Archive for June, 2008
Black and White Image Conversion with the GIMP
One of the reasons I was hesitant to switch from film to digital photography was the fun of experimenting with different films and the joy of finding one that really seemed to give incredible results (I always loved playing with Kodak T-max for example)
Tonight I’ve been trying to fill that void by experimenting with B&W conversion using GIMP. I’ve found it much more effective to shoot in color and convert during post production to really get the best tones. Unfortunately, GIMP out-of-the-box does not handle this work flow as well as Photoshop, in my opinion.
After some searching though, I found a great script that both automates the process and gives some really great tone control. The technique uses Channel Mixer presets to simulate tonal response of various black and white films. You can apply various filters to the film as well. By choosing Filter option you can apply yellow, orange, red, and green filters to the film. It can even generate the results as a new layer and automatically rename it using the settings you choose—very useful for making tweaks and comparing.
The original script however, does not work with GIMP 2.4.5, so I’ve updated it and am distributing it here under the GNU-GPL.
Twhirl in Linux
I’ve been trying to use Twitter more frequently lately, but it is hard without a good client at home on my Linux machine. I’ve tried several native linux clients, including gtwitter, which is so feature lacking as to be almost pointless, and Twittux, which is better, but still leaves much to be desired—you can’t even click on URLs in people’s tweets. You have to open up twitter in the browser, and then follow the link. I even resorted to setting up a Prism app on my desktop, but none of these prevented my account from fading into total disuse.
Fortunately, however, I was able to install Thwirl on the Linux alpha version of Adobe Air. I’ve been waiting several months now for the day it would work, and it actually turned out to be mostly pretty painless to install.
cd ~/Desktop
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/air/linux/adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin
wget http://www.twhirl.org/files/twhirl-0.8.2.air
chmod +x adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin
sudo ./adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin
Then you follow the GUI installer to finish installing Air. When that is done, go back to the command line:
/opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/airappinstaller ~/Desktop/twhirl-0.8.2air
Voilla, now there should be a link in your applications menu.
