Free Stock Photography

adigitaldreamer.com has free royalty free stock photography available for download. This is a great resource for anyone wanting to build a website or magazine on the cheap. The stuff I've seen is pretty high quality, which is rare from a free stock photo site, so I thought they were worth a highlight. Go give them a look.

Open Font Library Logo Competition

The Open Font Library has announced a logo competition. From the announcement:

The Open Font Library (OFL.o) needs a logo to help identify the project. We want the community to help create this logo and three judges from the OFL.o will select the winning logo which we will use in all of our branding.

One of the stipulations is that it must be in SVG format, so fire up Inkscape and get cracking!

Convert RGB to Black and White

There is no one "right" way to convert color photographs from color to black and white. In fact there are tons of ways to do it, and they all have their advocates. If you want to see some other methods, I'd recommend taking a look at a tutorial at digital Photography School entitled How to Convert Color Digital Images into Black and White Ones, or at another one from GimpGuru.org entitled Converting Color Images to B&W using the GIMP. Both of these detail several different methods, all with their own merits.

I've been researching the subject quite a bit, and I think I've settled on a favorite method of my own, and I'm going to detail it for you now. We'll be using lessons learned in the last couple of posts on luminosity masking, so if you haven't read those yet, you might want to at least skim them to get the idea.

The photograph for today is another CC licensed shot, originally posted to flickr by user J. Star. Thank you J. for this truly amazing photograph.

Okay, let's get on with it.

1. The first thing we're going to do is decompose to LAB to get the luminosity layer, so click Image>Mode>Decompose. Select LAB, make sure decompose to layers is checked, and click OK.
   
   Discard the A and B layers, and just set that aside for a few minutes.
2. Go back to the original color shot and click Filters>Colors>Channel Mixer. Check both of the boxes for Monochrome and Preserve luminosity.
   
   You do not actually have to check the preserve luminosity box. What this box is supposed to do is make the sliders dynamically adjust so they all add up to 100%. I have not found this to be the case, but maybe I'm just doing it wrong. If anyone can shed some light on that subject, I'd be very appreciative. I recommend checking it anyway just to be sure.
3. Step three is highly subjective, and will probably differ from image to image, so use your judgement here and pick values that look good to you. I'm picking Red - 70, Green - 25, and Blue - 5. I'm doing this because there's obviously a lot of red, not much green and very little blue in this photograph.
   
4. You may at this point decide that you are finished. The channel mixer is a pretty powerful tool, and you can get very good results with it. I personally think the highlights on her back are a little too high, and the darkness on the back of his hand is a little too dark, so I'm going to use that luminosity layer to create some masks and adjust those areas a bit. Please see Monday's post on luminosity masking to get an idea on how to do that.
   

Here is the final result:

I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial. Please remember there are many many ways to convert photographs from color to black and white, and I highly encourage you to research the subject to find your method of choice. Thank you for following along.

Edit: I realize the EXIF data on the photograph says it was edited with Photoshop Elements 3.0. I assure you that was done by the original artist. All the work done in this tutorial is done in the Gimp.

Gimp Portable

PortableApps.com announced yesterday the release of their portable version of the Gimp 2.2.13. From the announcement:

This new release updates the included GIMP to 2.2.13, adds Vista compatibility, correctly cleans up GTK's bookmark and thumbnail files and features a greatly improved startup speed thanks to the new launcher's plugin processing. And, it's now packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite.

If you don't have a portable computer, or if your only computer is someone elses, having PortableApps is the next best thing, seriously. Go check it out!

Gimp Users flickr Group

Just bumped into the Gimp Users flickr group. (Thanks again Charles.) From their description:

Just to let the world know that some of us prefer to use "free software".

They've got over 1,100 members in the group. Check them out!

LightZone for Linux

Charles Tilford (a.k.a. listentoreason) sent me a tip about another photograph editor called LightZone for Linux. I haven't had much time to experiment with it, but it looks to be a pretty sweet little package. This is $250 software on Windows or Macintosh but free for nerds linux users. Score! Here's a quote from their homepage:

Drawing on principles behind the photographic Zone System and traditional darkroom film photography, LightZone 2.1 makes it simple and easy to bring out the true tone, color and contrast often hidden in digital images. Designed by photographers for photographers, LightZone 2.1 offers a rich set of powerful, yet easy to use digital editing tools. LightZone's editing tools help reduce the noise often found in high-ISO digital images, correct color shifts and white balance errors, selectively sharpen or blur images or parts of images, remove dust spots and boost overall color to create beautiful, breath-taking images, letting the true talent of the photographer shine though.

Note: it's not open source, but it is free. Take that for what you will. I'll be checking it out sometime this week depending on my free time.

Luminosity Masking: The Dark Side

Okay, last time I showed you how to bring out detail in highlighted areas. Today, I'm going to show you the opposite, bringing detail out of darkened areas. I'm also going to show you a different way of creating this luminosity mask that I think is a little more versatile. If you'd like to see the Photoshop way of doing things, the tutorial I'm adapting is from planetphotoshop.com and is called The Shadowy Face of the Luminosity Mask.

The photograph for today is another CC licensed photograph originally posted by flickr user listentoreason. Thanks Charles!

1. Okay first, as always, open up your photograph in the Gimp and duplicate the background layer. Rename this layer Mask 1.
2. Just like last time, we're going to decompose the image into LAB layers by clicking Image>Mode>Decompose.
   
3. Discard the A and B layers, then select all by pressing Ctrl-A and copy by pressing Ctrl-C.
4. Go back to your original color image, but this time, instead of creating a masking layer, we're going to use the quickmask by pressing Shift-Q. This will put a red overlay over the image. Press Ctrl-V to paste the copied Luminosity layer onto the quickmask and anchor the layer.
   
5. Press Shift-Q again to toggle the quickmask off, and you should see the marching ants indicating a selection. If you look at the Selection Editor dialog, you'll see a black and white copy of your image that looks just like the Luminosity layer. White areas are fully selected, and black areas are fully deselected. So, right now, I've got almost all of the flower area selected along with some green leaves in the background.
   
6. Press Ctrl-I to invert the selection, then press Ctrl-K to delete everything in the selection. Here's what my Mask 1 layer looks like now:
   
   
7. Set Mask 1 layer blending mode to Multiply. The opacity is going to be subjective, so play around with yours, but I'm going to set mine to 57%.
   
8. Now, Copy the background layer again, and merge the Mask 1 layer with the background copy and call it whatever you like. I'm calling it Layer 1.
   
9. Now, you should still have a selection. Activate the background layer press Ctrl-C to copy the selection. Create a new transparent layer on top of Layer 1 and call it Mask 2. Press Ctrl-V to paste into the layer and anchor it. Here's what my Mask 2 layer looks like:
   
10. Now, set Mask 2 layer mode to Screen. Wow! Hello leaves. Now, you could decide that you're done at this point, but you might want to play with the curves dialog a bit to bump up those highlights even more.
    

That's it! Here's the before and after:



I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial. Thanks for stopping by.