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G'MIC 2.7 - Process Your Images with Style!

The IMAGE team at the GREYC research laboratory is pleased to announce the release of version 2.7 of G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic for Image Computing), its free, generic, extensible, and probably a little magical, framework for digital image processing .

The previous PIXLS.US article on this open-source framework was published a year ago, in August 2018. This new release is therefore a good opportunity to summarize the main features and milestones of the project’s life over the past twelve months. Fasten your seat belts, the road is long and full of surprises!

Quick digiKam Tip: Back up digikamrc file

digiKam stores the current state of the application in the ~/.config/digikamrc file. This file keeps track of pretty much everything: from the database connection profile and custom toolbar settings, to the last-used curve and sharpening parameters. So next time you install or reinstall digiKam, don’t forget to back up the digikamrc file. This way, you don’t have to configure a fresh digiKam installation from scratch. Simply copy the file to a safe location or external storage device, and drop the file into the ~/.config folder before you run digiKam.

Location Tracking for Photographers with GPS Logger and Trekarta

When it comes to Android apps for photographers, we are spoiled for choice. From depth-of-field and golden hour calculators to sun position and remote control apps – there are plenty of clever tools to choose from. But there is one particular app combination that can prove to be indispensable for any photographer on the move: a GPS logger and a GPX viewer. There are two main reasons for that.

New Topic Previews

I’ve been a member of the community over at blenderartists.org (previously elysiun) for a long time (it’ll be 15 years this October according to my profile there ). So it was nice to see when they finally transitioned to using Discourse a little while back.

G'MIC Finally Accepts Donations

For years the incredible team over at G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic for Image Computing) have been producing an incredible image processing system and many awesome filters to go along with it. They’ve got an very active and awesome community right here on their forums and they’ve been producing all manner of neat processing filters for photographers, digital artists, and scientists.

Due to the project being under the auspices of a French Research Lab, the GREYC laboratory in Caen, France, they were limited in being able to accept any donations.

Until now!

To avoid burying the lede, go and make a donation to the fabulous folks of the G’MIC project: https://libreart.info/en/projects/gmic .

Libre Graphics Meeting 2019

It’s that time of year again: Libre Graphics Meeting 2019 is fast approaching!

This year the meeting will be May 29 to June 2 in Saarbrücken, Germany . This is extra exciting because Saarbrücken is centrally located enough that we should have a nice representation from projects and community members. Members of both RawTherapee and darktable live nearby and will be in attendance (along with others from those projects and many others).

Goodbye Google Analytics

Over on my personal website I decided to stop using third party trackers and assets to keep from exposing visitors to unintended tracking. Third party assets expose a user to being tracked and analyzed by those third (or fourth, or more) parties and honestly this is something the web could use a little (lot) less of. I loved having stats early on when we started this crazy idea for a community and as I mentioned on my blog post, it’s a Faustian bargain to get stats at the expense of allowing Google to track what all the users of the site are doing. No thanks.

2018 PlayRaw Calendar

Last year I got an amazing surprise in the mail. It was an awesome calendar of a handpicked selection of results from the years PlayRaw images.

Chris (@chris) put together another fantastic calendar for this year (while juggling kids, too) and it’s too nice to not have a post about it!

Giving More Thanks

It is a yearly tradition for us to post something giving thanks around this holiday. I think it’s because this community has become such a large part of our lives. Also, I think it helps to remind ourselves once in a while of the good things that happen to us. So in that spirit…

Financial Supporters

We are lucky enough (for now) to not have huge costs, but they are costs none-the-less. We have been very fortunate that so many of you have stepped up to help pay those costs.

Support Andrea Ferrero on Patreon!

Andrea Ferrero, or as we know him Carmelo_DrRaw , has been contributing to the PIXLS.US community since April of 2015. A self described developer and photography enthusiast, Andrea is the developer of the PhotoFlow image editor, and is producing AppImages for:

• The GIMP image manipulation program - weekly AppImage packages from stable releases and development branches.
• The RawTherapee editor - nightly AppImage and Windows packages from stable and development branches
• LuminanceHDR - nightly AppImage packages for Linux
• HDRMerge - nightly AppImage packages for Linux
• The Hugin panorama photo stitcher - AppImages for stable releases and development branches

Andrea is the best sort of community member, contributing six different projects (including his own)! He is always thoughtful in his responses, does his own support for PhotoFlow, and is kind and giving. He has finally started a Patreon page to support his all of his hard work . Support him now!

