A few black and white experiments

In the same picture series as for the previous posts, some of the shots were not really convincing on the colour side of things... But for a few of them that showed nice geometrical patterns, I decided that I would try to convert them into black and white.

The first results of the convertion are the following:

Un toit à Saint-Malo

Un rayonnement du passé

Technically, nothing impressive is involved :

  • a mix between Red/Green/Blue chanels performed from the RAW file (with UFRaw)
  • some tweaking on the contrast as well
  • small sharpness enhancement
  • a quick framing
Of course there is much more information about this on a MeetTheGimp podcast.

Walkthrough for a simple photo post-process

When posting one of my pictures, I usually say that some post-processing was done. This is nothing but very classical stuff, that I believe are common to most photographers.

However I've been advised to give a glimpse of what those modifications were. And that's why this post will explain and illustrate, for a very simple case, how, starting with a picture coming out of my camera, I get one that suits me enough to post it here.

The picture I'll use as an example is the following:

Île et sillage au large de Saint-Malo (version finale recadrée)

Long story short, the post process I usually do, and that I will show here have basically two purposes:

  • improve color and contrast
  • re-frame the picture

Read more…

BackupMonitor: important bugfix

Icône de Backup Monitor

A nasty bug found its way in the latest release of BackupMonitor which caused the program to suddenly exit when something went wrong during the execution of one of the backup script.

The bug has been corrected  (a problem with threads and a method call that should have been asynchronous) and the "correct" behaviour is back: when something goes wrong an error log is displayed and the program "hiberantes" until the user wakes it up.

The updated version can be downloaded from the project's page.

BackupMonitor: improvements

Icône de Backup Monitor

A new version of backup-monitor has been released including:

  • bugfix for when the locale is not defined, or when playing a little with the script's command line options
  • refactoring of the GUI to give the user more feedback and to give more hints on where to click (GUI inspired by Ubuntu's update-manager)
  • using OptionParser to ease the command line handling
  • change in licence: for the GUI changes I've look and taken ideas from many GPL project, so it's just fair (if not plain compulsory) to release this new version under GPLv3.

Most of these modification were motivated by the first feedbacks I got from a friend, thanks to him then ;)

For more info and download, please go here.