 sessions for the Creative Freedom Summit, and it's my honor to introduce Pat to take it away. Hello everybody. Thank you very much for having me. I'm just tickled pink to be here today to talk about this topic. And there are a couple of small things. If you are joining in on the live stream, you're taking a look at this now or you're in the matrix chat room. There should be a URL for a slides.com link. It's a hosted reveal.js slide deck. I control the advancement of the slides, but it's a web page where you'll actually get the full slide deck and you can see it as I talk through it and move through it. And I'm also going to share here on the live stream so that we have it for posterity's sake. Let's share a screen. As I was saying, if you happen to be watching this on the live stream and you haven't gone to the actual slides.com deck yet, this is a quick QR code that will lead you to the slide deck as I'm preparing it and moving through it. And then we'll talk later about the dangers of scanning random QR codes that everyone tells you might be okay. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Pat David. You may have found me at patdavid.net and you may know me from a few different places like the GIMP team at gimp.org or possibly even pixels.us where we have done all kinds of cool things. I'll talk about the GIMP in just a moment, but a really quick plug for pixels.us that kind of leverages what we're going to talk about in this presentation is pixels.us is a community that I created I guess eight years ago now really focused on kind of consolidating all of the people that like to do and practice photography in general. And it was interesting because we have a lot of people that were working in photography but they were kind of stove piped into different communities. There are people that talk about the GIMP, people talk about dark cable, people talk about raw therapy, astrophotographers in very specific places. And what happened was all the free software using photographers were spread all over the place when they didn't need to be. And I said well look we're all doing photography of some sort and we're focusing on doing it with free software so maybe we could get a community together where we could do that. And that was really kind of the crux for creating a place like pixels.us. I would recommend you visit if you have any photography questions at all concerning free software. Or you may know me from tossing my children around in the house while I was testing out cameras. Wherever you might happen to know me from that's who I am. But that's secondary to the fact that we want to talk today about the GNU image manipulation program. I've been a member of the GIMP project for a long time now not as long as some of the folks that are there. But if you're not familiar with the GIMP I'm curious to know what color rocket you've been living under for the last 27 years. It is a cross-platform image editing software and it's been available across all major OSs for a long time. We're actually celebrating the 27th year of GIMP as a project this year. So we're closing in on the big 3-0 which should be fun. And for those of you that have never actually seen any of the GIMP people these are a series of headshots that I took of the team at a Leveray graphics meeting maybe eight years ago now at this point. But they're a fantastic group of folks and a goofy bunch of people to hang around who are all incredibly big-hearted and very generous with their time. So just a kudos to the team in case they see this later on or they happen to be around. But when we talk about photography with GIMP there's a couple of things lately that are slightly different that you kind of want to be aware of these days. And these days a lot of folks are generally probably going to be using some sort of a raw image file format out of their camera. And really raws are just kind of unprocessed image data that we get directly from the camera sensor. And we have specialized tools for developing images from these raw files that are kind of focused on some some higher level image manipulation some demosaic and some other things. If you don't know what all those are it's okay you don't have to but just be aware that if you when you start to get a little bit more into photography as a hobby or as a profession even you're going to be dealing with raw files. And the methods that you approach processing images in a raw editor are going to be a little bit different than what we're going to see here today that you would do with the raster editor in GIMP. The other thing I want to talk about too was a project from a good friend of mine David Schumperle and that's a gimmick which is Gracie's Magic for Image Computing. It's available as a plugin for GIMP and Krita and really it's a collection of advanced image processing filters that were have been written by by David himself and by other people in the community who are doing various types of processing of images. I actually use it extensively for a handful of very specific image processing algorithms that get helpful in certain cases but we'll talk about that in a little bit. Fabulous project, highly recommended, can't say enough good things about it. So as an overview of what I want to try to get through today and by the way it's really tough like Maureen was said well can you talk about photography with GIMP at Creative Freedom Summit? Yes I would love to and I can talk as long or as little as you want and then I realize I probably shouldn't have said as little because you know the overall topic of photography is huge in the first place and then how to approach editing and doing things with it is just a large domain so I'm trying my best to kind of skim the top of where the current state of some fun tools are for doing image processing in GIMP is. Believe me that there are a lot more details that are involved and I can't recommend enough for you to either reach out to me personally check out the GIMP IRC channel or come on over to the pixels dot us community and ask some questions there. You're