Photography – Page 56 – Something Odd!

Changing sky colour with the Gimp

Jenny Drake wrote an illustrated tutorial on Changing sky colour with the Gimp.
She does a great job of explaining her technique but I think she had a tough job as the sky was really washed out, – compositing two images, one for the landscape, one for the sky would have resulted in a better image maybe!
Still, something to try later..

Mountain Path

Trees reaching up from the ground to the sun soaked hills.

Cartoonizing Photos With The GIMP

This is fun! After reading this tutorial on making cartoons from photos I tried to emulate his technique in the GIMP. The dialogs are slightly different but here’s what I did..

Layer->Duplicate Layer
Select the new layer, Filters->Edge-Detect->Edge, select Sobel, Amount should be 2.0, and Black should be checked.
Invert the edge-mask layer, it’s in Layers->Colors->Invert
Back in the Layers Dialog, change the Layer Mode to Divide

Play around with Layer mode settings, desaturate the top layer, blur or otherwise mess up the bottom layer. Endless fun can be had! Feel free to post links to your own creations in the comments below!

Later.. on advice I got rid of the portrait, I’ll upload another tomorrow!

Tips for Traveling with a Digital Camera

Common sense tips from Shirley. When I travel I tend to bring along as much memory as possible, batteries and a charger, and if I get the opportunity, I’ll burn my photos onto several CDs, carrying one on my person/hand luggage and another in stowed luggage. But that’s just paranoid me!

Digital Camera Myths

Megapixel Myths is an introduction of digital cameras, probably useful for someone new to the genre and looking for a new camera.
This Megapixel Myths site is a lot more involved – the author goes over many aspects of digital vs film photography, including the costs of each..

Let’s look at two scenarios to see how the cost of digital and traditional photography balance out over the first year. Notice that I said cost, not value. Cost is the total amount of money you spend. Value is what you receive in return. Cost is empirical; value is subjective.

My camera has probably halved in value in the year that I’ve owned it, but if I had a nice 35mm film camera it may not have gone down in value so much! (That said, film cameras are getting cheaper as digital becomes more popular!)

Up The Tree

While the girls ate sandwiches and drank tea I wandered off with my camera..

(Almost) Everything You Wanted to Know about Sharpening in Photoshop but Were Afraid to Ask

This lengthy articlegoes into detail about sharpening using PS. It translates to The GIMP, but the dialogs are very different.

Online Photo Printing Service in Ireland, Redux

Looks like Digi-Prints in the UK is probably the cheapest online printing service. I just got confirmation from them that they deliver to Ireland. Bonusprint come second, Spectra Photo trail behind as they’ve doubled their prices in the last year and others are very expensive too or shut down. I’ll be placing my order next weekend!
Mypixmania caused me no end of problems, although I was offered photo-credits for the few mix-ups that happened. Their French prices are good, but Sterling is too much unfortunately.