Warning: Photo footling ahead

[major_clanger]

A few weeks back I rashly volunteered to run some Photoshop lessons for the Photographic Society here at Edinburgh Uni. To my pleasant surprise some 20 people signed up as being interested, and to my even more pleasant surprise a dozen of them turned up to my first lesson last night. It seemed to go reasonably well, although it was mainly a canter through what Photoshop can and can't do ("there is no CSI 'Enhance' button!") leavened with some practical demos on image cleanup.

Anyway, as part of my slideshow I wanted to convey how easy it is to end up with a hard drive clogged with digital photos. The statistics were bad enough - I've got a collection of 2,400 since I got my new camera at the end of May, and that's not counting the shots I discarded - but I was looking for a way to put this into pictures. So I downloaded MacOSaiX, a nifty little program that takes an image and renders it as a mosaic of other pictures from your computer, or Flickr, or Google. It takes a while to run through and select the best pictures for the job, but the results can be very impressive:



More photo-geekiness: I finally managed to get hold of an extension cord for my flash. This isn't as simple a bit of kit as you might think, as my flashgun is a computerised unit that works with the camera to optimise exposure, so a simple link isn't sufficient. What it does though is allow for much more flexible lighting options, especially for close-up or portrait work. A large mirror provided an opportunity for an experiment in self-portraiture:

Comments

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the new graphics tool that resizes images by removing pixels with less information in them than their neighbours:

http://www.seamcarving.com/

Demos:

* http://rsizr.com/ - Flash version, doesn't like Linux
* http://swieskowski.net/carve/ - demo that will work on Linux as well

And a GIMP plug-in (can photoshop be far behind?):

* http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Yes, I saw the demo video that was posted a few weeks back. My jaw hit the ground so hard it almost bounced.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

: grabs and installs gimp-lqr-plugin_0.3.0-1_amd64.deb

Now there's a timewaster :)

It's going to take a bit of fiddling with its parameters and with feature preservation masks before I get its measure, but I can see this being huge funa useful tool with many practical applications.

[t--m--i.livejournal.com]

GRUUUUNNNNNT! :D

[dalmeny]

That program was written by our friend Frank. I've known his partner since we were in high school together and we stayed with them in Wisconsin while we attended a Corflu.

[the-gardener.livejournal.com]

The second photograph (of you and the flash) is very obviously the back and the front covers of a paperback noir thriller. But I can't think of a title for it!

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

A Shot In the Dark?

[scotiva.livejournal.com]

Awesome!