G'MIC 2.3.6

The IMAGE team of the GREYC laboratory is happy to celebrate the 10th anniversary of G’MIC with you, an open-source (CeCILL ), generic and extensible framework for image processing . GREYC is a public research laboratory on digital technology located in Caen, Normandy/France, under the supervision of 3 research institutions: the CNRS (UMR 6072), the University of Caen Normandy and the ENSICAEN engineering school.

Welcoming the gPhoto Project to the PIXLS.US community!

A major goal of the PIXLS.US effort is to do whatever we can do to help developers of projects unburden themselves from administrating their project. We do this, in part, by providing forum hosting, participating in support, providing web design, and doing community outreach. With that in mind, we are excited to welcome the gPhoto Projects to our discuss forum !

G'MIC 2.2

The IMAGE team of the GREYC laboratory (UMR CNRS 6072, Caen, France) is pleased to announce the release of a new 2.2 version of G’MIC , its open-source, generic, and extensible framework for image processing . As we already did in the past , we take this opportunity to look at the latest notable features added since the previous major release (2.0, last June).

LGM and Libre Graphics at SCaLE 16x

There are two libre graphics related meetings coming up early next year. The annual Libre Graphics Meeting (in Spain this year), and something entirely new: a libre graphics track at SCaLE. How exciting!

Libre Graphics Meeting 2018

The Libre Graphics Meeting is going to be in Seville, Spain this year. They recently published their Call for Participation and are accepting presentation and talk proposals now. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend this year, but there’s a pretty good chance some friendlier folks from the community will be! We’ll update more about who will be making it out as soon as we know, and maybe we can convince someone to run another photowalk with everyone. (On a side note, if anyone from the community is going to make it and wants a hand putting anything together for a presentation just let us know - we’re here to help.)

Giving Thanks

This is becoming a sort of tradition for me to post something giving thanks around this holiday. I think it’s because this community has become such a large part of my life (even if I don’t have nearly as much time to spend on it as I’d like). Also, I think it helps to remind ourselves once in a while of the good things that happen to us. So in that spirit…

Keep the Raws Coming

Our friendly neighborhood @LebedevRI pointed out to me a little while ago that we had reached some nice milestones for https://raw.pixls.us . Not surprisingly I had spaced out and not written anything about it (or really any sort of social posts). Bad Pat!

So let’s talk about raw.pixls.us (RPU) a bit!

Recap

For anyone not familiar with RPU, a quick recap (we had previously written about raw.pixls.us earlier this year). There used to be a website for housing a repository of raw files for as many digital cameras as possible called rawsamples.ch . It was created by Jakob Rohrbach and had been running since March of 2007. Back in 2016 the site was hit with a SQL injection attack that left the Joomla database corrupted (in a teachable moment, the site also didn’t have a database backup).

G'MIC 2.0

The IMAGE team of the research laboratory GREYC in Caen/France is pleased to announce the release of a new major version (numbered 2.0) of its project G’MIC : a generic, extensible, and open source framework for image processing . Here, we present the main advances made in the software since our last article . The new features presented here include the work carried out over the last twelve months (versions 2.0.0 and 1.7.x, for x varying from 2 to 9).

Happy 2nd Birthday Discuss

I was idling in our IRC chat room earlier when @Morgan_Hardwood wished us all a “Happy Discuss Anniversary”. Wouldn’t you know it, another year slipped right by! (Surely there’s no way it could already be a year since the last birthday post ? Where does the time go?)

We’ve had a bunch of neat things happen in the community over the past year! Let’s look at some of the highlights.

Welcome digiKam!

One of the goals we have here at PIXLS.US is to help Free Software projects however we can, and one of those ways is to focus on things that we can do well that might help make things easier for the projects. It may not be much fun for project developers to deal with websites or community outreach necessarily. This is something I think we can help with, and recently we had an opportunity to do just that with the awesome folks over at the photo management project digiKam .

GIMP is Going to LGM!

This years Libre Graphics Meeting (2017) is going to be held in the lovely city seen above, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil! This is an important meeting for so many people in the Free/Libre art community as it’s one of the only times they have an opportunity to meet face to face.

We’ve had some folks attending the past LGM’s (Leipzig and London ) and it’s a wonderful opportunity to spend some time with friends. (Also, @frd from the community will be there!)

