Mr. Me's Pictorial Wonder

Hiatus

Mr. Me — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:53:11 +0000

I’m leaving on a two year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

I have a lot of ideas for future posts on this site, and will definitely continue writing additional content on this site when I get back. Until then, farewell, and thanks for reading my website.

Waterfall Mania

Mr. Me — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 21:32:32 +0000

Here is a picture I took of the mini waterfalls at cascade springs. It was the middle of the day when I took the picture. I can’t imagine how this place must look like at sunrise. I’ll have to go back sometime and find out.

The Lady

Mr. Me — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 19:40:23 +0000

Outdoor Photography

Mr. Me — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:20:18 +0000

Here are a few thoughts that will take your outdoor photography to a new level.

REMOVE DISTRACTING ELEMENTS

Make sure any distracting people or branches are removed. This can be done when you are taking the picture or in post processing.

Be mindful of the time of day

The golden hour is the hour of time when the sun first appears. Taking pictures during this time will give you more beautiful pictures. Especially when you are outdoors.

The middle of the day will give you harsher shadows. You can’t get the same beautiful pics at this time of day, so you will want to be more creative, and take pictures that show the world from a bit of a different perspective.

At the end of the day you can also get some good pictures, but it’s not quite as good as early morning.

At night you can get some very interesting pictures, especially in the city when buildings are only being illuminated by the little they put off. You’ll have to use longer exposures for nighttime photography.

Shoot things creatively

Don’t try to repeat shots you’ve seen others do. Be creative.

Take your time.

This isn’t action photography, make sure you have all your camera settings the way you want them for a scene before you continue on your way. You should have the subject in crisp focus and there shouldn’t be any motion blur.

walk around

Walk around and take pictures of a subject from many different angles

Bubbly Icy Water

Mr. Me — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 02:15:15 +0000

I was hiking up to a waterfall and noticed that there were a lot of interesting ice formations floating in the water.

Granite Flats

Mr. Me — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:27:18 +0000

I like how well the post processing on this picture turned out. The colors really come out well without looking too unnatural. The contrast is more unnatural, but that is so common now a days that it shouldn’t turn most people off.

GIMP vs Photoshop

Mr. Me — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 01:01:37 +0000

The following is a list of reasons why GIMP is more powerful than Photoshop.

Half the amount of color spaces

Using Gimp you can edit colors in YCRCB or LAB or CMYK or HSV. Using photoshop you can only edit in LAB or CMYK. Half the amount of color spaces.

Limits Creativity

I don’t care if I am destructively editing a photo, don’t limit my creativity because of it. Photoshop focuses a ton on a few non destructive adjustments, and they don’t pay attention to the many other destructive edits that are just as valid of methods of editing photos. Photoshop is limiting in this respect.

lack of awesome plugins

Lack of free awesome plugins. And Photoshop really needs better plugins for doing things like reducing noise, Fourier transform, and separating frequencies.

Overpriced

Photoshop is way overpriced, with way overpriced 3rd party plugins. Especially if you try to stay up to date with the newest version of Photoshop.

Hide their algorithms

Photoshop hides the technical details about the exact algorithms they use in their tool set, while in GIMP I can look at the source code and I can read up on any of the algorithms used so I know exactly what is happening under the hood.

Copy, paste and undo, don’t work INTUITIVELY

You can copy and paste and undo. I get really annoyed at the way Photoshop thinks we would only want to undo one edit at a time or that we wouldn’t ever want to copy information from one layer to another. There are ways around these things. Yeah it doesn’t matter that much, but they are two really big pet peeves I have with Photoshop.

Terrible UI

GIMP’s single window UI is awesome and better than Photoshops UI. When I started using Photoshop, I found out why so many people use keyboard shortcuts with Photoshop. trying to navigate through Photoshop’s menus is ridiculous. Keyboard shortcuts are the only way to do things in a timely manner. An obvious sign of a poor UI.

in a comment on lightstalking.com Deeg said:

Interesting. Now I have been using gimp to edit my pictures. Now I used photoshop years ago so understoof that menu system more. It did take a while to adjust to a different menu system and layout. For myself I find the Gimp layout freindlier and quicker, and more than capable to edit an original photo to my desired result whatever it is, so I personally feel Gimp is well up to the task. That is not to say that gimp does not have its shortcomings, and I did try shift back to Photoshop and honestly the number of mouse clicks needed to accomplish the same tasks was so much more and more tedious I am back using gimp.

in another comment on lightstalking.com Dolores said:

“The GUI which is used in GIMP is not as advanced or even suitable for the hand of an artist”

I do not agree with this assessment AT ALL. I have found gimp’s interface to be far more intuitive than photoshop’s.

