Tag Archives: Linux Mint

Nature

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Had some fun around the garden last week. I bought myself a 5-way reflector and wanted to try it out, then moved on to some flash work in broad daylight:
Yellow

Taken with available light, Olympus E-PL1 with Kit lens, gold reflector to the right and slightly behind reflecting the sunlight from behind the camera back onto the flower. Here’s the setup shot:

Set-Up Shot

Then, I moved onto pure flash work:

Shades or Yellow

Pen E-PL1, YN560 on a stand camera left.
Dead Leaf

Saw this dead leaf hanging by a thread from the doorway of our garden shed. E-PL1, Kit lens, YN560 handheld off to camera left. The same setup was used for the following pictures also:

Dead Leaf

Dead Leaf

Caught this big drop of rain after a shower in one of the big leaves of this plant (I’ve forgotten the name of it):

Big Drop

That week, my parents were over to visit from the UK. We took them for a lovely walk around the Dietrichsburg in Melle, which has a Wild Boar Park on it’s grounds. But these Foxgloves were more stunning than the local pigs ;0)

Foxglove

Foxglove

Both the above were taken with the PEN and the kit lens in available light.

And to finish off, here’s the Dietrichsburg itself:

Dietrichsburg

We even got luck and stumbled upon a load of boars…

Wildschweine

There are more pictures of the wild boars on my Flickr stream.

All images processed with Olympus Viewer2 and RAWTherapee.

Al

Digikam’s Local Contrast Tool: Almost HDR

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I’ve been exploring more of Digikam’s possibilities of late and I came across the ‘Local Contrast’ tool. I had never heard of this before, and a quick search led me to understand that it functions similarly to the LDR Tonemapping utility. Here’s the write-up from Scribbles and Snaps:

digiKam offers several features that can improve photos containing under- or overexposed areas. For example, the Exposure Blending tool lets you merge multiple shots with different exposures into one perfectly exposed photo. But what if you have just a single image? In this case, you might want to give the Local Contrastfeature a try. It’s based on the LDR Tonemapping utility which is designed to improve the dynamic range of the photo by reducing its global contrast and increasing the local contrast. It does so by generating a desaturated and blurred version of the photo. It then combines the RGB channels of the original photo with the desaturated blurred image using either the Linear or Power function. Sounds complicated? Don’t worry, the Local Contrast tool is rather straightforward to use, so you don’t have to understand all its intricacies in order to achieve pleasing results.

Apparently it is good for bringing out detail in the shadows or highlights areas that have been over or under exposed.

I had just taken a photo of a local farmhouse which I was going to use for an HDR image. So I decided to give the Local Contrast Tool a try beforehand.

Here’s the original image:

 

120420 sam 27_v2

As you can see, the main portion of the image is underexposed. This would originally have been the underexposed image in a series of three exposures for an HDR image. After applying the Local Contrast Tool using just the standard settings with the first three stages (tonemapping operations) activated, I ended up with this image:

120420 sam 27_v1

I was quite surprise at the result. This is almost HDR-like from a single image. Somehow, the image is very smooth (soft) and unsharp, but this was just a trial. I will have to look into the setting further to find out the ideal settings.

A second image I used was this one:

120420 sam 30_v2

After applying the above settings again, I ended up with this one:

120420 sam 30_v1

These are sized down images pulled from my Picasa album, so the originals look better than this. Still, I think this is quite an interesting tool. I can see some uses here with slightly underexposed areas.

Do you have any experience with this tool? How do you use it in your workflow? Can you recommend any settings?

Would love to hear from you.

Click that shutter!

Al

 

Transitioning from Magix Video Deluxe to Kdenlive

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One of the programs I really loved on Windows was Magix Video Deluxe video editing software. I found it very powerful and intuitive. So looking for video editing software that I could use on Linux Mint 12, I came across Kdenlive. It was getting some good reviews, so I decided to give it a try, before booting back to Windows just to do video editing.

I found Kdenlive to be just as intuitive as Magix, some of the key features are very similar. Even some of the tricks for editing in the timeline which aren’t the same can still be found without reading pages of manuals. For instance, editing MP3 files as soundtracks (cutting, fade in / out – all on the timeline).

Here’s my first effort with Kdenlive. It’s not that long, but it has shown me that there is no need to boot back to Windows just yet… ;0)

And here a few stills from the trip. Just to make things complete.

Click that shutter!

Al

Slideshow: Easter 2012

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I found a neat little program for Linux called Photofilmstrip.

PhotoFilmStrip erstellt Videoclips aus Bildern in nur 3 Schritten. Bilder auswählen, Bewegungspfad bestimmen und Video erzeugen. Es stehen Ausgabeformate für VCD, SVCD, DVD und FULL-HD zur Verfügung.

Der Slideshow-Effekt ist auch als “Ken Burns”-Effekt bekannt. Bildkommentare werden in eine Untertiteldatei generiert. Weiterhin kann in der Slideshow eine Hintergrundmusik verwendet werden.

Im Gegensatz zu anderen Programmen, bietet PhotoFilmStrip die Möglichkeit, die Slideshow in Full-HD (1920×1080) Auflösung zu erzeugen.

It’s a really quick and easy to use program which allows you to make really effective slideshows in just a few clicks. Here’s a quick slideshow I made using the program for the first time:

Click that shutter! :0)

Al