Find us at SCaLE 15x

The Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) 15x is returning to the Pasadena Convention Center on March 2-5, 2017. SCaLE is one of the largest community-organized conferences in North America, with some 3,500 attendees last year.

If you’re attending the conference this year, find me, @paperdigits and lets talk shop or grab a meal!

If meeting isn’t enough for you, I’ll have stickers!

From the Community Vol. 2

Welcome to the second installment of From the Community, a (hopefully) quarterly-ish blog post to highlight a few of the things our community members have been doing!

Improving grain simulation

@arctic has posted some research about how to better simulate grain in our digital images and the ensuing conversation is both fascinating and way above my head! This discussion is thus far raw processor independent and more input and code is welcome!

New Year, New Raw Samples Website

Happy New Year, and I hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday!

We’ve been busy working on various things ourselves, including migrating RawPedia to a new server as well as building a replacement raw sample database/website to alleviate the problems that rawsamples.ch was having…

rawsamples.ch Replacement

Rawsamples.ch is a website with the goal to:

…provide RAW-Files of nearly all available Digitalcameras mainly to software-developers. [sic]

It was created by Jakob Rohrbach and had been running since March 2007, having amassed over 360 raw files in that time from various manufacturers and cameras. Unfortunately, back in 2016 the site was hit with a SQL-injection that ended up corrupting the database for the Joomla install that hosted the site. To compound the pain, there were no database backups… :(

Welcome Digital Painters

Yes, there really is art outside photography. :)

The history and evolution of painting has undergone a similar transformation as most things adapting to a digital age. As photographers, we adapted techniques and tools commonly used in the darkroom to software, and found new ways to extend what was possible to help us achieve a vision. Just as we tried to adapt skills to a new environment, so too did traditional artists, like painters.

Giving Thanks

Here in the U.S., we have a big holiday coming up this week: Thanksgiving . Serendipitously, this holiday also happens to fall when a few neat things are happening around the community, and what better time is there to recognize some folks and to give thanks of our own? No time like the present!

A Special Thanks

I feel a special “Thank You” should first go to a photographer and fantastic supporter of the community, Dimitrios Psychogios . Last year for our trip to Libre Graphics Meeting, London he stepped up with an awesome donation to help us bring some fun folks together.

João Almeida's darktable Presets

I realize that I’m a little late to this, but photographer João Almeida has created a wonderful set of film emulation presets for darktable that he uses in his own workflow for personal and commisioned work. Even more wonderful is that he has graciously released them for everyone to use .

These film emulations started as a personal side project for João, and he adds a disclaimer to them that he did not optimize them all for each brand or model of his cameras. His end goal was for these to be as simple as possible by using a few darktable modules. He describes it best on his blog post about them :

The Royal Photographic Society Journal

The Journal of the Photographic Society is the journal for one of oldest photographic societies in the world: the Royal Photographic Society . First published in 1853, the RPS Journal is the oldest photographic periodical in the world (just edging out the British Journal of Photography by about a year).

So you can imagine my doubt when confronted with an email about using some material from pixls.us for their latest issue…

If the name sounds familiar to anyone it may be from a recent post by Joe McNally who is featured prominently in the September 2016 issue. He was also just inducted as a fellow into the society!

Arnold Newman Portraits

Anyone that has spent any time around me would realize that I’m particularly fond of portraits. From the wonderful works of Martin Schoeller to the sublime Dan Winters , I am simply fascinated by a well executed portrait. So I thought it would be fun to take a look at some selections from the “father” of environmental portraits - Arnold Newman .

Newman wanted to become a painter before needing to drop out of college after only two years to take a job shooting portraits in a photo studio in Philadelphia. This experience apparently taught him what he did not want to do with photography…

From the Community Vol. 1

Welcome to the first installment of From the Community, a (hopefully) quarterly blog post to highlight a few of the things our community members have been doing!

Rapid Photo Downloader Process Model

@damonlynch has a great write up of Rapid Photo Download’s process model . Rapid Photo Downloader is built using Python , so if you’re looking for a good way to add threads to your Python program, this write up has some good information for you, check it out!

HD Photo Slideshow with Blender

While I was out at Texas Linux Fest this past weekend I got to watch a fun presentation from the one and only Brian Beck . He walked through an introduction to Blender , including an overview of creating his great The Lady in the Roses image that was a part of the 2015 Libre Calendar project.