never going to ask a dumb question as far as we're concerned and we're happy to guide you to the right place because I've written extensively on a lot of these topics but today we're going to talk about some composition cropping and guides and those tools in GIMP contrast details and noise very common thing that most people have to deal with photographs some black and white image processing because it's fun and then colors tones and color tone matching which is what most people are probably going to want to play with in GIMP as well. So when we talk about something like composition really this is a ranging of a visual elements within a frame when you are talking about dealing with it in GIMP though or even any other image processing really it's about removing and focusing on elements within a frame and I say removing and focusing on the frame because chances are you might not get a second chance to grab a photograph meaning that the image that you're looking at is the image you have to deal with it you might not ever get a chance to go back in time to try to capture that same image again so with what you have you want to try to work within it and so in GIMP at least in my personal workflow I'm a big fan of just using the selection tool and then cropping and editing and doing some other things with it as well and this is just the rectangle select tool in GIMP this is such a fundamental tool that almost is silly to talk about it but a lot of folks never really pay much attention to the tool options and this is kind of a general thing in GIMP as overall there are multiple options available for each tool that you might use and if you don't use GIMP often you might overlook them and not realize the power that's available to you in the case of doing cropping and composition work I find that having an aspect ratio and being able to put in exactly what it is is very handy sometimes I want a 2.35 to 1 like a cinema aspect ratio I want a 4 by 3 I want a 1.85 by 1 for like a less widescreen image or 1 to 1 if I just want a square image and then the highlight which allows you'll see that in just a moment which allows you to kind of highlight the areas that you have selected at the rectangle select you can change that opacity and then guidelines rules of thirds rules of fifths diagonals and all those other fun kind of guides you might have so this is my daughter in upstate New York at a wedding being a farmer I think she must be she's wearing overalls and a flannel shirt or the coolest hipster kid I've ever seen but you know when you look at a photograph like this what you have when you enable those tool options for rectangle select is you will you can see here the areas that have been selected are highlighted the rest of them are darker and then you've got these these guides that will automatically scale around with the selection for you to allow you to to compose the photo and of course you know general rules of thumb tend to be you know you kind of want to visually focus a the image in some way at possibly a a guideline or a combination of guidelines so for example if I were looking at rules of thirds that I know that I wanted to focus on my daughter's face these are kind of the four options that are available to me if I put the intersection of thirds lines right in the middle of her face along her eye line and if you see that visually there's you know a couple that stand out as usable and a couple that are just goofy looking and you know of the ones that I do like you know I'll kind of get some general options that are laying out there I end up with some some interesting um an interesting result and you know now what happens is compared to the original image I think that this really helps to um provide a lot more a dynamic view of the um of the image for example if my focal area is here on her and I've moved the third line along here I can clearly see that my focus is here but there are a couple of real strong visual elements in this image you know the bench nearby leading to a tree in the background and the tent whose strong lines leave me right back to her face again there's an interesting bit here and so it's really about you know kind of leading those viewer's eyes on a journey within a frame now granted you might not even be considering that when you press the shutter yet and if there's anything I've learned about photography it is slowly peeling back and on you know skills that you slowly build up over time and you one of us can just press a shutter button it's the true greats that can pre-visualize and be ready for an amazing shot long ahead of it ever happening and these are things that you you only pick up through repetition and practice of the craft constantly but you know you can see from the original image on the top here the one on the bottom I feel like I've gotten a more interesting photo overall right there's a couple of distracting elements like your eyes are actually drawn to the brighter area of the frame the the peaking sun in the top right corner of the frame it's a little bit overwhelming and it kind of draws attention away from my subject which happened to be my daughter so it's it's a powerful tool there's all kinds of ways to play with cropping and composition obviously and I recommend playing a lot I found myself enjoying it quite a bit trying all different kinds of weird and extreme crops just to see if I provide a more interesting view of an image for me so contrast details and noise is another bit of just a fundamental topic that the tools haven't really changed much but if you're not accustomed to having played with them before I just want to show them very quickly and you know at contrast it's really just a range of brightness across an image and there's two primary tools that you can play with to do this in an image and one of them is an actual brightness and contrast tool the other one is actually just a color curves and I'd say for probably most things you might do in photography in camp you're going to be playing a color curves a lot and it would behoove you to learn