App Screenshots

Mac App Store Apps are required to have screenshots, and these images must fit certain criteria, which Apple changes from time to time.  As of today, here are they options they demand:

Although not terribly difficult, I have previously maintained a Photoshop file for each of my Apps, with a stable background color, and a different layer for each screenshot, thus maintaining a clean continuity.  I have no clue if this is important, but I like it.

My latest App update is CalEventer (my first Mac App), and the new screenshot files are 909 x 510 for the Main GUI, and 808 x 668 for the Preferences window.  So, I will use the 1440 x 900 basic size, and load them all as layers. 

I fire up GIMP, patiently waiting for it to scan my entire drive for fonts, and select File --> New, and make the dimensions 1440 x 900.  I saved it in my folder of Support Images, and then selected the foreground color, and made it a tan like shade.  It was then a simple matter of Edit --> Fill with FG Color:

Next, I open up all the screenshots I made as layers (File --> Open As Layers), and I can then easily click them on and off at will.  As I select the ones I use, I can rename the layers with more specificity, albeit not easily.

Then, I export (File --> Export) as PNG, and all is swell:

GIMP Layers

Last Saturday (30 March 2013), I was in Bellevue visiting the Temple built by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  I enjoy opportunities photographing this structure, since the landscaping changes often, and it does not move.  On very sunny days (like last Saturday), the most difficult part of the structure is the golden angel statue atop the spire; the reflections are unbelievably bright:

The details are completely washed out, and although you can tell that this is indeed a statue of a man with a trumpet, it looks terrible.  Additionally, the building is very white, and bright sunlight creates exceedingly harsh shadows when the scene is properly exposed.  In essence, three photos are necessary to obtain a desired final product that (hopefully) looks good.

Photo 1 - A good exposure of the stature, with minimal glare, and reasonable detail.

Photo 2 - A good exposure of the sky and daffodil foreground that is rich with color and details.

Photo 3 - A good exposure of the building, that minimizes the harshness of the shadows created by the hard sunlight without washing all the detail from the white surfaces

I am using a Nikon D300s with a Nikon 14-24 mm lens, attached to a Manfrotto Ballhead atop a Manfrotto Tripod.  Setting the camera to ISO 200, I find that Photo 1 is good at a shutter speed of 1/500 at f11.  Photo 2 is 1/250, and Photo 3 is 1/125.  All images are in Nikon RAW (NEF) format.  I use iPhoto as my primary organizing and preliminary editing tool.

My plan is to use GIMP to manually blend the portions of the three photos together into a single composite image, then do the final adjustments for color, saturation, sharpness, etc. on the completed product.  Let's see how that works out.

In iPhoto, the only changes I make before exporting are to images 1 and 3.  For image 1, I fully recover all highlight details in the RAW image, and subsequently fully darken the highlights.  This produces acceptable detail and depth to the statue.  For image 3, I also fully recover all highlight details, and darken the highlights about 60%.  This reduces the overexposed portions of the white building to more acceptable levels, and does not darken the shadows much at all.  Here are the three images side by side (in iPhoto):

Yeah, you can't see much like this, but hey, it's a blog.  Oh well.

Anyway, time to bring these images into GIMP and see what I can do to combine them.  I use an AppleScript I designed myself to "export" them as linked files, so that I do not have to burn up more hard disk space.  The link is set to the JPG files that iPhoto creates after I do the mini-manipulations, so it is those JPGs that I will open up in GIMP.  Magically, GIMP has a nifty command entitled Open as Layers:

I then select the three files, and each file is placed in its own layer:

I renamed each layer to correspond to the photo numbers I defined earlier.  All I want from Photo 1 is the statue, so I put that at the bottom of the stack to act as the background layer.  I will need to mask out the statue in both upper layers so that the statue from the bottom is fully visible.  Of course, I also need to mask out the sky and daffodils in Photo 3 as well, so that only the building from Photo 3 is visible.

First, we just need to create a layer mask, starting with Photo 3, the uppermost layer.  To quickly get rid of the sky, and preserve the building, I start with the Fuzzy Select Tool, and set the threshold to 35.  (I got that with a lot of experimenting to see how well the edges of building were selected.)

The selection was not perfect, but it is close enough to start with, since we can edit the mask manually later on.  Now, the tricky part; the selection has to both be inverted AND converted to a layer mask.  With the selection still active, I click on Layer --> Add Layer Mask...   Then, check both the Selection and Invert mask boxes:

Boom!  Not perfect, but now we can edit the mask directly with a paintbrush.  First, it is necessary to click onto the mask portion of the layer, to be sure that it is highlighted.  It is also a reasonable idea to make sure that Edit Layer Mask is checked, indicating that you are actually about to edit the mask, not the image:

I want a hard brush, so that I can make a nice (freehand) mask edge along the left side of the building:

I painted everything black, so that the mask completely blocked it out, allowing Photo 2's sky to be visible throughout, including over the statue atop the steeple.  I went back with white, and then grey over the evergreens along the left so that they were visible as depicted in Photo 3.  I still want the daffodils to be from Photo 2, but I don't want to use the hard edge brush for that, so I select a brush with a hard center, and very soft radius (the one just above the hard brush) and do the entire daffodil section.