Coincidentally, during my trip home community member @Fotonut asked about software to create an HD slideshow with images. The first answer that jumped into my mind was to consider using Blender (a very close second was OpenShot because I had just spent some time talking with Jon Thomas about it).

Texas Linux Fest 2016

While in London this past April I got a chance to hang out a bit with LWN.net editor and fellow countryman, Nathan Willis . (It sounds like the setup for a bad joke: “An Alabamian and Texan meet in a London pub…”). Which was awesome because even though we were both at LGM2014, we never got a chance to sit down and chat.

So it was super-exciting for me to hear from Nate about possibly doing a photowalk and Free Software photo workshop at the 2016 Texas Linux Fest , and as soon as I cleared it with my boss, I agreed!

Color Manipulation with the Colour Checker LUT Module

I was lucky to get to spend some time in London with the darktable crew. Being the wonderful nerds they are, they were constantly working on something while we were there. One of the things that Johannes was working on was the colour checker module for darktable.

Having recently acquired a Fuji camera, he was working on matching color styles from the built-in rendering on the camera. Here he presents some of the results of what he was working on.

Sharing is Caring

It was always my intention to make the entire PIXLS.US website available under a permissive license. The content is already all licensed Creative Commons, By Attribution, Share-Alike (unless otherwise noted). I just hadn’t gotten around to actually posting the site source.

Until now(ish). I say “ish” because I apparently released the code back in April and am just now getting around to talking about it.

Also, we finally have a category specifically for all those darktable weenies on discuss !

Sharing Galore

Community member and RawTherapee hacker Morgan Hardwood brings us a great tutorial + assets from one of his strolls near the Söderåsen National Park (Sweden!). Ofnuts is apparently trying to get me to burn the forum down by sharing his raw file of a questionable subject. After bugging David Tschumperlé he managed to find a neat solution to generating a median (pixel) blend of a large number of images without making your computer throw itself out a window.

New Rapid Photo Downloader

Community member Damon Lynch happens to make an awesome program called Rapid Photo Downloader in his “spare” time. In fact you may have heard mention of it as part of Riley Brandt’s “The Open Source Photography Course” ^*. It is a program that specializes in downloading photo and video from media in as efficient a manner as possible while extending the process with extra functionality.

^* Riley donates a portion of the proceeds from his course to various projects, and Rapid Photo Downloader is one of them!

G'MIC 1.7.1

A new version 1.7.1 “Spring 2016” of G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic for Image Computing), the open-source framework for image processing, has been released recently (26 April 2016). This is a great opportunity to summarize some of the latest advances and features over the last 5 months.

G’MIC: A brief overview

G’MIC is an open-source project started in August 2008. It has been developed in the IMAGE team of the GREYC laboratory from the CNRS (one of the major French public research institutes). This team is made up of researchers and teachers specializing in the algorithms and mathematics of image processing. G’MIC is released under the free software licence CeCILL (GPL-compatible) for various platforms (Linux, Mac and Windows). It provides a set of various user interfaces for the manipulation of generic image data, that is images or image sequences of multispectral data being 2D or 3D, and with high-bit precision (up to 32bits floats per channel). Of course, it manages “classical” color images as well.

Post Libre Graphics Meeting

What a blast!

This trip report is long overdue, but I wanted to process some of my images to share with everyone before I posted.

It had been a couple of years since I had an opportunity to travel and meet with the GIMP team again (Leipzig was awesome) so I was really looking forward to this trip. I missed the opportunity to head up to the great white North for last years meeting in Toronto.

Pre-LGM Photowalk

It’s that time of year again! The weather is turning mild, the days are smelling fresh, and a bunch of photography nerds are all going to get together in a new country to roam around and (possibly) annoy locals by taking a ton of photographs! It’s the Pre-Libre Graphics Meeting photowalk of 2016!

Come join us the day before LGM kicks off to have a stroll through a lovely park and get a chance to shoot some photos between making new friends and having a pint.

Happy Birthday DISCUSS.PIXLS.US

For some reason I was checking my account on the forums earlier today and noticed that it was created in April, 2015. On further inspection it looks like my, and @darix, accounts were created on April 2^nd 2015.

(Not to be confused with the main site because apparently it took me about 8 months to get a forum stood up…)

Which means that the forums have been around for just over a year now?!