them and understand what they're doing and as a matter of I'll come back to my thought there so taking again another look at the same image for instance you can see here that my histogram of the image on the right and we haven't seen a histogram before this is basically just how many values of that level of black or white or in between are in the image overall and it kind of gives me a feel for what my overall image is doing it is to say the way that the image sits right now I can see that I have a lot of a lot of darker colored pixels in the image and they kind of taper up to white and still to taper off as you get to the to the pure white tones and you'll also notice for example I actually don't have anything way down here in pure black so that gives me a rough idea of what's happening but now what happens is when I apply any of these contrast tools in the top example I have cranked the contrast with the contrast and brightness tool down to negative 20 and you kind of see that result and then in the bottom one we push it up to plus 20 and you can see the corresponding histogram as well when you decrease the um the contrast in an image you're going to start compressing that histogram you're going to start pushing all of those pixels in your image and start squishing them into the middle and excuse me when you increase the contrast you do the opposite and you start pushing them out to the sides and they kind of start to go and your your pixel level start kind of pushing out to the extreme more and more um and you know what you want most likely is some level of reasonable increase in the contrast because again it tends to be a little bit more pleasing to the eye and the thing you're going to get to from playing a lot and you'll find whether or not it gets to where you want it to be and honestly if you take anything else away from this entire presentation I just want you to take away that this view of the curves basically tells you that that line that you're going to adjust in the left of your darks in the right of your lights in the mids of your mids um and that is the region of the images you're going to be affecting when you play with anything in the um color curves for example if I only take the values and I drag down here um just a tiny bit what I'm really doing here is I'm just kind of crushing those blacks just a tiny bit and I'm pushing those whites up in the in the um lower mids and then on up and it adds just a tiny bit of contrast to the overall image right the top one is the original and the bottom one is the application of that slight s curve so um it's a tool to learn tool to have fun with I'm going to revisit it again in just a few minutes in terms of details honestly it's one of those things where you're not I got I got a I don't really have a whole lot of new to offer uh in general right there's an unsharp mask wavelets fft sharpening usually just ways to sharpen the image basically increase the contrast on a very fine scale between pixels that are right next to each other if there's a bit of a color difference and it's one of those cases where and I think we talked about this briefly yesterday with ryan gorley is it um you know using free software proprietary tools for the most part the fundamental algorithms underneath the application of these kinds of filters and functions are the same no matter what tool you're using it might be in a different place but under fundamentally they work the same learning what they are how they work fundamentally means that you can transfer that application of knowledge to any other software for the most part an unsharp mask is it looks like an unsharp mask no matter where you go and as far as noise goes I just embrace it if you have to gimmick has some amazing filters for denoising an image but I don't often denoise an image personally for my in general I will let the let the let the noise lie where it where it shows up for example so um so in like the context of things like colors in black and white doing black and white photography which is on the front I like to say colors are so cliche but all the new kids are doing is not very interesting but taking an image like we see here which was shot on a gray foggy day in instant color that I don't know if you can tell it from the stream but this is color um it's visually uninteresting from a color perspective that is to say color doesn't add anything to the image in which case I begin to want to focus on form and tone instead and it's kind of a nice path on the photographic journey to learn from where you can focus on just the forms and you can focus on just the tones in your image and not what the various colors might be doing to help you have a better understanding of composition and how those forms affect how your image might be viewed and honestly again this is another case where there's too many ways to list for getting you a black and white image right quickly in GIMP there's you know desaturate color to gray channel decomposition luminosity and color to gray both mimic human perception in terms of turning color pixels into gray values um you know so I generally will start with some sort of illuminance desaturation just to see how things will look for example and what you see here for instance is a huge shift from blue to blue going from zero to 360 degrees with a gradient from transparent to full black on the bottom and you can see that illuminance desaturation will favor the yellows the greens and the science because those colors will be perceived as brighter than others even though they might have the same relative brightness value from rgb so you know you put it together you take an image desaturated turned into um add some contrast curve like we just saw a minute ago color to gray and you get an image that I think personally pops a little bit more than uh than just having the uh the plain color image the way that it's set so that's just me and of course if you're into color and you like that like all the cool kids do it's interesting to note at least in GIMP that as far as colors are concerned