On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 9:28 PM, Stephen DeLear wrote:

Unsharpen Mask: The GEGL unsharpen mask feature does not use standard terminology. I have no idea how to set this.

Let me give you an idea: edit the source code and send us a patch ('diff -u' is your friend)

You want this file:

http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gegl/trunk/operations/common/unsharp-mask.c?revision=2590&view=markup

:-)

High Dynamic Range Imaging: Which will require greater then 8bit color. Mathematically putting 3 or more images bracketed on a tripod together for an expanded tonal range. Currently can be done natively in CS3/CS4.

Qtpfsgui is your friend :-)

Noise Reduction: The overexposed look is in for photography lately as dark areas of an image pick up patterning from the digital sensor (i.e. noise). Back in the days of film seeing grain in an image enlarged to several feet would be a "live with it". Today a number of companies will reject images showing ANY noise at 100%. Plugins such as noise ninja are quite popular. Would be nice to have a specific noise killing enhancement in GIMP.

You mean you want all those noise reduction plug-ins and scripts floating around GIMP in the bundle or some particular one? Could you probably be more particular about that? :-)

I'm not saying GIMP developers will do what you say (I'm not in position to make any claims regarding development process), but at least you could start with review of existing solutions for GIMP (GREYCstoration, Wavelet Denoise etc.) with samples and recommendations. That would be a good start. Just telling people something is missing and not providing enough information is not quite helpful ;-)

Alexandre

Stephen:

- GEGL Unsharpen Mask: AFAICS, the values are the same of the regular unsharp mask filter, but it has a larger scale. It allows extreme values (i guess it makes sense for really high resolutions)

- View at Simulated Output: That's what the "point to point" option allows when deactivated.

- Noise Reduction: There are several great plugins for noise reduction: Greycstoration and wavelet denoise being a couple of them (Greystoration is really impressive).

- High Dynamic Range Imaging: There is a exposure blending script that allows too merge 3 different exposures in one image, The resulting image isn't an HDRI though.

On Sun, 2008-10-05 at 10:28 -0700, Stephen DeLear wrote:

?Just some thoughts on Gimp in general and 2.6 in particular.

Some people have already replied, here are some more thoughts from another photogtrapher :D

Layers: Somebody has misplaced a box. Where has the layers stack window gone? I can’t turn on the pane under either layers, image or view. I can create a new layer but not see what layers are on the image.

control-L will get the layers dialogue back (at least on Linux), or you can go to the Windows menu and it's under Dockable docks. By default it should be visible in one of the docks, though.

Save As: I don’t seem to be able to move up a level then down into a new folder on a save as.

I think a LOT more details are needed here in order to help... for example, which Linux distribution are you using, and which version of gtk?

for me, I can do this -
(1) control-shift-S (or File->Save AS) (2) Save Image appears
(3) I can click on Browse for other folders (3) I see immediately under the Browse for other folders label I clicked on,
< [lee] [eos] [2008-10-01-peterborough] (4) I can click on [eos] to go up to that directory.

Unsharpen Mask: The GEGL unsharpen mask feature does not use standard terminology. I have no idea how to set this.

Youi'll have to experiment. By "standard" do you mean that there is an ISO specification for unsharp mask, or do you mean you want the labels to be the same as some piece of proprietary software or other, or that you want them to be the same as Filters->Enhance->Unsharp Mask
?

In general, be specific with suggestions, e.g. "it might be clearer for people who grew up using other software if the terms were Amount and Radius rather thn Standard Deviation and Scale", or "ISO 30196:2006 Terminology for Graphics" says that the terms should be Setting One and Setting Five; conformance with this specification would help US Government adoption" :)

General Wish List:

Locate Center Point:

Reviewing a 22MP image a 100% means navigating an image with an equivalent size of several feet. What would be nice is some way to mark the exact center of the image, where the central AF point fell, so that it can be quickly navigated to at 100%.

?Middle-click on the middle of the horizontal scrollbar, and again on the middle of the vertical scrollbar, and that will get you roughly the the middle of the image. I don't know which camera you're using, but mine has multiple AF points, and I can use a wheel to choose which one is active; it's conceivable to me that a plugin could be written to extract this information from the EXIF data (it's probably different for Canon, Olympus, Nikon, Pentax, Mamiya, Phase One, etc) and take you to the point or points that the camera thought were in focus.

Scale to File Size: Many stock sites require an image to be upsized. For example Alamy requires an uncompressed file size of 48megs from a file saved as a 8bit .JPG. It would be useful to be able to set in an uncompressed file size and have the GIMP resize to be exactly that size.