Lighting Diagrams

Community member Eric Mesa asked on the forums the other day if there might be some Free resources for photographers that want to build a lighting diagram of their work. These are the diagrams that show how a shot might be set up with the locations of lights, what types of modifiers might be used, and where the camera/photographer might be positioned with respect to the subject. These diagrams usually also include lighting power details and notes to help the production.

PlayRaw (Again)

On the old RawTherapee forums they used to have a contest sharing a single raw file amongst the members to see how everyone would approach processing from the same starting point. They called it PlayRaw. This seemed to really bring out some great work from the community so I thought it might be fun to start doing something similar again here.

I took a (relatively) recent image of Mairi and decided to see how it would be received (I’d say fairly well given the responses). This was my result from the raw file that I called Mairi Troisième :

Shimming an Adapter to be Parallel

Some of you may know I exclusively use Contax manual focus lenses on my Canon cameras. I have had one reliable adapter from the start, that just happened to be perfect in every way: perfectly parallel, and lets my lenses focus exactly to infinity, and none of my lenses hit the mirror on my 5D.

However, swapping adapters between cameras gets mighty tedious, so recently I have been trying a variety of different adapters for my cameras, several quality tiers ranging from the cheapest ($15) up to the most expensive ($70).

jpeg2RAW Guest Spot

Mike Howard , the host and creator of the jpeg2RAW podcast reached out to me last week to see if I might be able to come on the show to talk about Free Software Photography and what we’ve been up to here. One of the primary reasons for creating this site was to be able to raise awareness of the Free Software community to a wider audience.

So this is a great opportunity for us to expose ourselves!

Libre Graphics Meeting London

We’re heading to London!

I missed LGM last year in Toronto (having a baby - well, my wife was). I am going to be there this year for LGM/London !

Help Support Us

I don’t ever do this normally, but you’ve got to start somewhere, right?

It’s my long-term desire to be able to hold a PIXLS meetup/event every year where the community can get together. Where we can hold workshops, photowalks, and generally share knowledge and information. For free, for anyone.

darktable 2.0

Sneaking a release out on Christmas Eve, the darktable team have announced their feature release of darktable 2.0 ! After quite a few months of Release Candidates the 2.0 is finally here. Please join me in saying Congratulations and a hearty Thank You! for all of their work bringing this release to us.

Alex Prokoudine of Libre Graphics World has a more in-depth look at the release including a nice interview with part of the team: Johannes Hanika, Tobias Ellinghaus, Roman Lebedev, and Jeremy Rosen. My favorite tidbit from the interview:

Let's Encrypt!

I finally got off my butt to get a process in place to obtain and update security certificates using Let’s Encrypt for both pixls.us and discuss.pixls.us . I also did some (more) work with Victor Grigas and Wikipedia to support their #Edit2015 video this year.

Wikipedia #Edit2015

Last year, I did some 2.5 parallax animations for Wikipedia to help with their first-ever end-of-the-year retrospective video (see the blog post from last year ). Here is the retrospective from #Edit2014:

Happy Birthday GIMP!

I got busy building a birthday present for a project I work with and all sort of neat things happened in my absence! The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase chose winners for it’s wallpaper contest for Ubuntu 15.10 ‘Wily Werewolf’ (and quite a few community members were among those chosen).

The darktable crew is speeding along to a 2.0 release with a new RC2 being released .

Also, a great big HAPPY 20^th BIRTHDAY GIMP ! I made you a present. I hope it fits and you like it! :)

News from the World of Tomorrow

Some awesome updates from the community and activity over on the forums ! People have been busy doing some really neat things (that really never fail to astound me). The level of expertise we have floating around on so many topics is quite inspiring.

darktable 2.0 Release Candidate

Towards a Better darktable!

A nice Halloween weekend gift for the F/OSS photo community from darktable : a first Release Candidate for a 2.0 release is now available!

Portrait Lighting Cheat Sheets

Many moons ago I had written about acquiring a YN-560 speedlight for playing around with off-camera lighting. At the time I wanted to experiment with how different modifiers might be used in a portrait setting. Unfortunately, these were lighting modifiers that I didn’t own yet.

I wasn’t going to let that slow me down, though!

If you want to skip the how and why to get straight to the cheat sheets, click here .

Softness and Superresolution

A small update on how things are progressing (hint: well!) and some neat things the community is playing with.

