in your photo--so if your insanely blonde friend looks like her head is glowing while everyone else looks normal, you can recover some of the color and contrast in her hair so that she looks a bit less like an alien.

3) You can independently tune your blacks, so you're not stuck fiddling with contrast and washing out your highlights when all you really want is to make your blacks a bit blacker.

4) The heal tool certainly isn't perfect--GIMP is a better choice for cloning.  However, it's easy and quick, and does a great job on small spots and imperfections.  For touch-up jobs, you can spend seconds instead of hours correcting minor blemishes in your photos.

5) The luminescence tool allows you to ditch some of the graininess in photos shot in low lighting.  Crank it up too much and people begin to look like they've had too much plastic surgery.  On a low setting, though, you can make your photos look a little softer/smoother without losing clarity. 

6) There are lots of fun creative modes to play with to give your photo a unique look.

7) Lightroom won't overwrite your photos, so you don't have to worry about accidentally losing your originals.

8) Dodging and burning is a little different from the way it's handled in other programs, but it's quick and easy to learn, and you can do more than adjust exposure--you have options for brightness, clarity, sharpness, saturation, and contrast.  Nice, huh?


Cons:
1) Adobe programs aren't cheap.  In fact, I was ready to do a happy dance when I found Lightroom for $150 because on the Adobe site it's $300.  However, you can do a 30 day trial for free on the Adobe site (which I'm doing before I part with $150).

2) I'm not impressed with the Autotone function.  Lightroom is great for easily adjusting things by hand, but Autotone seems to like things to be really washed out and grainy.  I imported a few photos with Autotone on by mistake and I struggled to get them looking normal; I couldn't believe I had taken such bad portraits at a paid gig.  It was only when I reset the photo that I realized what had happened.  Among other adjustments, the Autotone feature cranked the brightness and fill light way too high, and turned the contrast way down, and the photos looked overexposed and unfortunate.

3) Perhaps I'm just not looking in the right place, but it seems that all zooming is limited to preset values, so I spend a lot of time and effort fidgeting with 1:2 vs. 1:4 vs. 2:1 vs...you get the idea.  Zooming into a specific area by a specific percentage seems to be an impossibility.  If you know something I don't on this front, I'd love to hear that I'm wrong because the zooming is rather frustrating.

4) The program can watermark on export--this is a pro, except that it doesn't look like you can adjust the position or opacity of your watermark.  Again, I'm new to the program, so maybe I'm missing something, but having the watermark in the lower left corner of the photo means that it will be pretty easy to crop out.  Defeats the point of a watermark...



Alright, enough talk.  Time to show you what I'm talking about.  Below are a few before and afters.  The first set of photos was from a film shoot, and when I scanned the photo,  it was covered in dust, it looked grainy, and it just generally wasn't a very good representation of the original photo.  Enter Lightroom.  Obviously, it's still not perfect--there was some dust I will have to remove in GIMP, and I'd like to clean up the background a bit.  However, for the speed and ease of editing, I was pretty pleased with the difference Lightroom made.  Note: luminescence was particularly helpful for reducing the grain, and the heal tool was used to get rid of some of the dust and the big scratch on her arm from the original photograph. 

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Getting Plugged-In

My original plan was to have another installment of Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates devoted to batch (i.e. applying the same edit to multiple photos at once) watermarking and resizing in GIMP and Picassa.  However, while that's a simple task in Picassa, I've had quite a bit of difficulty with the process in GIMP (and this is where the cheating comes back to bite me--incidentally, if you haven't figured this out yet and you were wondering, you can adjust the opacity of your text for your watermark using the layers dock; if you have no idea what I'm talking about, more on this later).  It turns out that you need a plug-in to do batch watermarking in GIMP.  There are a lot of special functions like this you can perform in GIMP if you simply install the appropriate plug-in.

If you're not sure what on earth installing a plug-in in GIMP means, think of it like this: there are certain editing and creative tasks users want that GIMP cannot accommodate.  So, users who are far more computer savvy than myself go and write little mini-programs that tell GIMP how to do whatever it is they feel GIMP is missing.  Then, these kind individuals are generous enough to post all of their hard work on the GIMP registry, where novices like me can download the files to make GIMP accomplish the task.

The problem is 1) installing a plug-in for GIMP is not as simple as clicking one or two buttons and 2) you need a program called Python installed prior to installing GIMP in order to get some of these plug-ins to run.  I learned this the hard way, which involved uninstalling GIMP, hunting for a solid half an hour for the appropriate files, sifting through a bunch of UNIX gibberish I won't even pretend to understand and, finally, with the substantial assistance of my fabulous computer guru (yes, he pretty much did everything for me while I stood over his shoulder going "oooohhhhh!"), locating and installing the appropriate files.  Let's see if I can make the process a little less frustrating for you than it was for me.  Here are the steps we took for Windows 7.  Mac and UNIX users, you're on your own (though this is probably a breeze for UNIX users anyway):

1) Go here and click on the third item down in the list under "Downloads":

• Windows x86 MSI Installer (2.7) (sig) 

2)  Go here and click on

pygtk-all-in-one-2.24.1.win32-py2.7.msi  

3) Go here and download GIMP, and don't forget to install the user's manual if you want it--it doesn't come with the program automatically.  The files to pick here should be pretty obvious.

4) Run each file you downloaded in the order of the download.  So, first python, then the pyGTK package, then GIMP and the user's manual. 

 Given what a pain this is, I'm going to consider this post my good deed for the day.  Hopefully you'll find it helpful. 

A Little Fun Before the Work Begins...

Alright, so one of my professed reasons for starting a blog was to push myself to learn more about digital editing.  A lot of the image editing I've done to date has been simple touch-ups in Picassa--I've picked my best photos and fiddled around a bit, but didn't really have the skills to take it any further.  I've picked up a few books on the subject, and I'm ready to take my digital editing to the next level, but I decided to fiddle around in Gimp a bit and just familiarize myself with some of the menus before picking up my books and getting serious.  I've had a bit of fun messing around with some of the functions in Gimp, and I've shared the before and after images below.  Just above the after images, I've provided the menu commands I used to produce the effect you see.  I'm not sure how many of these I would actually use regularly, but it's fun to see what the program is capable of.    

Before:

Filters-->Edge-Detect-->Neon

Before:

Filters-->Artistic-->Cubism

Before:

Filters-->Distorts-->Mosaic