these are still just channels in your image a red green and blue pixel channels in your image and you can modify each of those red greens and blues and their corresponding curves separately from each other which will have a wild different types of effects depending on what you end up doing but small careful shapes of various sorts can produce some subtle and very pretty in my opinion differences in the image to provide a wonderful color toning this is a personal um a personal process that finds something that you rather enjoy this is kind of a portrait-esque curve that I've been using since the dawn of time that I like because I think the skin tones are a lot better they roll off a little bit nicer there's some nice color in those skin tones um for example with those and what happens is when you do this over and over again you end up making lots and lots of uh different types of um color emulations and so much so that I think I went off the deep end a few years back and we ended up producing I don't know a few hundred and then other people started kind of jumping on and making some as well and they made some more and added to it and now we've ended up with I don't know somewhere in the order of 600 plus kind of these film emulations that are available in free software uh gimmick wrought therapy my friend Jonas Wagner has a um film emulator online and you can apply these filter or these uh color effects to but they're all generally predicated on making modifications in the value or the red green and blue pixels and what those curves should look like that's the same image just with different colors applied to it for example so uh check it out because it's a big time-saver if you're just looking to grab a photo crop it nicely add some pretty color curves to it you get a workflow done so you can get on to doing other things that you might need to do great if you're really into the photography and want to know how those color curves work it's a slightly different problem but you can uh you can spend all the time in the world getting into it and I'm happy to help if you want to reach out to me on the on the forum and then finally I think you know looking at something like masking I actually went to go look for an old photo of mine that was out there somewhere and I accidentally typed pat david gimp mask into google it was not what I expected it to be so maybe don't do that maybe just pat david mask or photography or something it's definitely gonna less embarrassment so masking is basically just a process of applying a mask to an image and when you apply a mask to a layer all you're really doing is giving a black to white or some variation in between values to the layer that says any values that are all black or all the way transparent to all the way translucent from black to white and that's simple I think everybody probably gets the general idea of a mask but the power of a mask is when you use copies of the actual image itself to build the masks from right so usually we call these luminosity masks and they're a lot of fun it's it's an opportunity to target different effects to very specific regions within an image for instance that first image on the left was taken at a beer fest years ago here in mobile alabama on the right is the inverse of that image if I use that image as a mask and take my darks and tone the photo very blue and take the lights and tone them very orange and then apply those masks you end up with this kind of very cool you know it's a classic split tone split tone effect that you see here where the highlights will tend to have an orange cast to them and any of the darker shadows will tend to have a tend to have kind of a bluish cyan cast and then skin tone the lighter tones end up being kind of orangey color it's a classic split tone and it's a good base for playing out playing with these to know how to use them so classic split toning a lot of fun and then coming up near the end here basically my best piece of advice is try out a handful of these classic classic toys classic functions and filters for modifying an image throw them all together in various ways and experiment you know like the image that we see here for instance of my friend my read that's the original straight out of camera jpeg on the left that's the retouch photo on the right they are using I didn't use anything in this image that was any different than anything I just showed you at a high level right now maybe a little bit more in depth but that was basically it so it's a lot of fun and you know some general resources obviously gimp.org come to the site support us check it out I've written a ton a ton I have written a ton either on my personal website at pateba.net or I translated some of those tutorials on to gimp.org but there's a ton of stuff there gimmick is well worth your time to check out and put into um uh critter or gimp whichever and then of course come to pixels dot us if you're into photography at all so that is me that's my email that's my url that's my wilbur mascot and that's my wife in the photograph thank you very much hey pat hi thank you for that thank you for that presentation we did have some questions coming in but uh you were in such a flow that I decided to just wait until the end here to jump into those so here we go uh you mentioned the lee bray graphics meeting is that still going on and where can we find information about that event uh those are wonderful questions the last emails I saw that went to the uh the mailing list for lever graphics meeting I think went on answered the intention was to have one again but I don't think we've built up anything but just to make that a reality yet that's okay I don't I don't know the answer to that so it's a question mark for now yes that's right hopefully soon we'll find something yeah cool so I guess uh the okay I'm gonna not go virtual uh no yeah yeah all right so next question what camera or cameras do you use and what model would you recommend for a photography newbie that's a great question so my camera lately has been an olympus lmd which is