GIMP

Photography and Linux

Carlos Echenique — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 14:31:57 +0000

Is it possible for a professional photographer to use a FOSS-based workflow?

I'm a professional photographer based out of Miami, Florida. I learned photography on my own, starting at age 12, with a Yashica TL Electro 35mm film SLR. In college, I discovered I also had quite an affinity for computers and programming, so I got my degrees in that field. I landed an IT job in county government, and photography took a back seat in my life until two things happened: I became a father, and the digital revolution came to the world of photography.

I dove into digital photography as it made practicing my art economical in the extreme. Having a child meant plenty of opportunities to take photos. All of my photographer friends suddenly needed someone who could understand both computers and photography, and I was conveniently placed to help them.

I turned pro in 2008, when a local ballet troupe asked me to photograph their performance of The Nutcracker. Other performances followed, and my skills were further honed. I later was asked by the late Pedro Pablo Peña to photograph his International Ballet Festival, which I did for two years.

Fast-forward to 2014 when I started a photography club at my day job and offered free photography lessons, once a month, to any fellow employees willing to listen.

In 2017, at the behest of my club members, I was asked to assemble a low-cost photography laptop configuration, as many of my students wanted to expand their photographic skills in the post-processing side of digital photography. I completed my task, assembling a reasonable portable digital darkroom for less than $700 USD that included all necessary photo-editing software with no recurring monthly fees, an upgraded hard drive and a colorimeter.

The laptop turned out so well, I decided to take the plunge myself and converted my Windows 10 workstation (custom-built by me) to a dedicated FOSS photography workstation.

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GIMP, More Awesome Than I Remember

Shawn Powers — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 11:24:19 +0000

by Shawn Powers

For what seems like decades, GIMP (Graphic Image Manipulation Program) has been the de facto standard image editor for Linux. It works well, has many features, and it even supports scripting. I always have found it a bit clumsy, however, and I preferred using something else for day-to-day work. I recently had the pleasure of sitting at a computer without an image editor though, so I figured I'd give GIMP another try on a non-Linux operating system. See, the last time I tried to use GIMP on OS X, it required non-standard libraries and home-brew adding. Now, if you head over to the GIMP site, you can download a fully native version of GIMP for Windows, OS X and Linux.

I'll be honest, just being able to install GIMP with a simple drag and drop on OS X was an improvement worth noting. When I actually started using it, however, I found that it's truly as powerful as Photoshop for the things I do. Granted, Photoshop likely has features advanced users might need that GIMP doesn't have, but everything I do with images was fully supported without exception. In the screenshot (from an OS X machine), you can see an example of me "painting" my Volkswagen using nothing more than the auto-selection tool and a virtual airbrush.

If you're looking for a great graphic editor and want to be consistent across platforms, GIMP is truly hard to beat. And if you tried it years ago but didn't really care for it, I urge you to give it another try. I'm shocked at how well it works, even on platforms other than Linux!

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GIMP 2.7.3 adds Single Window Mode

Michael Reed — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

GIMP 2.7.3 has added one of the most requested features in the program’s history: a single window mode. Version 2.7 is part of the development branch, so unfortunately, the feature won't hit most distro repositories for a while.

As I said, because 2.7 is a development branch, most distributions won’t add it to their repositories, and this means that you’ll have to build it yourself. It’s a shame, in a way, because the new window mode might be viewed as a ease of use feature that less advanced users would appreciate. According to this page, it looks like version 2.8 should arrive in about November.

If you want to have a sneak peek at the new development features, you’ll probably have to compile from scratch. As it’s a development version, it depends on some up to date libraries which you may have to add by hand. Fortunately, if you’re an Ubuntu user, you can use this excellent guide to find all the bits that you’ll need.

The one window mode is activated by selecting the option in the Windows menu. So, people who prefer the old way of working still can. It handles multiple open documents with an iconified tab bar that runs along the top of the screen.

The single window interface. The two questions are: What will long term users make of it? Will new users find it more appealing?

Personally, I’m sure that this is how I’ll be using GIMP from now on. I’ve used the program a lot of over the years, despite an interface that I always considered to be rather awkward. As for gauging how a new user would take to the program, it’s difficult to be sure. For a start, it should look more inviting than the old interface and reminiscent of other programs with a similar purpose.

Let me know if you spot any promising looking custom repos, PPAs or packages for 2.7 series, and I add them to the post.

[User bartman2589 has spotted a PPA that he has successfully installed. See comments.]

The gimpusers.com guide to compiling the development branch on Ubuntu. It’s not that difficult and the guide should work as an aid for people working with other distibutions.

A summary of all of the changes to 2.7 series so far.

The download page with direct links to the 2.7.3 tarball.

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Tutorial: Translating Scanned Docs

Michael Reed — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

Recently, I had to access some information from a German document, but the problem was that it was only available as a poor quality scan. This is an overview of how I extracted and translated the information. The tools used were pdfimages, GIMP, gImageReader and Google Translate.

There are some OCR (optical character recognition) tools that can directly handle PDF files as an input file format. Unfortunately, in this case, the scanned pages were badly skewed and needed to by tidied up by hand before processing. It would be possible, although tedious, to screen capture each and every page, but the screen resolution and the resolution of the original scanned images wouldn't match which would result in a loss of quality.

Extract the images (pdfimages)

The solution is to extract the images from the PDF file. I used a tool called pdfimages for this.

pdfimages inputfile.pdf outputfile

will produce a series of graphic files which are numbered according to the order in which they occurred in the PDF document. By default, they are in PBM format. This is a less common format, and pdfimages can be coaxed into outputting JPEG files instead. However, I would advise against that as JPEG is a lossy format and we need to preserve as much quality as possible for documents that are going to be OCRed.

Clean up images (GIMP)

I used GIMP to clean up the images, and fortunately, it can work with PBM as an input format. The scans themselves had a number of problems. The first thing I did was to use the rotate tool (Layer>Transform>Arbitrary Rotate...) to straighten up the image. To the make this easier, I zoomed in so that I could use the top of the windows as ruler against a line of text. In this case I found that a +1.4 deg rotation made the lines straight again.

The original image that I had to work with.

The cleaned up version.

The scans were also skewed to an extent. This meant that although the lines of text were now horizontally straight, the the left margin was not vertically aligned. I used the GIMP skew tool to correct this, again working with a zoomed image.

The image was also crushed, so, I scaled it to add 50% to its height (Layer>Scale layer...). Through experimentation, I discovered that this, along with making the image mono (Image>Mode>Indexed...), greatly improved the accuracy of the OCR software.

Finally, I cropped the image.

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