I have been quiet these past few weeks because I decided I didn’t have enough to do and thought a rebuild/redesign of the GIMP website would be fun, apparently. Well, it is fun and something that couldn’t hurt to do. So I stepped up to help out.

A Question of Softness

There was a thread recently on a certain large social network in a group dedicated to off-camera flash. The thread was started by someone with the comment:

Notes from the dark(table) Side

We recently posted about the Open Source Photography Course from photographer Riley Brandt. We now also have a review of the course as well.

This review is actually by one of the darktable developers, houz ! He had originally posted it on discuss as a topic but I think it deserves a blog post instead. (When a developer from a favorite project speaks up, it’s usually worth listening…)

Here is houz’s review:

The Open Source Photography Course Review

by houz

It seems that there is no topic to discuss The Open Source Photography Course yet so let’s get started.

New Discuss Categories and Logging In

Hot on the heels of our last post about welcoming G’MIC to the forums at discuss.pixls.us , I thought I should speak briefly about some other additions I’ve recently made.

These were tough for me to finally make a decision about. I want to be careful and not get crazy with over-categorization. At the same time, I do want to make good logical breakdowns for people that is still intuitive.

Here is what the current category breakdown looks like for discuss:

Welcome G'MIC

Anyone who’s followed me for a while likely knows that I’m friends with G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic for Image Computing) creator David Tschumperlé . I was also able to release all of my film emulation presets on G’MIC for everyone to use with David’s help and we collaborated on a bunch of different fun processing filters for photographers in G’MIC (split details/wavelet decompose, freaky details , film emulation , mean/median averaging , and more).

It’s also David that helped me by writing a G’MIC script to mean average images for me when I started making my amalgamations (Thus moving me away from my previous method of using Imagemagick ):

Congratulations

I compiled the list of entries this afternoon across the various social networks and let random.org pick an integer in the domain of all of the entries…

So a big congratulations goes out to:

** Denny Weinmann ** (Facebook , @dennyweinmann , Google+ )
and
** Nathan Haines ** (@nhaines , Google+ )

I’ll be contacting you shortly (assuming you don’t read this announcement here first…)! I will need a valid email address from you both in order to send your download links. You can reach me at pixlsus@pixls.us .

The Open Source Photography Course

Photographer Riley Brandt recently released his Open Source Photography Course . I managed to get a little bit of his time to answer some questions for us about his photography and the course itself. You can read the full interview right here :

A Q&A with Photographer Riley Brandt

As an added bonus just for PIXLS.US readers, he has gifted us a nice surprise!

Did Someone Say Free Stuff?

Riley went above and beyond for us. He has graciously offered us an opportunity for 2 readers to win a free copy of the course (one in an open format like WebM/VP8, and another in a popular format like MP4/H.264)!

darktable on Windows

Due to the heated debate lately, a short foreword:

We do not want to harass, insult or criticize anyone due to his or her choice of operating system. Still, from time to time we encounter comments from people accusing us of ignorance or even disrespect towards Windows users. If any of our statements can be interpreted such, we want to apologize for that – and once more give the full explanation of our lacking Windows support.

PhotoFlow Blended Panorama Tutorial

After quite a bit of back and forth I am quite happy to be able to announce that the latest tutorial is up: A Blended Panorama with PhotoFlow ! This contribution comes from Andrea Ferrero , the creator of a new project: PhotoFlow .

In it, he walks through a process of stitching a panorama together using Hugin and blending multiple exposure options through masking in PhotoFlow (see lede image). The results are quite nice and natural looking!

Interesting Usertest and Incoming

I ran across a neat website the other day for getting actual user feedback when viewing your website: UserTesting . They have a free option called peek that records a short (~5 min.) screencast of a user visiting the site and narrating their impressions.

You can imagine this to be quite interesting to someone building a site.

It appears the service asks its testers to answer three specific questions (I am assuming this is for the free service mainly):

A New (Old) Tutorial

A little while back I had attempted to document a shoot with my friend and model, Mairi. In particular I wanted to capture a start-to-finish workflow for processing a portrait using free software. There are often many tutorials for individual portions of a retouching process but rarely do they get seen in the context of a full workflow.

The results became a two -part post on my blog. For posterity (as well as for those who may have missed it the first time around) I am republishing the second part of the tutorial Postprocessing here.

