Showing posts with label tutorial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tutorial. Show all posts

December 27, 2010

Cross-processing using GIMP

Downloaded FxCamera for our trip over to Chicago over the holiday weekend. The app has a mode called Toy camera, that produces a cross-processed look to the photographs in the phone itself. Unfortunately, the final images are resized, and applying an in-phone effect to a phone camera shot results in an irrecoverable loss of fidelity, leaving no room for anything else. According to the author, the effect is produced by manipulating the color curves of the image - something that GIMP does a rather good job of.

Cross-processing has its roots in film photography, where a film is deliberately developed in a chemical solution intended for a different film. Cross processing results in color casts, high contrast and a sort of blown highlights and color casts in blacks.

Cross-processing technique

To cross-process in GIMP, the idea is to open the picture; auto-correct the colors or get the picture to look well exposed; apply the curves; then potentially adjust contrast.

The focus of this post is the trickiest part step from the above - to apply custom curves for the cross-processed look. The screenshot below shows how the curves should look. Save these as a preset and use as a starting point. As you can see, the red highlights get toned down and shadows get stretched, the green highlights get stretched, and blue is clipped at the ends.

Redscale technique

Similar to the cross-processed technique is the redscale technique, that originated with film cameras using the film in reverse. This causes the photograph to have an overtly red cast, while suppressing greens and blues.

The curves similarly follow, by focusing on boosting the higlights and midtones of the reds, while actively damping greens and blues. The curves below are what work best when trying to apply the redscale technique in post processing.

The advantage of doing this outside the phone is of course the additional control, but in addition you can leave the poor phone camera to do what it can to get a decent photograph with its itsy bitsy sensor, without worrying about having to post process it as well.

Of course, after using either technique, a good followup is to do a quick contrast boost make sure the resulting photograph is not too flat, and do the usual crop, resize, unsharp mask prior to saving as a png. Boosting contrast is achieved by using the classic "S-curve" on the composite channel. The curve can be stronger or flatter depending on the original photograph and the final desired effect. Know that you will lose a bit of detail at the higher and lower ends of the histogram using either technique and you shouldn't necessarily try to get it back with contrast correction.

External links: lilahpops.com & epicedits.com

December 03, 2010

Cheap Terabyte RAID on Network

Background: We need storage space. And we are not that good with keeping backups. And it is always a good idea to be a little cheap. I knew I was never going to afford a RAID 5, but I figured it was just a matter before RAID 1 became more accessible.

Ingredients:

  • 1x Cavalry Dual Bay Hard Drive Dock (EN-CAHDD2B-D)
  • 2x WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA Drives with 32MB Cache at 7200 RPM (WD10000LSRTL)

Buying instructions: Buy the Cavalry Dock for $19.99 (including $10 mail-in rebate) from Buy.com. Get the two terabyte drives from Best Buy during their Black Friday sale for $59.99 a piece.

Assembly and physical setup: Tear open boxes and covers. Try not to make much of a mess. Setup the jumper configuration into 0-1-0 per provided instructions. Slide the two Terabyte drives into the two slots provided on the Cavalry Dock Bay.

Configure and Format: The Cavalry drive is a classic plug, crash and play USB device. In the RAID 1 configuration, the device shows up under Windows XP as a JMB352 RAID-1 USB device. The two drives are not shipped formatted, so while you can see the plugged in USB hardware, it will not show up as a drive. So you will need to create a partition and format the drive.

Go to Start > Run, type diskmgmt.msc and hit enter. Here is what I saw.

Disk 1 is what I added, and it had not been initialized yet (in other words the space has not been allocated to a drive yet). Right click, select New Partition, and go through the defaults. Assuming you want to keep the Terabyte to just a single drive, you want to format a Primary partition. And I chose to not do the Quick Format, as I had other designs for the drive and wanted to make sure it was really good to go.

Network it: This was going to be the trickiest part. My router is a Netgear WNR3500L Wireless Router.

The great thing about this router, among many others, is that it provides a USB port that you can use to plug a USB drive in and have it visible on the wireless network. The tricky part was going to be compatibility - I wasn't sure if the USB chipset was going to play nice with the router. Fortunately, they did decide to play well with each other and as a result I now have a network accessible RAID 1 storage of a Terabyte at an additional cost of about $139.97 (plus tax).

September 10, 2010

Using GIMP: Web 2.0 Buttons - II

In a prior post, I posted an easy way to make those three dimensional reflective buttons that are typical of the new Web 2.0 interface elements. GIMP, is a great tool to create those nice and shiny buttons. The other method was relatively quick, and this one is a tad more involved.

I am using GIMP 2.6.10 for the tutorial. For earlier versions, the main difference is the difficulty in selecting with rounded corners. Step by step tutorial with pictures after the break

September 09, 2010

Using GIMP: Web 2.0 Buttons - I

Web 2.0 has adopted its own distinctive style for interface elements, dominated by those three dimensional, reflective buttons. Using GIMP, it is easy to create those buttons. This is the first of two ways to do it - a relatively simple method. I will post a slightly more involved method later.

I am using GIMP 2.6.10 for the tutorial. For earlier versions, the main difference is the difficulty in selecting with rounded corners. Step by step tutorial with pictures after the break

April 14, 2010

Pied piper of Yahoo

The problem:
I have a blog and a website - the blog is maintained by blogger, and the latter manually by me. Now I want to syndicate (via Feedburner) updates to either of these locations, transparently to the end user.

The solution - Part 1:
To begin, I did not have a feed for my website. So, well, I went about creating one. A couple of sites got me started. I would strongly urge the use of the <published> tag in addition to the other recommended ones. What I came up with, continued after the break: