Light box for object photography

Yes, GIMP is available for Windows. I've used it with XP & Win 7.

I have the several of the five caster bases from bad office chairs I plan on using to hold backdrops & lights. The backdrops will be rolled up on pieces of PVC pipe so you can change them in under a minute.

I need to replace the memory battery in my Fujifilm S5200, and I am going to see if there is enough spare space to add a tiny 433 MHz receiver to give me a remote shutter function.

That was made for photojournalists with sheet-film press cameras. I've shot it, and I also used it for contrapositive silver masking (which I did for McGraw-Hill Book Company, and which made me more money than shooting photos for them). Today, you can do the same job with Unsharp Masking in Photoshop, in a few seconds. Then, it would take me a whole evening to silver-mask a sheet of 35mm Kodachromes. Sheesh.

It was a very versatile film. Grain like golf balls, but versatile.

Yes, but jeez....

You'll get a kick out of this. I have a behind-the-lens air-bulb shutter I used with process lenses on my view camera, which I used for making Tri-Mask in-camera separations for the Trenton Times. I have put that sucker in *front* of a lens on my Nikon F2 for shooting multiple exposures. It's a big interleaved shutter.

But I don't get into those gymnastics anymore.

Yeah, one of them. It belonged to my partner at Windsor Advertising. He had a gazillion lenses -- and an 8 x 10 Calumet that we used to shoot giant trade-show Translites for Canon calculators and Prince tennis rackets. They were around 20 feet wide.

Those were fun times.

A single shot with my (then) new Smith Victor daylight fluourescent scoops. I was using too many new things at once not to have backups.

I have the digital shot on my hard drive if you want to see it -- before and after I worked it over with Gimp.

Again, I spent too many years lugging 100 pounds or more of flash heads and power packs, and even my big Bowens Monolights into the field. No way, Hose-A. From now on, I'm going with the daylight fluorescents. Lots of field photographers are using them now. I'm convinced, after seeing the densitometer readings on digital images from my gray card and Macbeth Color Checker. I shot the latter in daylight and then in daylight fluorescent with the same camera. You can hardly tell the difference.

It's a great hobby. Maybe if I retire I'll take it up again.

Dood, I lived with Photoshop for 20 years. I'm not paying for it anymore. And I find that Gimp is about equal to Photoshop 5. If you only use manual controls -- and that's all I use -- it works great.

I can show you a heavy background-editing job I did with Gimp, if you want to see the before-and-after.

Ooooh! Im Impressed! My brightest lens is a Canon 1.2.

And yeah...Im sure its a bit soft...lol

Microdol-X

Ayup. It was too grainy for just about anything I was doing. And even Tri-x pushed once was not as grainy as I recall.

Gunner

Ayup. The eye tends to translate green easier than most other colors..and a shit load of people tend to be green oblivious. Used to drive me nuts in the lab. One of the reasons Im still..still a fan of B&W

Gunner

Its pretty good too.

Though I use Irfanview and all the accessory software that comes as a seperate (free) download.

You might find this set of filters of interest then:

of course, you may already know/have them added to Gimp :)

Thanks, Leon. No, I haven't added any filters, although I'm interested and I'll take a look at those.

I've only used GIMP for a couple of years, and almost strictly for professional work that involves very mechanical kinds of hand-retouching. It's all straight photography. I haven't ever used overal image manipulation, except for the basic corrections -- contrast, color, density, etc. Mostly I clean up backgrounds, correct mistakes, silhouette, and related things.

But I know there are a lot more Photoshop things you can do with GIMP if you go for the open-source add-ons. I'll have to look into it further.

Thanks again.

:-)

That will do it. Or an electric shutter such as I used when building a camera from a large lightbox to 2x2" glass film -- for integrated circuit layouts.

Though usually I was running the lightbox on a Gralab timer instead. :-) The lightbox was two neon transformers and white neon folded in square-wave shape behind a diffuser.

Understood.

Indeed so. My largest format at home is 4x5 -- both a view camera and a Crown Graphic (like the Speed Graphic, but without the focal plane shutter.) Yes, the 8x10 Calumet was what I used with the same light box for printed circuit layouts. Two color layout tapes, and filters for the two shots for the two sides -- we didn't try multi-layer boards. :-)

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You could not get it to my mailbox. There is a size limit of

60K (to keep virus e-mails out of a couple of small mailing lists I host.)

The SB-800 flash units are very light -- often used camera top on 35mm SLRs. A camera bag with a half dozen of them would be lighter than my bag full of lenses. You can clamp them pretty much anywhere, or just set them on a tabletop. And no wires to string -- the camera and the flash units communicate by encoded flashes. :-)

Pretty good, then. But probably about the same weight per head (for just the lamp and the socket) as the SB-800.

I *am* retired, so I did. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

While I (on Sun unix boxen) use xv for flipping through a lot of images and selecting them, but gimp for serious working on them.

Since I don't use Windows, I can't use Irfanview -- but I supply it on DVDs of images that I'm sending out to people who use Windows.

Enjoy, DoN.

You may want to checkout JP2 format (aka JPEG2000). Could save you some space. It can be setup to save as loss-less. There are libraries/apps available for Unix/Linux now. It sucks hard on the processor though...

If you dig into the raw files (storing the un-retouched scans) at:

for their old books for instance you will find they are using JP2 for many of them. I haven't tried to figure out what setting they are using though (ie how much loss, if any).

You need to have some filters to play with. Try this/that and then finally decide that none of them will do what you want/need. Then you can get down to the real job of manually editing the image pixel by pixel, spot by spot :)

Much of the time I find loading up GIMP is kinda like calling in the National Guard when your only traffic light in town fails...

Most of what I do is adjust gamma, contrast, crop, unsharp mask, add text and I've found a simple filter that will redistribute contrast (ie boost low areas and reduce the highs). The latter is great for pulling out detail lost in the shadows. For doing all that I usually run Irfanview via Wine on Linux. You can do all that with GIMP but it would take me an half hour as opposed to maybe three minutes with Irfanview. GIMP's user interface is anything but intuitive...

Of course I also use XnView, XnConvert, Mtpaint, Fotoxx, Mashup, Image Analyzer, FotoTouch (ancient Win3.xx)... different apps for different problems.

But you speak the truth, many times it comes down to pixel editing/hand retouching here and there. I haven't found any "magic bullets" for getting that kind of work done, well, yet anyway. I keep looking ;-)

Leon Fisk fired this volley in news:klbndi$pvr $ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

And _sometimes_ that sort of editing is the only way to properly blend a defect. The filters don't always have the intelligence to handle gradients that run three ways across a chip in the emulsion.

Lloyd

I'm always interested in finding the magic pixel-munger that will make my job easier. I've not found it yet, and I used Photoshop from the first few months it was on the market; and PhotoStyler before that.

Meantime, a program that allows easy selection, paths, and the other fundamentals -- with speed and accuracy -- is all I need. I have a fast desktop with 6 GB of RAM, so Gimp works fast enough to satisfy me.

One thing I could use, though, is conversion back and forth to a really broad colorspace that has a lightness (black and white) channel. I used L,a,b with Photoshop. You get superior results with unsharp masking by working only on the lightness channel (it avoids color artifacts), and there are other things I like to do with it.

There may be a plug-in for doing it with Gimp, but I haven't looked. I've gotten away with lesser colorspaces because I've done work mostly for the Web lately, and it's not very demanding.

If you know of one, I could use it.

I'm not familiar with this (but learning). See if this blog entry helps:

"...One of the hidden secrets of Gimp is that it supports the LAB color space so you can get access to the L, a and b channels in an image. This adjustment therefore produces similar results to those you can achieve with my earlier post using Photoshop it?s just that the pro cess in Gimp is a little different..."