Archive for the 'LGM' Category

LGM2010, community support

Published on April 16, 2010 in Graphics and LGM. 0 Comments

Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 is getting really close. This year we are doing a Pledgie campaign as well to get support from our community, so that all individual developers willing to participate and make the free graphics software better again could attend.

To give you a better idea why LGM matters I finally finished the article I promised long time ago. Read it here.

If you are willing to support LGM, no matter how little money you can give, please use the Pledgie:

Click here to lend your support to: Support the Libre Graphics Meeting and make a donation at www.pledgie.com!

If you are a potential corporate sponsor, it’s best to contact GNOME Foundation, who help us with processing of incoming payments, by writing to lgm(at)gnome.org. Thank you!

MyPaint reviewed

Published on January 31, 2010 in Development, Graphics and LGM. 0 Comments Tags: .

MyPaint developers released a much anticipated v0.8.0 on Friday, and one of them, Ilya Portnov, wrote a good introduction to MyPaint and a review of changes in this version. Read on!

I can’t stop myself from quoting one of the users who commented on the Russian version of the review: “Yeah, great application! I’m painting again!!! PS: my girlfriend just can’t stop using MyPaint, that’s how much she likes it! I’m getting jealous ;) ”

The raising popularity of MyPaint clearly has a lot to do with David Revoy’s famous time-lapse video. This is how a lot of people discovered the application. Here is one of the new MyPaint artists: http://tissia.livejournal.com/ (warning: cyrillic letters :) )

Hopefully at least some of the developers will make it to Libre Graphics Meeting in May. We’ve been having more or less same projects every year at the conference, it’s time to see more people :)

LGW unveiled

Published on August 6, 2009 in Graphics and LGM. 0 Comments

Back in May during Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 Alessandro, Cedric, Melissa and me sat down 20 meters away from the roaring official LGM supper to talk about ways to make more buzz in designers community re. free/libre tools. We defined major pitfalls and came up with a number of ideas.

The first of them shoots now: Libre Graphics World. We intend to make this website THE host for news, articles, interviews and so on. We tried to cover most questions about LGW in the FAQ. Feel free to ask more :)

Most technical work was done by sK1 team (kudos, guys!).

We start with all interviews I did over the years, a review of Fontmatrix 0.6.0 (released a month ago) and a couple of Inkscape tutorials. The website is by no means complete, but I was so tired of keeping the project to myself, that here it is :) My own short-term goals are:

  • fill the gaps in the Web Links section
  • finish FAQs for main products
  • finish translation of Photoshop-to-GIMP migration guide
  • translate Illustrator-to-Inkscape migration guide
  • translate and publish my own GIMP and Inkscape tutorials
  • finish and publish the bloody LGM’09 report :)

A number of reviews (Inkscape 0.47, Scribus 1.3.5, GIMP 2.7.0) are already written and just wait for actual software releases to happen.

There is a lot of work on wiki to be done, and we actually are missing the logo. I have a preliminary version which I’m not quite happy with and I’d be grateful for help on that.

Last, but not least. One of the points of this project is collecting information about libre graphics related activities. So we have a shared Google calendar. There is an open thread in forum where you can comment to tell us about events that are related to libre graphics software, and then we’ll add them. I’m talking about conferences, workshops, courses etc.

And, like I said, this is just one of the planned projects. Expect something else soon :)

LGM’09 aftermath

Published on May 18, 2009 in LGM and Photography. 1 Comment

It’s been almost week since I’m back from LGM’09. Jet lag finally got me on my way back (8 hours between timezones), for the first time in my life. Am I growing older then? :)

I’m currently busy writing reports and sorting photos, but for now just few things:

  • lightning talks are great and should be used further, but in some cases we still need long talks
  • all talks in one room is good — everything is recorded
  • more time for BoFs is good, we need even more of that
  • BoFs should probably be recorded as well, at least audio
  • we need all the attention of local designers and content producers we can get — publish articles in local thematic magazines perhaps?
  • if we get this attention, we should better organize selling of books on using GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus and Blender (Blender movie DVDs too?) for little to no income, but publicity
  • we probably need some handouts for free software — something in the lines of LGM’07 newspaper, but smaller
  • we need a better academic track by all means

For the latter I think we should track scientific papers that relate to libre graphics tools.

Ay, and a small photo teaser for our LGM Flickr group :)

Dave Crossland

I want to once again thank all of our sponsors, especially our dear community. You are amazing!

