The Royal Photographic Society Journal

By Pat David

02 Nov 2016

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!

RPS Journal 2016-09 Cover

It turns out my initial doubts were completely unfounded, and they really wanted to run a page based off one of our tutorials. The editors liked the Open Source Portrait tutorial. In particular, the section on using Wavelet Decompose to touch up the skin tones:

RPS Journal 2016-11 PD
Yay Mairi!

How cool is that? I actually searched the archive and the only other mention I can find of GIMP (or any other F/OSS) is from a “Step By Step” article written by Peter Gawthrop (Vol. 149, February 2009). I think it’s pretty awesome that we can promote a little more exposure for Free Software alternatives. Especially in more mainstream publications and to a broader audience!