Back in June I expressed some doubts regarding viability of Luminance HDR (neé Qtpfsgui) in the review of v2.0.0. Unfortunately it looks like the doubts turn out to be true. A couple of weeks ago all project’s admins (for some reason I’m still among them) were contacted by SourceForge regarding breach of contract (selling software from SF pages is prohibited). The last official project’s maintainer never replied, the problem was resolved by previous maintainer.
Do we have to care, if Luminance HDR compiles and runs? Yes and no. Here is why.
Continue reading ‘In need of viable free HDR solution’
Heya, our little project that quite mattered in the libre graphics community for last couple of years is in danger. Giuseppe doesn’t have any time now, Daniel also lack time, and the brilliant Franco who joined us half a year ago disappeared a couple of months ago.
Continue reading ‘Qtpfsgui needs help’
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
I want to once again thank all of our sponsors, especially our dear community. You are amazing!
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 )
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
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’
Right after GIMP 2.6, UFRaw 0.14, LensFun 0.2.3 and Blender 2.48 our beloved Liquid Rescale hits the shelves with a new stable version 0.5.0. Don’t forget to grab liblqr 0.2.0 as well. Kudos to Carlo Baldassi for this groundbreaking killer plug-in! Content-aware resizing in GIMP keeps getting better
So, UFRaw 0.14 is out with quite a bit of additions:
- saving options moved to a separate tab of a main window;
- Exif is embedded into TIFF files (you need Exiv2 0.18-pre1 and newer);
- improved greyscale conversion (using a color mixer too);
- experimental LensFun support;
- experimental linear contrast slider;
- color temperature can go up to 15000°K.
And two weeks before that LensFun 0.2.3 was released. I think both Udi and Andrew deserve a really big hug! It’s too easy to forget saying a thank you, when people invest time into work which results we often take for granted.
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
Just a day after I blogged that it’s unknown when LensFun will land to UFRaw the patch entered holy waters of UFRaw’s CVS I bet you’ve been waiting for that for quite a while 
The user interface is built so that if the used preset is OK, you don’t go any further. But if you want to tweak options, you have plenty of them to play with:
Looks cool, eh?
Continue reading ‘LensFun in UFRaw’
If you read CREATE mailing list or stumbled upon one of my previous blog postings, you might have wondered, what happens to LensFun project.
Here is the news. During LGM Gilles Caulier demoed an initial implementation of LensFun in digiKam. Currently it has no advanced options, but you can choose a lens manufacturer and a lens model and see preview. From what I understood, this will be in version 0.10.0 (first KDE4 version of digiKam) and already is in SVN. Edit: I was just told that chromatic aberrations can be fixed in digiKam now as well thanks to LensFun
Screenshots for digiKam: one, two, three.
The Great Anderses of Rawstudio also demoed (privately) an initial support for LensFun (without advanced options as well). It fixes geometric distorsions only right now and I don’t know when it will be released.
There also exists a patch for UFRaw that is coming directly from Andrew Zabolotny (the LensFun developer) and has advanced options, but it was obsoleted by more recent changes in UFRaw/CVS, so it doesn’t compile right now.
Thus, even if not at the speed of light, changes are coming