a micro four-thirds maritalist interchangeable lens camera you know uh you know what they look like I think that um it's a cheap small relatively inexpensive small ish camera system the super lightweight it could take you with me everywhere um I try to avoid getting gear acquisition syndrome too much because I can spiral out of control real fast depending on what your budget was like there's a couple of different options but um I know a lot of my friends have been loving fuji and fuji's cameras lately just the color renditions the glass has been fantastic um so one of the fuji's might be a fun camera to get into if you had a price range that fit that so what photo management tools do you use and what features do you like or don't like about it sure okay so I didn't get a chance to mention all of the projects again because I wanted to focus on gim um I think digicam is a fantastic asset management system for photography in general uh so digicam I'm going to put it in the chat digicam is fantastic um if not I can often just use my file system I have a rough idea about where my photos are because I arranged them by year and month and an event so I kind of have a rough idea where things might be um and then from there if I'm using dark cable I'll just use dark cable as a you know the light table where I can I'm sorry the catalog where I can look through it and the same thing with raw therapy where I'll load up a folder um and then quickly be able to sort through the images in uh in a file viewer from there and then drunk directly to my raw processing cool all right next question what is the mosaic and how does it relate to raw photo editing sure I got you all right so if you real quick and easy is um if you picture a sensor on a camera the sensor does not have photo sites where uh photons can hit the sensor that record all spectrum wave wavelengths of light at once rather they have a site for red a site for green and a site for blue and you know when the wavelengths from blue hit the blue guy you register some value and you have millions of those all across your sensor that will create your final image well the problem is a pixel is represented as a red green blue combination on your in on your on your monitor but on the photo sites from a camera they're not a site is red green blue it's like a pixel is red a pixel is green a pixel is blue right next to each other well to recreate an rgb pixel image we have to smush all those rgb colors together from each of the photo sites that's demosaicing right so to get one pixel color of red green and blue I have to actually take three different values and kind of push them back together um and we have a great we have a we actually have a wonderful image on an article on the pixels website when we were talking about um doing something called pixel shift with pen with pentax cameras from a man uh one of the users called heck floss and if I can find it real quick I'll put it at a link to it but uh basically it's taking the sensor image and getting pixel data back out of it rather than just individual wavelength data got it trying to take some notes as I felt like that was wordy yeah I apologize no no worries um okay last question what was the technique used to key out the doorframe in one of the last images with the girl with the long hair and be oh my gosh yeah no it uh it was um a lot of patience um yeah like it like what happened was I'd taken this shot and I said son of a gun the door frames in there which meant that I had to go through step by step and basically clone and color match other sections of the wall nearby and put it over the doorframe the actual tutorial that this image is included in is available from here which was 10 years ago now so it um I think I might have mentioned the actual step by step in that tutorial I just linked right there matter of fact yes I'm pretty sure that I did but yeah so it was um basically take the image duplicate it shift the top layer over to fill out the left side a little bit and then use a layer mask to paint in the the same wall and then color matched a little bit on that side and then kind of finagle it again the step by steps are in that link so you can see it cool yeah thank you for sharing I'm gonna put the notes here yeah I can't recommend enough like hitting those URLs or even going to my web page um because I've written about all of these topics in in mind numbing detail in some cases like the digital black and white tutorial on GIMP is adapted from like a five post um uh a tutorial that were each post was I don't know a thousand words at least it was an obnoxious amount of writing but if you have any questions those things haven't changed they're still very valid in GIMP right now because again the tools that underlie everything haven't really made a big change awesome well thank you so much you fill a lot of information and to a small amount of time and I feel like uh the next summit we have uh we might need to have you you know come on for a bit longer and show us more stuff yeah like the problem is you give me an hour and it's gonna like just already took me a week and a half or two weeks of playing with it to finally get a presentation and by the way finally one last quick thing I just wanted to say while I have a stage and a microphone for just two seconds um yeah what the the reason that I did all of the things that I've done so far and the reason I'm working so heavily on pre-nocturne software is very similar to Ryan Gorely's reason if anyone was able to visit that presentation yesterday somewhere there's a kid that doesn't have money like I did growing up or access to a lot of tools that might get a second hand digital camera and have a little bit of fun with it I want to make sure that that kid has access to tools that will let them spread their creative wings and really learn to play with things without having to incur cost both uh that as in beer or as in um freedom so awesome yeah pay it forward okay thank you guys so much for having me looking forward to the next one yep absolutely thank you Pat