The big problem is on the right side, where the tree branches were not all selected as part of the mask.  Holy cow, what a mess!!  That is going to be time consuming to try to repair.

For the statue on Photo 2, I just created a layer mask, and blacked out the brightest portions.  That worked as well as trying to select the thing precisely and completely mask it to allow Photo 3 to be visible.

And, here is the finished product (with the iPhoto spread for comparison), except for all that annoying stuff on the right, in the branch/sky mixture.  I have removed all the spots from the sky, but I still have not done any color saturation, sharpening, or noise reduction:

GIMP Clone Tool

A friend emailed me an image today that he hoped I could help with:

Specifically, he wanted to know if I could remove the sprinkler and the hose from the lower left portion of the grass.  I, of course, wanted to know why he couldn't have simply moved them before he pressed the shutter....

Anyway, it is just as well, I have been wanting to play more with GIMP (version 2.8.2 - Mac), so this worked well as a first test image.  I decided to just use the Clone Tool, but had some initial difficulties since the instructions are all for Windows versions of GIMP.  Additionally, since I have been playing with Inkscape the past week, I became pretty used to using the control key, and it took a while before I remembered that since GIMP is now a native Mac app (it no longer requires X11 to run), I should be using the command (⌘) key.

Once I got past that, it was simple:

Click the Clone Tool: 

I then experimented with different brushes, eventually settling on this one:

I was happy to discover that the bracket - [ ] - keys function much the same way as they do in Photoshop, which is that they enlarge and reduce the size of the brush.  Very convenient.  I made the brush about 2/3 the height of the sprinkler, after zooming to 200%

After discovering the command key thing I mentioned above, it was a simple matter to place the brush outline in a clean piece of grass, command-click to set that as the source for the cloning, and start clicking away.

I also tried out a few different modes in the Tool Options window, and decided that Normal was indeed the best.  I also set the Alignment to Aligned, so that the lighting would be pretty even throughout the fixed region.

Once I finished the first run through, I did few random selections to remove the most glaring areas of parallel cloning, and got this:

You can still see some remnants of where the clones happened, but only if you know where to look.  For a 3 minute exercise, I am pretty happy.

Saving the image was a bit different than I had anticipated; it was necessary to Export (instead of Save As):

I sent it to the same folder I opened from, with a new name, still as a JPEG, and checked the box for Use quality settings from original image:

The new image is 3 MB, versus 3.1 in the original.

Introduction

I have never really possessed a desire to blog.  And yet, I find myself  on the threshold of a pathway that will most likely require more attention to details, so this seems to be the most reasonable method of tracking my progress.  Plus, I expect that it will make it easier to locate things I have already done (but forgotten) when I need them later on.

I am not an artist; I trained as a scientist and veterinarian in the 1980s, and I continue to practice veterinary medicine full time.  My father and I built a black & white darkroom in the basement of our home in the early 1970s, and I have continued my interest and avocation in photography ever since.  I went fully digital just after the turn of the century.

Since that time, I have dumped most of my discretionary dollars into Apple computers, Nikon cameras & lenses, and Adobe Photoshop.  (The lack of a link on that last item is clue...)  At first, I was not bothered by the huge expense of Adobe's image editing product, even though I only need a half dozen times per year, since I did not purchase every single upgrade as each came out.  In fact, I only purchased the original version 7, and the CS3 upgrade a few years later.  I thought that was plenty for the little that I used it.

The current version of Mac OS X (10.8.x - Mountain Lion) is having a few issues with CS3, and the truth is that I am just plain frustrated about the push toward subscription based Photoshop, or as Adobe phrases it, Creative Cloud.  Mind you, I do not disagree with the concept, but $50 per month?  Sure, as a bona-fide CS customer, I would get $30 per month for a year, and full access to all the software (which is nice), but it does not work for someone who uses it as infrequently as I do.

I have considered just purchasing a month of everything, but which month?  It is simply impractical to manage it like that.  I am also not thrilled about coughing up another $200 for the full upgrade to CS6.  I would much rather continue to save for the next generation of imaging equipment, and improved computing power.  I understand that my choices are not always logical, nor are they necessarily what others would select, but oh well.  That's my problem.

So, I will spend the next few months learning the ins and outs of GIMP, an open source, no-cost image editing software package, and I will be keeping my notes here on what I learn, focused, of course, on the photographic projects I am currently working on.

I also plan to simultaneously explore inkscape, another open source, no-cost application, designed for vector drawing.  In fact, this is the "final straw" reason for my decision anyway.  I have been considering GIMP for a few months, but the image-editing functions of Photoshop have been working just fine (and I purchased a truly fabulous noise/sharpening filter plug-in from Kodak a few years ago that does not work as a standalone app) so I never really did anything to learn GIMP.   Truthfully, it is the drawing modes of Photoshop CS3 that are crashing my machine, and it is not like I was asking it to draw anything complicated, just some curved arrows (with effects) and an icon that looks like a stack of paper.

This discloses my alter ego, Mr. CodeBoy, who sells utility applications at the Mac App Store and has an occasional need for button images and application icons.  It is not something that I have any intention of hiring a graphic artist to do, since these apps are not generating an impressive revenue stream, so I need a very low-cost option to continue to make my own.

There you have it; a geek scientist, practicing veterinary medicine, pursuing photography, and coding computers.  Why not attempt electronic illustration as well?