On the old RawTherapee forums they used to have a contest sharing a single raw file amongst the members to see how everyone would approach processing from the same starting point. They called it PlayRaw. This seemed to really bring out some great work from the community so I thought it might be fun to start doing something similar again here.
I took a (relatively) recent image of Mairi and decided to see how it would be received (I’d say fairly well given the responses). This was my result from the raw file that I called Mairi Troisième:
Some of you may know I exclusively use Contax manual focus lenses on my Canon cameras. I have had one reliable adapter from the start, that just happened to be perfect in every way: perfectly parallel, and lets my lenses focus exactly to infinity, and none of my lenses hit the mirror on my 5D.
However, swapping adapters between cameras gets mighty tedious, so recently I have been trying a variety of different adapters for my cameras, several quality tiers ranging from the cheapest ($15) up to the most expensive ($70).
Mike Howard, the host and creator of the jpeg2RAW podcast reached out to me last week to see if I might be able to come on the show to talk about Free Software Photography and what we’ve been up to here. One of the primary reasons for creating this site was to be able to raise awareness of the Free Software community to a wider audience.
So this is a great opportunity for us to expose ourselves!
We’re heading to London!
I missed LGM last year in Toronto (having a baby - well, my wife was). I am going to be there this year for LGM/London!
Sneaking a release out on Christmas Eve, the darktable team have announced their feature release of darktable 2.0! After quite a few months of Release Candidates the 2.0 is finally here. Please join me in saying Congratulations and a hearty Thank You! for all of their work bringing this release to us.
I finally got off my butt to get a process in place to obtain and update security certificates using Let’s Encrypt for both pixls.us and discuss.pixls.us. I also did some (more) work with Victor Grigas and Wikipedia to support their #Edit2015 video this year.
I got busy building a birthday present for a project I work with and all sort of neat things happened in my absence! The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase chose winners for it’s wallpaper contest for Ubuntu 15.10 ‘Wily Werewolf’ (and quite a few community members were among those chosen).
The darktable crew is speeding along to a 2.0 release with a new RC2 being released.
Also, a great big HAPPY 20th BIRTHDAY GIMP! I made you a present. I hope it fits and you like it! :)
Some awesome updates from the community and activity over on the forums! People have been busy doing some really neat things (that really never fail to astound me). The level of expertise we have floating around on so many topics is quite inspiring.
Many moons ago I had written about acquiring a YN-560 speedlight for playing around with off-camera lighting. At the time I wanted to experiment with how different modifiers might be used in a portrait setting. Unfortunately, these were lighting modifiers that I didn’t own yet.
I wasn’t going to let that slow me down, though!
If you want to skip the how and why to get straight to the cheat sheets, click here.
Infinite Realities had released a full 3D scan by Lee Perry-Smith of his head that was graciously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. For reference, here is a link to the object file and textures (80MB) and the displacement maps (65MB) from the Infinite Realities website.
What I did was to bring the high resolution scan and displacement maps into Blender and manually created my lights with modifiers in a virtual space. Then I could simply render what a particular light/modifier would look like with a realistic person being lit in any way I wanted.
A small update on how things are progressing (hint: well!) and some neat things the community is playing with.
I have been quiet these past few weeks because I decided I didn’t have enough to do and thought a rebuild/redesign of the GIMP website would be fun, apparently. Well, it _is_ fun and something that couldn’t hurt to do. So I stepped up to help out.
Free/Open Source Photography
Unless otherwise noted content on this site, PIXLS.US by Pat David, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.