30 April 2014

Pop Art

Recently I took a very colorful and quite abstract picture, which I thought would make for an interesting 'pop art' effect. The process is really basic and obvious, but I decided to share it for anyone who want to learn a quickie.

pop art gimp

So, I opened the image with GIMP. Since I want the final collage as a 4x4 composition, increase the Canvas Size to 200% on both directions.

pop art gimp

Then Duplicate the image layer.

pop art gimp

Repeat the duplication until there are enough pieces to cover the image. I need 3 duplicates, for a total of 4 pieces.

pop art gimp

Select each piece and with the Alignment Tool move them to cover the image (one right, one bottom, one right and bottom).

pop art gimp

Now the aligned pieces should fill the entire image.

pop art gimp

Leave one layer as is (if you really want, you can edit it too) and for the second open the Hue-Saturation dialog.

pop art gimp

Move the Hue slider left or right until you are happy with the new color set.

pop art gimp

Repeat for the other layers until you have something like this:

pop art gimp

Export and you are done:

pop art gimp

Here's a different use case for a similar effect: I had a single background for the water drop photos, but adjusting the Hue made it appear the pictures are more different than in reality.

pop art gimp

PS: as someone told me, I should print this at some big size and try to sell my 'pop art' creation for a ginormous amount of money.

Firefox 29

firefox 29
Probably everybody already heard there is a new Firefox release and it changes many things and already has an opinion about it. Unfortunately I don't have the audience to gather a significant sample, but if anyone runs such a poll, I would be genuinely interested.

Which Firefox user interface do you prefer?
  1. Firefox 29 (the latest, just released)
  2. Firefox 4-28 (still on long term support)
  3. Firefox pre-4 (before the "keyhole")
  4. Seamonkey (the suite)
  5. I don't care (as long at it open web pages)
Of course i am coming here from an angle: I prefer the apps on my desktop to be consistent with each other, as layout, structure, widgets placement, shortcuts, behavior( I was happy the old Firefox never got the "keyhole" on Linux.) Still, not enough to move to something like Midori , where the look and feel is totally native but the set of features smaller.

22 April 2014

Pseudo-HDR editing

Usually I don't edit much my landscape photos, not because I don't know how but I prefer them this way. Still, recently I felt the need for some more advanced processing for a picture, it enjoyed some success so I decided to share the process. The tools used were UFRaw (in the form of the GIMP plugin), Luminance HDR and, of course, GIMP.

I passed by this scene in the nearby park at the "golden hour" and it looked photogenic, but I wanted to make it more dramatic. One can increase the drama in a landscape photo by using a HDR treatment, but not having the tripod with me (for a proper HDR image you need at least 3 images with exactly the same scene but different exposures) I decided to go for pseudo-HDR. For this, I set the camera recording mode to RAW.

pseudo hdr

Note: the real purpose of a HDR image is to have details both in the shadows and in the highlights, beyond what the camera sensor can record, the improved drama is a side effect.

The RAW image was imported in GIMP via the UFRaw plugin 3 times: with normal, -1 and +1 exposure. If you really want, you can try doing the same starting from a single JPEG an simulate the exposure bracketing with color levels/curves, but I wouldn't advise: if from a RAW you can recover some lost image details, in JPEG they are gone forever.

pseudo hdr

The result is 3 JPEG images, one under-exposed, one exposed properly and the other over-exposed, which are to be combined in a HDR. For more drama, you can bracket with more than one step.

pseudo hdr

I imported the JPEGs to Luminance HDR and set their exposures manually to -1, 0 and +1 (or whatever values you used for RAW development). Then just press "Next" a few times, there is no need to adjust parameters, nor align the images (they were obtained from the same source).

pseudo hdr

Now we have a High Dynamic Range image, which can't be used or viewed as-is on a normal computer display, it has to be converted back to Low Dynamic Range, but optimized for what do we want from it (details in shadows and/or highlights, drama, whatever).

pseudo hdr

Time to pick one of the presets in the right column, one you think is the best for your case.

pseudo hdr

Then I adjusted the color levels a bit (if you prefer, the levels can be adjusted later with GIMP or any other image editing app).

pseudo hdr

Now the image can be exported as a JPEG benefiting from the HDR/pseudo-HDR treatment. You can leave it as-is if you like.

pseudo hdr

However, I opened it again with GIMP for more refinement: sharpening and color curves adjustment, to make the colors warmer. This is my end result.

pseudo hdr

10 April 2014

A license to print money

We learned (link in Romanian) the Romanian government is negotiating with Microsoft for a Windows XP support extension in the public administration. This is the free market at work and there may be solid arguments for doing so (yes, I would prefer my tax money to be spent on Free and Open Source Software instead of making business with a convicted monopolist, but realistically I don't expect this to happen in the foreseeable future).
My source of amazement is: once the patches and the delivery infrastructure are set for the first government (UK), then the costs for adding any subsequent government is approaching zero: computers in Romanian administration usually have Windows installed in English, so there is nothing to translate, the infrastructure to deliver patches is there and the network costs are the same or lower (presumably patches fro XP are smaller in size as patches for Windows 7).
Apparently ending support for XP makes a lot of business sense for Microsoft, they suddenly started receiving important sums of money for things they did only a week ago for free. Who would refuse that?

08 April 2014

On the Mozilla scandal

Like many of you, I too received the Mozilla email about "helping" with communications regarding the "activities of the past week", which is an euphemism for the Brendan Eich scandal. It comes with a FAQ you are expected to quote when talking about the issue.

Since all communications from Mozilla on the topic were opaque, either in blog posts with comments disabled or emails from generic addresses where is useless to reply, I finally decided to write something. Anyway, April 1-st, when I learned about the topic, wasn't a good day to write about serious issues. It may be not me my business what happens inside the Mozilla corporation, but if the Mozilla community feels a need to guide my public communications about it, then maybe it is.

So I am totally unhappy with Mozilla to caving-in to pressure from bullies. It creates a serious precedent and a slippery slope. What's the next step? Once a new CEO is announced, no matter who he is, the browser will be blocked by anti-gay websites? It looks like we are going towards a Balkanized web, where the "best viewed with [Internet Explorer|Netscape Navigator]" buttons are replaced by "blocked for browsers whose CEO have private opinion X".

Seriously, instead of personal political opinions of the Mozilla CEO I was more concerned about him wasting resources on the mobile OS unicorn while the browser looks more and more like a Chrome copy-cat.