Software and Noise

I want to take a moment to thank everyone for all of the kind words and support over the past week. A positive response can be a great motivator to help keep the momentum rolling (and everyone really has been super positive)!

Software

The Software page is live with a decent start at a list.

I posted an announcement of the site launch over on reddit and one of the comments (from /u/cb900crdr ) was that it might be helpful to have a list of links to programs. I had originally planned on having a page to list the various projects but removed it just before launch (until I could find some time to gather all the links).

It's Alive!

Well, here we are. I just checked the first blog post and it was dated August 24^th, 2014. I had probably been working on the back end of the site getting things running for the basic blog setup a few weeks prior to that. It’s almost been a full year since I started working on this idea.

So it is with great pleasure that I can finally say…

Welcome to PIXLS.US !

If you’re just now joining us, let me re-iterate the mission statement for this website.

What's In Your Bag?

That lede image above is a quick (and dirty) snapshot of my go-to bag for running out the door. I thought it might be fun to take a diversion and talk about gear a little bit. Here’s the full image again:

I had decided years ago on going with Micro Four Thirds (MFT) as a camera system because I like to travel light, and wanted options to adapt old lenses. (On a side note, I’m still angry that there is not focus-peaking on the E-M5…)

Back to Writing

I took a bit of a break from writing articles to work on getting the forums up and running. We are almost back to a stable enough point that I want to turn my attention back to writing.

I say almost because there are still a few wonky things that I’d like to work out. There is still a little bit of an issue with the comment embeds from the forum for full-blown articles .

An Opportunity

I think we are at an interesting time for digital imaging. I came across this graph on Petapixel the other day that showed camera sales from 1947 - 2014:

There was explosive growth driven by the Compact Digital market right around 2000. Likely driven by the advent of those inexpensive compact digital cameras and the ubiquity of home computers. It was relatively cheap to get a decent digital camera and the cost per photo suddenly dropped to a previously unheard of amount (compared to shooting film).

A Forum

After much hard work, that basically consisted of me annoying darix as often as possible, I am glad to say that we finally have a Discourse instance set up! Super Big thank you to darix for all the help!

So What?

What does this mean? For starters, we now have a forum/community in place that we can start building around photography and free software.

A neat side-effect of this forum is that we now also have a way to embed forum threads as comments on posts (only blogposts at the moment - I’ll add them to articles shortly).

All the Articles

I spent a little time struggling conceptually with how I wanted to categorize the different types of content I am planning for this site. As I had previously noted , I was already done with creating a blog post type of content, and had noted that I was working on how to show tutorials and ‘showcase’ types of posts.

Apparently, I had the answer in mind when I created that graphic last month. If you notice the two other types of content I am working on, Tutorials and Showcase, are both listed as types Articles on the graphic.

Deep Links

I tried to find a good funny reference to Jack Handey here but failed. Which might be a good thing given how the reference likely shows my age…

I have been working on various bits of the site as well as finishing up a long-overdue article. I’ve also been giving some thoughts in general about interesting ways to move forward with some ideas which I will bore you all with shortly.

Some Updates

I hate when things take me away for a little while, but won’t make any apologies just yet for having little activity here! It’s mostly a one-man show here at the moment so I do beg for some patience as I build things out and get articles together.

Speaking of building things out…

Site Structure

I have been giving some thought to the general site structure lately. I thought it might be fun to talk about it briefly.

Another Article Done

2015 seems to be getting started nicely!

Just before the holidays Ian Hex sent me his finished tutorial to post, and I just finished editing it. It’s a wonderful look at using Luminosity Masks in darktable for targeted adjustments. (Parametric masks in darktable-speak). You can find the new tutorial here:

PIXLS.US: Luminosity Masks in darktable

On a side note, I had previously written about doing [Luminosity Masks in GIMP](http://blog.patdavid.net/2013/11/getting-around-in-gimp-luminosity-masks.html) on my personal blog, and yes I will be porting that tutorial here a little later!

Still Writing

It’s been a busy month (+ ½) for me personally. Things have finally settled down so I can get back to writing articles and working on the site.

Wavelets Coming

As I mentioned in the previous post , I’m currently working through a re-write of the various tutorials I had done about using Wavelet Decompose for skin retouching. I’m about ²⁄₃ of the way through it now and expect to have it finished shortly.