LGM, Pledgie and more

Published on April 24, 2009 in LGM. 0 Comments

In the world of recession we somehow managed to cross 5K USD borderline last week in our Pledgie campaign. This is where I’d love to give credits to both our community and blendernation.com which published news on LGM. In the mean time we published draft schedule of talks.

You can still register to attend the conference.

Click here to lend your support to: Support the Libre Graphics Meeting and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

LGM’07-08, LensFun

Published on March 25, 2009 in Development, LGM and Photography. 5 Comments

This is another posting in the Libre Graphics Meeting series, and another on LensFun, of which I’ve already written before.

LensFun as idea — a library to provide means to fix distortions and aberrations that lenses apply to captured photos — and a set of requirements was born two years ago at Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal. As a real code it was born a bit later — you can read interview with Andrew Zabolotny by Joel Cornuz for details.

At this point we have a sophisticated implementation of LensFun in UFRaw, a quite simplistic yet working implementation in digiKam and somewhat forgotten test implementation in Rawstudio which hasn’t made its way to users yet — last thing I heard is Anders K. will probably do it soon now that Rawstudio has plug-in architecture. (And if he doesn’t, I will feel justified to renew my torturing skills that I got during my KGB secret agent course years ago :) )

Rawstudio team

Currently LensFun suffers from lack of a very much up to date lens/camera database. New lenses pop up every few months, but most of its data is coming from the last available open ptlens database (before it went proprietary). So I have an idea. If you happen to have lenses unsupported by LensFun and you are planning to come to LGM, bring them, and we’ll do a calibration session. The walls of École Polytechnique — our old/new venue — have pretty straight lines to rely on, and at least one pano head with leveller will be available :)

By the way, you can start registering for the conference now! And if you would love to do a talk on free graphics software, do get in touch — the program is still in the works :)

Click here to lend your support to: Support the Libre Graphics Meeting and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

LGM’08, all things Raw

Published on March 21, 2009 in Development, Graphics, LGM and Photography. 0 Comments

Continuing the series of postings about Libre Graphics Meeting. This one is all about Raw software.
At LGM3 We had almost everybody related to Raw software:

We were missing only Hubert Figuiere of libopenraw/exempi/niepce and Alex Tutubalin/Ilia Borgh of LibRaw. But the spirit of Tutubalin flew across the top of the waters of Oder for four days, so naturally Gilles couldn’t resist embracing the heavenly emanation and just few weeks later introduced LibRaw based libkdcraw :) Jokes aside, this library is now used across KDE4 graphics applications: digiKam, kphotalbum, DarkRoom and Krita. This is because Gilles heard about it at LGM in Wrocław.

You might as well ask, what is LibRaw and why it is better than the original DCRaw from which it is recreated. Alex’s “Goals and objectives” article pretty much covers covers this question, but you probably would like to hear from developers who use LibRaw. So I asked Gilles to write a short explanation.
Continue reading ‘LGM’08, all things Raw’

LGM’08, Fontmatrix

Published on March 2, 2009 in Development, Fonts, Graphics and LGM. 0 Comments

As promised before I start a series of postings about Libre Graphics Meeting and how it affects development of open source software.

Fontmatrix, as Peter Linnell says, is THE application for Scribus users: it is a new yet versatile font management application. This was the first application in C++ that Pierre Marchand, its principal developer, ever wrote, and it’s amazing how far it’s gone so far.
Continue reading ‘LGM’08, Fontmatrix’

Time to…

Published on February 26, 2009 in Development, Fonts, Graphics and LGM. 1 Comment

We ask our community to support Libre Graphics Meeting conference again. Last year we managed to collect 12K in few weeks and we put it to a really good use. I’ll be talking about LGM2008 in further blog postings about past, present and future of LGM.

Click here to lend your support to: Support the Libre Graphics Meeting and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

LibRaw coming to you

Published on September 29, 2008 in Graphics, LGM and Photography. 0 Comments

Some of you might have wondered what the real outcomes from LGM are (especially those who donated this year). For me the best result of LGM2007 was LensFun project by Andrey Zabolotny (used in UFRaw/CVS, digiKam and, secretly, Rawstudio). So far the best one for LGM2008 seems to be new libkdcraw that makes use of LibRaw. And while LibRaw vs. libopenraw might be a controversial topic, one cannot deny all the good things that are happening to digikam, Krita and other KDE4 apps now :-)