Category: photomanipulation

Photo editing tutorials

Lately I wrote on my general blog a couple of photo editing tutorials, both of them are targeted at GIMP, since this is what I use on my day to day work. Of course, the principles are general and can be applied to other similar tools.

The first one is about watermark removal on photos submitted to Wikipedia, this is something perfectly legal, since those pictures are submitter under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

watermark removal

The second tutorials refers to creating customs grids to be used on photo editing but also in graphic and layout design.

grids

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Purple haze tutorial

iphone 5I rarely cross-post things from one of my blogs to another, but now my sarcastic howto edit photos for an iPhone 5 look is somewhat on-topic here, so if you want to make a bit of fun about the defective iPhone camera while learning a tiny bit of GIMP editing, go read it.

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Referendum

The political situation in Romania turned as bad as expected, with the democratically elected president suspended by a rogue government and we are heading for a referendum this Sunday. Fortunately, the European Commission acted and made the government to respect the law (the government tried to put a government order in place of the law and eliminate the presence threshold for the referendum), so in the light of this, the most effective way to act against it, Romanians who want to preserve the democracy have as the best option to boycott the referendum, this way it will be invalidated in the case of a small voter turnover. Hopefully, the fraud won’t change the numbers from a projected 30% presence to the 50%+1 they need.
In support of the democratic action, I made a few images based on my old photos encouraging people to avoid a communist future for the country by boycotting the referendum.
Personally, I won’t vote and on top of that I will be out of the city for the next few days, I am going to the sea side (expect pictures).

referendum
referendum
referendum
referendum

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Vienna: beer festival

Another totally random encounter in Vienna was a beer festival taking place near the city center, a few hundreds of meters away from the St. Stephan cathedral. The setting was not very different from the festivals at home, the same tables and chairs, some different brands of beer and food, a much larger orchestra playing.

beer festival
beer festival
beer festival
beer festival

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Old photo, new edit

I needed a pictures with water drops for a little photo contest among a small group of friends, this is what I tool the roses, skin and water drops series, but unfortunately I had some publishing restrictions suddenly appearing on it, with no time for new pics, there is a “plan B” to activate: get an old pic and make the best of it for the contest. So here’s the old pic with today’s editing:

water drops

And if curious, the old version from about 3 years ago when I was a newbie photographer with beginner’s gear and a lot less editing experience:

water drops

However, I expect some (trolling or not) to prefer the older version (these days I am reading a book about “extreme” editing makeover, so is not impossible I went overboard or was misguided).

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Abigail CD cover

Remember the project I was worked on with Abigail? It started to come into fruition, they have now a sleeve for their It Is The Nidht I Fear CD, with the photo I made in that session on the back side (the band photo):

abigail
m/

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TGIF/Trollolol

Sorry people, today is Friday and I feel like trolling a bit. Problem?

trollolol
trollolol

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A trip with some friends in the Old City, a visit to an antique store, Iulia wanting to play, a lot of GIMP due to shooting in low light and here is this vintage session:

vintage
vintage vintage
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Photographer badge

I made myself a little “freelance photographer” badge, holding this title, my full name, an invented serial name, a photo and, of course, contact data, which I am lately wearing when shooting at public events, hoping will decrease the chance I get asked who am I. Not sure about the target audience, but so far quite a few photographers liked it and asked for one.

photo pass

Since I was asked and because sharing is caring, I decided to share the design freely. As I do almost all my illustration and DTP work with Inkscape, the badge was made with Inkscape too, the canonical source is in SVG format.
photo pass

I understand many photographers are not into illustration and may not know/want to edit a vector file, so I rasterized it and transformed into a GIMP layered (.xcf) file, for those who fancy that (I use GIMP for my photo editing needs):
photo pass

Since I understand most of the photographers are unfortunately still locked in the Adobe world, I went to the extra-mile, used “Save As” from GIMP to produce a Photoshop (.psd) version. This is untested, since I do not have any installed, nor I want to.
photo pass

Feel free to use it in any way you want, but don’t forget to add a photo, and to edit your name and contact info (web and mail). Also, put a random digit string as serial number.

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Dracula’s Backyard

In the Chindia ruins complex, past the old church there is another church, a smaller one, with a graveyard on the side. As the castle was ruled, among other voivods, by Vlad Dracul (Drăculea) and his son, Vlad Țepeș (the Impaler, the famous Dracula), I like to call it Dracula’s Backyard, since for sure it was the backyard of the two Vlads.

dracula's backyard

Now, I wonder, those graves… is something happening there at midnight?

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Life in Black and White, or How To Make It Simple

Felt sometime the life is to complex, to many details and aspects making you hard to take a decision? Time me teach a lesson: let’s start with whatever photo (this particular one is about the fight of good and evil, noble Jedis and scary villains with some cutesy in between, but to each his own) and open it in your favorite image editor (I opening it with GIMP, since it is my favorite):


You know how they say the life is about shades of gray? Let’s do that, trying to simplify it:

I don’t know what you think, but for me it seems still complex:

So the next step is to apply another tool, called Thresohld:

This is a much simpler life, no shades, only black and white:

Adjusting a couple of sliders we can move it more to the lightness:

Or to the darkness, according to each one’s taste and view of life:

See now, the outlook of the life around is so much clearer so a decision making become so much easier! Do it and do not look back. Easy solution to hard problems.

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Valentine’s Day

valentine

…choke on it!

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Photo comic: Medieval

Some time ago I also played with comic strips made as a combination of photography and illustration, but this time the idea was to aim for a longer story, evolving with feedback from the viewers. It will continue only if the audience want to.

medieval

Vote with your comments. Thanks!

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Flyers

I know this is a stupid thing to to, but when previewing the series on the LCD of my camera I noticed the continuity, so I had to assemble it in an animated GIF:

flyers

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Vintage FAIL

Hmmm… it looks like I need a new FAIL category in this blog… yesterday evening I had a meeting with some friends from the RLUG community and as all those meetings are best organised around some beers, we went to a pub called Bordello in the Old city of Bucharest (and this is the topic of my post here).

Long story short, the pub is called like that because in the XIX century in its place was a bordello, as the entire neighborhood used to be a light district (destroyed in a fire, rebuilt and such). And to keep the theme, the walls are decorated with vintage erotic photography, which awakened my interest as a photographer: now I think it would be an interesting photography exercise to take in this day some photos that will look like those. And this is going to be yet another source of frustration for me, thus the “FAIL” category, since is not going to be easy to implement.

Basically, those photos are not hard, what you need is logistics:

  • first you need a plumpy model… not fat, just with a bit more meat on her bones, to fit the beauty standards of the era. And good luck finding a plumpy model with enough confidence to pose;
  • then you need some old fashioned clothing, like the sheath your grandma used to wear… this is not as hard as it looks, use the “less is more” approach and you can get the job done with any piece of cloth;
  • accessories: feathers, beads, fans, etc.;
  • background is harder: an old looking chair, maybe a drawer, a bed with baldaquin;
  • for the lighting setup I would have to do a bit of study, but it should not be hard, the photographers of the era didn’t have expensive equipment;
  • the photos should be very soft, slightly unfocused, but not with shallow depth of field. So maybe take them softer directly from the camera or just go sharp and blur it a bit in post-processing, a trivial task;
  • again, in post-processing turn the colors in sepia tones, another easy task.

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