Iterating

I’m working my way through some of the suggestions I’ve received from many folks. In particular, the “px” icon in the upper left to slide open the navigation and Table of Contents has been changed to a (hopefully) more familiar ‘hamburger’ icon. I’ll also be testing some other things in the coming weeks as time permits such as having a TOC show up by default in the right ⅓ of the page at the top.

More Content

I’ve pretty much finished up the first article mentioned in the previous post . There is still a long way to go.

As much as I’d like to believe that “If you build it, they will come”, the reality is that nobody is coming until there is something worth coming for. So I’m working hard on getting good content in place.

I’m also acutely aware that nobody will stay unless good content continues to be published, but that’s for another post.

Getting Closer

Just a quick update on a couple of interesting things.

The first article is almost done being re-written and updated.

I added some functionality to the slide-out menu and am still thinking about the best icon to use.

I also had a nice epiphany when I realized that the styling I had already written to make big videos works great for images as well.

Commenting

First things first. I forgot to actually link to the new About page in my last post. So here it is . As with all things related to the site, any feedback, comments, or criticisms are welcome!

Speaking of feedback, comments, and criticisms, I wanted to write about it for a moment.

First, I want to thank everyone who has taken the time to contact me and provide me feedback on the site. You have no idea how valuable it is to both as a motivator, and as a means to know when something is off. I appreciate and give my full attention to each and every person and idea thrown at me. Thank you!

An About Page and Help

I’ve started working a bit on the “About” page for the site. I wanted a place to highlight the mission statement I’m sort of working from:

To provide tutorials, workflows and a showcase for high-quality photography using Free/Open Source Software.

As well as a place to let users know who is behind the scenes working on the site. It’s mostly me at the moment, but I’ve managed to talk someone into helping me…

The Big Picture

Sometimes I get into weird OCD mode where I need to have something for better or worse. One of those things was a desire to break out of the mold of standard blog-type posts in articles for this site. I’ve sometimes found images are relegated to second-class citizens on some page layouts that don’t do them justice.

I couldn’t let that happen here. The problem was that I needed to do some things to make sure the typographic layouts were visually strong as well. This meant a adding control to width and layout of main text elements, with the downside of having to hack a bit to make images large.

RSS Feed & Social Media

It took a bit of digging and wrestling to get there, but a couple of nights ago I also managed to get an RSS feed working for the blog posts on the site. Honestly, I spent more time fiddling with dates in javascript than I should have.

I had to make some minor modifications this morning to accommodate where the location should be, but it should be live now.

The location is: http://pixls.us/blog/feed.xml .

Both the blog index pages and post pages contain a <link> element that point to it, so most readers should find the feed if you point it at a page. I’ll test it later, but the most important thing is the location is correct regardless of whatever hacking I do to the feed itself later.

A Push Menu

So, I’ve had the idea in my head for a while that it would be nice to get the navigation out of the way. When I’m reading an article or tutorial, I don’t want to be inundated with elements that aren’t pertinent to what I’m reading. I want to focus on the content.

On Building PIXLS.US

For the curious, and to serve as an introduction, I thought I’d make a few notes about how this site is built and what I’m currently obsessing over. Hopefully this can help define what I’m up to in case anyone wants to jump in and help out.

The Purpose

The entire point of this site, its “mission statement” if you will, is:

To provide tutorials, workflows and a showcase for high-quality photography using Free/Open Source Software.

Subject to revisions, of course, but mostly sums up what I’d like to accomplish here. I also think it’s good to have this documented somewhere to remind me. :)

Hello World!

Well, technically this isn’t the first post on the site. I had actually started with building out the temporary Coming Soon page. Then I shifted focus on styling the main content page for the site (articles). After a bit I realized that I should probably be working on some sort of blog posts as a means for folks to keep up with what I’m doing.

So, here we are!

Who Am I?

I’m Pat David .

I’m an occasional photographer and I dabble in digital artwork occasionally as the mood strikes me. I also happen to be a fan of free software. Those two worlds collide fairly often, and lately I’ve been having a great time writing about them.

I’ve been writing tutorials on my blog as well as trying to modernize/update tutorials on the GIMP website . You could call me a (small) part of the GIMP team (but I’m trying to do more!). I also try to help out where I can on other F/OSS projects as well (G’MIC is another place you’ll find me bumming around). I do these things because I think it’s important to try and give back to the community in whatever way you’re capable of.

I’m loud. So I figured I could use that capability to help out.

(It’s my demented super-power).