My RawTherapee/Enfuse/Gimp workflow

To show my readers my workflow I decided to blog about it. Today I will show you how this image was created:

1. Basics
This tutorial assumes you are running a linux system with:

• RawTherapee 2.4rc2 – Download
• enfuse 3.2 – Download
• gimp 2.6 – www.gimp.org

The raw file can be found here and is also CC-BY licensed: Download

2. RawTherapee

So lets open RawTherapee and load the raw file. I usually don’t change much there, it’s more a matter of personal choice. I use to sharpen and resize afterwards so we’ll only change brightness in RawTherapee for later use with enfuse.

With “Auto Levels” set in the Exposure tab under Exposure we’ll get a brightness value of 1.22 which means I underexposed the image, but that’s no problem. Save this version of the image as IMG_8886a.jpg, change brightness to 1.5 save the result as IMG_8886b.jpg and do the same for brightness 2.0 and IMG_8886c.jpg. If you’ve done it correctly it should look like this:

This is all I do in RawTherapee for this image, now let’s move on to enfuse

3. Enfuse

Borrowed from the panotools wiki:

Enfuse is a command-line program used to merge different exposures of the same scene to produce an image that looks very much like a tonemapped image (without the halos) but requires no creation of an HDR image. Therefore it is much simpler to use and allows the creation of very large multiple exposure panoramas

I use it to get more details from darker parts, like in this case to brighten up the eyes naturally as I don’t like the look of HDR images.

Open a terminal and change to the directory where the three created images are in, now run following command:

enfuse -o out.jpg IMG_8886*.jpg

This should output in the terminal:

enfuse: Input image "IMG_8886a.jpg" does not have an alpha channel. Assuming all pixels should contribute to the final image.
enfuse: Input image "IMG_8886b.jpg" does not have an alpha channel. Assuming all pixels should contribute to the final image.
enfuse: Input image "IMG_8886c.jpg" does not have an alpha channel. Assuming all pixels should contribute to the final image.
Loading next image: IMG_8886a.jpg
Loading next image: IMG_8886b.jpg
Loading next image: IMG_8886c.jpg
Using 9 blending levels
Generating Gaussian pyramid: g0 g1 g2 g3 g4 g5 g6 g7 g8
Generating Laplacian pyramid: l0 l1 l2 l3 l4 l5 l6 l7 l8
Generating Gaussian pyramid: g0 g1 g2 g3 g4 g5 g6 g7 g8
Generating Gaussian pyramid: g0 g1 g2 g3 g4 g5 g6 g7 g8
Generating Laplacian pyramid: l0 l1 l2 l3 l4 l5 l6 l7 l8
Generating Gaussian pyramid: g0 g1 g2 g3 g4 g5 g6 g7 g8
Generating Gaussian pyramid: g0 g1 g2 g3 g4 g5 g6 g7 g8
Generating Laplacian pyramid: l0 l1 l2 l3 l4 l5 l6 l7 l8
Generating Gaussian pyramid: g0 g1 g2 g3 g4 g5 g6 g7 g8
Collapsing Laplacian pyramid: l8 l7 l6 l5 l4 l3 l2 l1 l0

You should have a “out.jpg” in the folder where the three images are in which should like this:

Let’s open the image in gimp:

4. Gimp
To give the image the final touch I open the levels dialog via right click on the image → Colors → Levels:

I change the input level’s left value to 25 and the input level’s right value to 240:

This yields:

Now I crop the image using the rule of thirds guide and putting the upper right crossing right into her left eye:

If you want to resize and sharpen use the unsharp mask, I usually don’t resize so we’re done here. The resulting image varies a bit from the flickr one, due to me creating this one all anew today and using different values in the levels tool probably:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany License

If you like my work, consider flattring me. Thank you

Rockbox 3.3 freigegeben

Am Freitag den 19.6 wurde Rockbox 3.3 veröffentlicht. Bei Rockbox handelt es sich um eine alternativ Firmware für viele verschiedene MP3 Player. Rockbox ist open source und bringt zahlreiche neue Features mit, die die Mp3 Player mit der original Firmware nicht haben. Zum Beispiel werden Formate wie FLAC, Vorbis, Musepack, Monkeys Audio, MIDI und viele mehr unterstützt. Weiter bringt Rockbox u.a. Replaygain und last.fm Unterstützung mit. Auch die Akku Laufzeit ist zumeist deutlich besser oder gleich der original Firmware. Unterstützt werden bisher folgende Player:

Apple: 1ste bis 5.5te Generation des iPods, iPod Mini und die 1ste Generation des iPod Nano (Der Shuffle, die 2te/3te/4te Generation Nanos, Classic oder Touch werden bisher nicht unterstützt)

Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 und Ondio

Cowon: iAudio X5, X5V, X5L, M5 und M5L

iRiver: H100-, H300- und die H10-Reihe

Olympus: M:Robe 100

SanDisk: Sansa c200-, e200- und die e200R-Reihe (Die v2/AMS-Reihe noch nicht)

Toshiba: Gigabeat X- und F-Reihe (Die S-Reihe noch nicht)

Download und weitere Infos auf der Homepage:
www.rockbox.org

Zensur in Finnland

Ein paar Zitate von der Seite des in Finnland zensierten Zensurkritikers:

The Internet censorship was being planned for years, and apparently three successive Ministers of Communications have been supportive to the Internet Censorship until it was finally implemented. When the ministry asked for statements about the planned censorship law from various parties, they were told by the Faculty of Law of the University of Turku that the censorship would be against The Constitution of Finland. Despite this, the ministry insisted there were no legal problems and that the censorship would be implemented.

Kommt uns das irgendwoher bekannt vor?

For example a document that goes by the name “Railaksen Selvitys” and dated 2005-12-16 lists several critical problems and unanswered questions regarding the censorship. These problems are listed in the very beginning of the document and include things like effectiveness of the filtering solutions, the problem of collateral damage when censorship affects more material than it should, freedom of speech, what kind of crimes the censorship should exactly target, etc. Most of these went unanswered and the problems are seen with the current implementation of the censorship. Some of the issues were only addressed partially, for example the freedom of speech regarding reception of illegal material was touched but the police has now been found censoring even sites that do not contain illegal material themselves. What is being practiced now isn’t what was planned.

Apparently the censorship had already been decided to be implemented even before the legality of the censorship had been touched at all. In the beginning of the resulting paper from the above mentioned investigation it’s stated that “A decision of principle has been made to take action against distribution of child porn over telecommunication networks”. Apparently the ministry had told the law firm that they will implement the censorship no matter what, and requested a paper to support it and to interpret the law in a way to make it look legal. Where this wasn’t possible, the paper suggested what laws would be the easiest to change. From this point of view, it makes sense that the investigation would conclude that the censorship can be implemented.

Once I had released my critique and made the change to turn the entries in my list to clickable links, my site was censored less than one week later in the next update of the censorship list. Police refuses to comment about it, but has given plenty of comments to several news reporters about my site having functioning links to child porn in it. They try to claim that this minor technical change changed the nature of my site and that it is now a “child porn portal”.

Das ist doch ein tolles Beispiel dafür, warum wir uns in Deutschland mit aller Macht gegen unser Zensurgesetz wehren müssen, Widerstand, jetzt!

Das Schlimme an Zensur

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