I used photoshop for 5 years, before switching to gimp because gimp was much faster and cheaper, with nearly identical functionality.

I love gimp’s right click menus. When you select something on an image, you can right click on that selection and hit “crop to selection”, use filters, change contrast, hue/saturation, etc, etc. Its intuitive and faster than going up to the top of the screen and using a tool bar.

I also like the way gimp handles brushes much more than photoshop. Its more organized and easier to find the brush you want. Plus all the options for that brush are all in one spot. Want to make it 40% transparent, dodge and the shape of a star? its easier and faster to do in gimp.

I think people believe that gimp is harder simply because they are not familiar with it. If people would take the time to learn gimp and do tutorials, etc they would see that gimp can do 99% of the things photoshop can.

Plus even if you do use photoshop for big projects, sometimes you just want to do a quick edit. Waiting for photoshop to load is a pain, and you can open gimp, make the edit and save the file in the time it takes for photoshop to even load. I think it is very much worth it for people learn how to use gimp. Its a very powerful tool.

Some things GIMP could improve on [incomplete list].

Lack of 16 bit support

This should be available in the next release.

Lack of awesome plugins

GIMP doesn’t have a puppet tool, as good of a liquify tool.

No non-destructive editing

any edits done in GIMP are done destructivly

Eclipse

Mr. Me — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 04:43:59 +0000

This is a picture taken of the solar eclipse. I took this picture to check my exposure as I was awaiting the solar eclipse. I didn’t realize it was actually happening when I took this picture. My entire family was waiting for the solar eclipse, but didn’t see it. We thought it happend after he sun went over he horizon and we missed it. It wasn’t until after I looked through the pictures I’d taken in preparation for the solar eclipse that I realized we’d watched the entire thing without realizing that we had.

California Sunset

Mr. Me — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 02:58:00 +0000

I can’t really figure out why I like this picture, but it works for me. Anyone have any ideas as to what makes this picture work..

Software Tools

Mr. Me — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 00:36:19 +0000

There is a lot more software out there than just photoshop. I’m going to discuss some of my favorite free tools to manipulate images.

Hugin

If you’ve ever used this tool, you’ll know it is better than any other free or paid panoramic stitching solution out there. With this tool you can even hand hold your camera as you take a panorama. It takes care of any movements, tilting of the camera, barrel distortions, vignetting, and any camera distortions you could think off. The program can also be used to align and create HDR images. There are a variety of methods for creating panoramas. It is also very much evident that the program was coded very well, with interchangeable components, and other wise design decisions. However, the UI isn’t the most user friendly. It needs a getting started page, but other than that, this is the best panorama stitching program.

RAW THERAPEE

This is a great program for editing RAW photos. Most of the RAW image editors are Linux only, but this one works on both Linux and Windows. It allows you to navigate through your files, and makes it easy to batch process files. From the browsing tab you can apply saved out profiles to your images, and then send the image to the queue to be processed. If you want to spend more time on an image there are a variety of sliders that can be used to manipulate the image. Many of these manipulations are better done in GIMP or photoshop, so make sure you don’t go overboard with the sliders.

Inkscape

The best free program for vector graphics. I don’t create vector graphics much, but if that interests you try out this program.

Luminance HDR

Not the best program, but as GIMP cannot yet handle 16-bit graphics, this tool can be used to do some preprocessing on a HDR photo, before you have to convert it to 8 bit to process it with GIMP. Hugin can also be used to create HDR images. Hopefully GIMP will introduce the ability to edit in 16-bit soon as these HDR tools are very limited in what they can do.

GIMP Plugins

G’MIC

You’ve probably heard me mention this one a few times. G’MIC opens a window with a ton of advanced filters. It has the best noise reduction filters, and sharpening filters. It has some great filters for manipulating color.

Adaptive edge detection

I don’t need a edge detection filter that much, but when I do this is much better than the default methods. This filter has also been ported to G’MIC

PSPI

This will allow you to use any photoshop plugins. In reality all the photoshop ones are way expensive, and there is usually is a fun GIMP counterpart, but it is kinda neet that you can use photoshop filters in GIMP.

Focus blur

Fakes an out of focus lens blur. Does a really good job. I love this filter.