I find with Alamy the limit is that your compressed file must be no larger than 25 MBytes. So I use Save As, choose JPG, and then turn on the image preview, and adjust (s l o w l y) the settings until I get just under 25 MBytes. If your image is too large or too small, the upload applet will flag an erorr.

But there are multiple parameters you can tweak, so it's not clear to me how this could be automated. For example, sometimes I think I can get away with reducing the quality and increasing Smoothing to reduce the artefacts, and sometimes I need to use 1x1,1x1,1x1 subsampling to preserve reds.

View at Simulated Output, 150, 300 or 500 DPI

What would this do technically, exactly?

High Dynamic Range Imaging: Which will require greater then 8bit color.

You can actually do HDR work with GIMp today. However, more-than-8-bit colour is in progress; it's a large amount of engineering, and is not yet complete.

Color Palettes: Digital Cameras tend to output in only a couple of color palettes. Alien Skins Exposure 2 plug in can simulate a number of old film palettes. It would be nice to be able to do in the open source world (patents allowing). At least from Kodak, datasheets including gamma curves of every film they’ve ever made are online (RG25 FTW).

GIMP's colour pallette support is currently mostly designed for indexed image formats such as GIF. But it would certainly be possible to write a plugin to say, "Change image A to use only the colours from image B"; ImageMagick supports this operation today. You could also experiment with Colours->Sample Colourise (or it might be called Colors->Sample Colorize, depending on where you live).

Noise Reduction:

One approach here is to scale the image up, e.g. 300%, then do a blur, then scale down again (use Cubic to avoid exaggerating noise artefacts) and then use Sharpen (not unsharp).

With some cameras this may work best if you use colours->decompose, and then blur only one of the resulting layers, and then recombine; I find a selective gaussian blur can work well.

There are quite a few noise plugins floating around, but I haven't so far found any better than scale up, blur, scale down.

Hope this helps. Good luck with Alamy :-)

Liam

On Sun, 2008-10-05 at 10:28 -0700, Stephen DeLear wrote:

?

Layers: Somebody has misplaced a box. Where has the layers stack window gone? I can’t turn on the pane under either layers, image or view. I can create a new layer but not see what layers are on the image.

A brief update --

Under Windows Vista it seems you may need to click "Auto" in the Image dock (you can find this under Window->Dockable Windows, if yuo don't have it docked already).

If you don't do this, you may find the layers dialogue is always empty, and some other dialogues don't work properly -- because the active image isn't getting set I think.

Liam

Stephen DeLear wrote:
::snip? SNIP!::
First off, just to be clear, what OS are you on? The vast majority of gimp users are Linux/some-form-of-UNIX users, so that tends to be what we (or, at least, I) assume. The issues you're facing sound like you might be using a less-tested configuration, though.

Locate Center Point: Reviewing a 22MP image a 100% means navigating an image with an equivalent size of several feet. What would be nice is some way to mark the exact center of the image, where the central AF point fell, so that it can be quickly navigated to at 100%.

Click and drag on the "move" icon in the lower-right corner of the image window.

Scale to File Size: Many stock sites require an image to be upsized. For example Alamy requires an uncompressed file size of 48megs from a file saved as a 8bit .JPG. It would be useful to be able to set in an uncompressed file size and have the GIMP resize to be exactly that size.

This seems incredibly silly and naive. First of, as JPEG is a lossless format, different images will end up at different pixel sizes to reach the same file size. I mean, if you've got a low-key image that's predominantly black (or some other image that JPEG works well on), you'd have to make the thing enormous to hit that. Secondly, upsampling the image doesn't increase the amount of information in the image, so you're essentially just wasting disk space for no gain. If there were a minimum pixel size, I could see upsampling the image to meet that. A minimum file size, though? No way.

Are you sure they want you to upsample the image to meet the file size requirement? Are you sure it's not just the case that they want images from a medium-format digital back or something like that?

--xsdg

On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 05:23 +0000, Omari Stephens wrote:

Stephen DeLear wrote:
[...]

Scale to File Size: Many stock sites require an image to be upsized. For example Alamy requires an uncompressed file size of 48megs from a file saved as a 8bit .JPG. It would be useful to be able to set in an uncompressed file size and have the GIMP resize to be exactly that size.

This seems incredibly silly and naive.

Regardless, this is what they require.

First of, as JPEG is a lossless format,

I think you mean "lossy" here.

Alamy (for example) requires a minimum uncompressed file size of 48 MBytes and a maximum compressed file size of 25 MBytes. They have instructions on how to upscale images. See for example http://www.alamy.com/contributors/stock-photography-digital-cameras.asp

If you want to go on a crusade against stock image companies, that's fine :-)

Liam (also at CSAIL by the way!)