It is frustrating. Most of the times it would be so easy to fix. What the hell did the developers think about while implementing those “features”?

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Especially if you want to convert photographs to black and white and create a nice dark sky, it may happen that you will have some noise in the sky, even if you shoot with low ISO. This happens if you use a channel mixer or a similar tool for black and white conversion. As the sky is (often) blue, it will appear darker in the black and white version if you reduce the blue channel. But in general you will have more noise in the red channel than in the blue and the green channel.

Of course this depends on the sensor type and the camera hardware and software you have. This per channel noise phenomena is very deeply documented on libraw.org, I recommend to read it, if you are interested in the technical stuff of (your) digital camera. There is another article there testing the results regarding channel noise with a magenta filter.

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Today I read about the launch of Sony’s new sensor technology Exmor R and the launch of the new compact cameras DSC-TX1 and DSC-WX1 on heise and dpreview.

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Yes. Another preview version. Bibble 5 Preview 2.2 released.

Not tried it yet very much. But some of the highlights of the changelog:

» Major improvements to the Layers & Regions tools, with better memory management and much faster rendering
» Implemented On / Off toggles per Region and per Layer
» Implemented File -> Open and drag & drop to open image files and work queues.
» Implemented ‘Portable Catalogs.’
» Improved Linux Trash operations (to be freedesktops.org compliant)

This means… Yes, it is time to implement a “Develop in Bibble 5” extension, or at least an “Open with…” context menu entry in form of a desktop file like I did with Bibble 4 (direct link to desktop file and shell script).

With the new versions of GIMP there is a menu called “GEGL Operation…” with a bunch of more or less interesting image operations. GEGL will be the graphics library for the future GIMP releases and brings 16bit support among other features to GIMP, when the transition will be completed.

GEGL c2g dialog with default settings

Within those GEGL Operations there is one operation called simply c2g (color2gray). Applying c2g is quite slow, but the results are at least interesting. It seems to be similar to the HDR and tone mapping hype of over-processing images and the results are similar, as this is a kind of tone mapping, just with black and white conversion applied.

There are a lot of bad examples tagged c2g on Flickr. Have look at this images. Doesn’t it remind you of the HDR groups in Flickr (or wherever)? Horrible halos, overall dull pictures as the high contrast and lighting is the same in all areas of the image. Aggressive, because of the high contrasts and because of the business of the subjects.

This method was tested by Rolf in his Meet The Gimp Podcast and Joel Cornuz is blogging in his Linux Photography Blog about it with the title “Could this be the ultimate black and white converter??”.

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Some more updates on the addins for F-Spot I wrote about lately.

Tabbed Sidebar

• Saves open sidebar page on changing between view mode and browser mode

Version Sidebar

• Fixed bug and crasher because of not using the correct id ranges in photo versions collection

You can find the source code as always on Gitorious, the extension url here:

http://purecodes.org/f-spot/0.6

Updates only available for 0.6.