We recently posted about the Open Source Photography Course from photographer Riley Brandt. We now also have a review of the course as well.
This review is actually by one of the darktable developers, houz! He had originally posted it on discuss as a topic but I think it deserves a blog post instead. (When a developer from a favorite project speaks up, it’s usually worth listening…)
Here is houz’s review:
It seems that there is no topic to discuss The Open Source Photography Course yet so let’s get started.
First of all, as a darktable developer I am biased so take everything I write with a grain of salt. Second, I didn’t pay for my copy of the videos but Riley was kind enough to provide a free copy for me to review. So add another pinch of salt. I will therefore not tell you if I would encourage you to buy the course. You can have my impressions nevertheless.
I won’t say anything about the GIMP part, not because it wouldn’t know how to use that software but it’s relatively short and I just didn’t notice anything to comment on. It’s solid basics of how to use GIMP and the emphasis on layer masks is really important in real world usage.
Hot on the heels of our last post about welcoming G’MIC to the forums at discuss.pixls.us, I thought I should speak briefly about some other additions I’ve recently made.
These were tough for me to finally make a decision about. I want to be careful and not get crazy with over-categorization. At the same time, I do want to make good logical breakdowns for people that is still intuitive.
Anyone who’s followed me for a while likely knows that I’m friends with G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic for Image Computing) creator David Tschumperlé. I was also able to release all of my film emulation presets on G’MIC for everyone to use with David’s help and we collaborated on a bunch of different fun processing filters for photographers in G’MIC (split details/wavelet decompose, freaky details, film emulation, mean/median averaging, and more).
I compiled the list of entries this afternoon across the various social networks and let random.org pick an integer in the domain of all of the entries…
So a big congratulations goes out to:
Denny Weinmann (Facebook, @dennyweinmann, Google+ )
and
Nathan Haines (@nhaines, Google+)
I’ll be contacting you shortly (assuming you don’t read this announcement here first…)! I will need a valid email address from you both in order to send your download links. You can reach me at pixlsus@pixls.us.
Photographer Riley Brandt recently released his Open Source Photography Course. I managed to get a little bit of his time to answer some questions for us about his photography and the course itself. You can read the full interview right here:
A Q&A with Photographer Riley Brandt
As an added bonus just for PIXLS.US readers, he has gifted us a nice surprise!
Riley went above and beyond for us. He has graciously offered us an opportunity for 2 readers to win a free copy of the course (one in an open format like WebM/VP8, and another in a popular format like MP4/H.264)!
Due to the heated debate lately, a short foreword:
We do not want to harass, insult or criticize anyone due to his or her choice of operating system. Still, from time to time we encounter comments from people accusing us of ignorance or even disrespect towards Windows users. If any of our statements can be interpreted such, we want to apologize for that – and once more give the full explanation of our lacking Windows support.
darktable is developed and maintained by a small group of people in their spare time, just for fun. We do not have any funds, do not provide travel reimbursements for conferences or meetings, and don’t even have a legal entity at the moment. In other words: None of the developers has ever seen (and most likely will ever see) a single $(INSERT YOUR CURRENCY) for the development of darktable, which is thus a project purely driven by enthusiasm and curiosity.
After quite a bit of back and forth I am quite happy to be able to announce that the latest tutorial is up: A Blended Panorama with PhotoFlow! This contribution comes from Andrea Ferrero, the creator of a new project: PhotoFlow.
In it, he walks through a process of stitching a panorama together using Hugin and blending multiple exposure options through masking in PhotoFlow (see lede image). The results are quite nice and natural looking!
I ran across a neat website the other day for getting actual user feedback when viewing your website: UserTesting. They have a free option called peek that records a short (~5 min.) screencast of a user visiting the site and narrating their impressions.
You can imagine this to be quite interesting to someone building a site.
A little while back I had attempted to document a shoot with my friend and model, Mairi. In particular I wanted to capture a start-to-finish workflow for processing a portrait using free software. There are often many tutorials for individual portions of a retouching process but rarely do they get seen in the context of a full workflow.
The results became a two-part post on my blog. For posterity (as well as for those who may have missed it the first time around) I am republishing the second part of the tutorial Postprocessing here.
I want to take a moment to thank everyone for all of the kind words and support over the past week. A positive response can be a great motivator to help keep the momentum rolling (and everyone really has been super positive)!
The Software page is live with a decent start at a list.
I posted an announcement of the site launch over on reddit and one of the comments (from /u/cb900crdr) was that it might be helpful to have a list of links to programs. I had originally planned on having a page to list the various projects but removed it just before launch (until I could find some time to gather all the links).
This was as good a reason as any to take a shot at putting a page together. I brought the topic up on the forums to get input from everyone as well. If you see that I’ve missed anything, please consider adding it to the list on the forum.
Free/Open Source Photography
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