Finally, I update my own blog. On this Sunday August 15th coming I will be at 091 Labs holding a talk on photography entitled Writing Light. Writing Light is a recounting of the separate histories of the camera obscura, the precursors to photography, photography itself. I also explore the state of the modern photographic art and look ahead to what might be to come in the next few decades.

And afterwards, you get to build your own camera. We have craft scissors, pritt sticks, craft paper and masking tape.

This talk will be so good, that it (and I) were mentioned in the Galway Independent yesterday.

Admission and Pre-booking:

Admission:
Members: Free!
Unwaged/Student: €8
General Public: €10

You can find the full details of this and 091 Labs’ other Irish Hackerspace Week workshops on their public calendar. Any inquires or questions about the event should go straight to me at mark@bhalash.com.

Auchinduon, Nagrand (again) and Terokkar Forest.

For some reason everybody wants panoramas from Azshara, an area in World of Wacraft that by player consensus is exceptionally pretty. I’m very sorry to say that “pretty” doesn’t always translate to “photogenic”.

Let’s move on from that sad note – I’m having a ton of fun capturing insanely huge panoramas in all areas of the game. The header image above is the entire Outland zone of Halaa. Fifty images, captured at 2048×1536 in lossless Truevision TGA format. After this batch I have another ten of so panoramas to go up and online, mostly from the Outland and Northrend. I’ve been sequentially working my way up to ever-bigger scenes.

How did I capture at these magical sizes? 091 Labs.

After mentioning my desire for a more powerful workstation to capture panoramas on (and also the cutting-edge video card gifted to me by Mr. Joshua and Mrs. Jennifer Tidmore of Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.), Matthew jumped in to help me assemble one. Motherboard, case, power supply and hard disk. On top of this hardware monster are running a Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 dual-boot. We can conceivably handle almost all of the light media work you might expect at somewhere like 091 Labs:

• Still image editing. I’ve transferred my Hugin->Gimp->Mogrify workflow from my laptop, although the screen real estate and underlying performance have jumped hugely. I’m down from (up to) three hours to finding control points in a stitch to about 15-30 minutes for a big scene.
• Video and audio editing. I believe I saw somebody stream editing a video under Windows? I can build a time-lapse screencast in h.264 format and append an MP3 soundtrack in less than five minutes. Down from 20 or 30.
• 3D video game creation. Matthew has been very happily cracking away at the Unreal SDK.
• Video games. Don’t share this with anyody, but I have iWintergrasp on my iPod. And Matthew runs Portal when nobody is looking.

  Don’t ask, don’t tell

Shout-outs to those who gave me suggestions:

Illista of The Scryers server for Utgarde Keep.
Planeshaper of the Blackhand server, Sunderstruck of the Scarlet Crusade server, and Punchbuggey of the Kel’Thuzad server for Nagrand.

(As an aside, the above video is my first HTML5 YouTube embed, because it puts flash playback to shame on my Netbook. Technology advances ever onward!)

I used The Gimp for a few solid hours this morning. Observsations:

1. GEGL grinds The Gimp to a halt. I have no idea if it is tied to the size of the files in question. I eventually gave up on a GEGL unsharp mark and instead just duplicated the layer to sharpen it the old-fashioned way.
2. The eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF) file format is The Gimp’s native workabout file format. It is equivalent to Adobe’s PSD format in that it It supports saving each layer, the current selection, channels, transparency, paths and guides, but, nicely for me, it seems less of a hog in raw file-size.

   I grabbed Kharanos #1, renamed it as 1.jpg to enhance its aesthetic purity and plugged it into both Adobe Photoshop CS4 and The Gimp 2.7.1. In each editor I created a new and blank layer, saved and exited. The results were:

   • 1.jpg was 4.5MB.
   • 1.xcf was 24MB.
   • 1.psd was 45MB.

   Ah, yeah. I created a new layer and the overall file-size jumped tenfold. Nice one, Photoshop. I love working on panoramas, and I’m restricted to a Netbook. File-size makes a huge difference in performance. Gimp win.

3. As a result of the above file-size differences, The Gimp is noticeably nippier on my Netbook as compared to similar work (with all three files open at once) when compared to Adobe Photoshop CS4.
4. Even with the single-window improvements in 2.7.1 (and onward), the defaults still occasionally feel ass-backward. I’ve so far remapped the majority of the “core” keyboard shortcuts.
5. I like the clone tool. Photoshop’s “preview” is frequently distracting and equally frequently doesn’t reflect the reality of the final finish.

So I’m two days into using The Gimp v2.7.1. instead of Photoshop. Eh. It handles just fine. The Gimp’s tools and features are complete to me, as a Photoshop user (mostly-I cannot figure out, for the life of me, how I can change brush hardness on the fly short of changing brush. Anyone?). I can zoom, layer, clone, crop, paint and sharpen to my black little heart’s content. I understand that GEGL, the Generic Graphics Library, actually supersedes Photoshop’s adjustment layers in functionality, but as of tonight I haven’t had any reason to go and play with it. I’ve been happy to discover that I can clone non-destructively.

Irks and quirks:

Mild disclaimer: I am using a packaged beta which was compiled by a third-party, so my experience may not reflect that of somebody using a mainstream version:

• The zoom tool (Z) works fine…if I just want to zoom in. However it seems to zoom in on a random segment of the image?
• The “Hand” tool (space/middle mouse) is a little bit wonky. Even after I “released” it, the hand continued to drag the image around.
• Tooltips. There is no way to configure them?
• When cloning, “Sample merged” is sinfully less intuitive and informative than Photoshop’s “sample all layers.” I was annoyed by having to flick between layers until I figured it out.
• There are separate move, shear, resize (etc.) tools. Couldn’t they all be rolled into one, improved Move tool?
• Some of my tool choices don’t seem to be saved. I certainly had to change back the Move tool after restarting.

Un-irks and non-quirks:

It isn’t all bad.

• There is a great, accessible interface to change every possible keyboard shortcut. I’ve been gradually changing The Gimp to match what Photoshop has. It is looking up.
• The Clone tool was wholly less obnoxious other than its obfuscated “sample merged”.
• The single-window interface is a really nice step up on the old interface, albeit still buggy. I have to click on the image before I can tab-hide panels.
• GEGL. I haven’t actually used it yet, but a dry-reading on its documentation is fascinating. I’m actively looking for reasons to use it.

As a bonus to any open source fans here, these images were entirely processed using open-source tools: Hugin, The Gimp, and Imagemagick

I’ve been happy to discover that as well as the Gimp maturing, so has Hugin (and it’s suite of tools) since I last used it. No more nightmares in having to pick out control points by hand because autopano was being crotchety. I even made a wee little screencast to go along with this; I’ll put it up later.

Gimp users: Is there any easy way to change the hardness of brushes on the fly, short of changing to a different brush?