Goodies Giveaway for digiKam Recipes Readers
Yay! It’s time for yet another giveaway. A lucky winner will receive a swanky Photorito Lens Wrap (pictured below) and a “fuzzy wuzzy” Felt Camera Case.
If you’ve already purchased digiKam Recipes, you automatically participate in the giveaway. Don’t have a copy of the ebook? Please find further info about digiKam Recipes along with the purchasing options at digiKam Recipes’ website. A winner will be picked randomly on February 15.
Add a Vintage Effect in digiKam
Want to add a vintage effect to your photos? digiKam has all the tools you need to turn your digital snapshots into vintage masterpieces. Open the photo you want for editing, adjust exposure, white balance, and tweak other settings as you would usually do. The first step in the “aging” process is to add film grain to the photo. To do this, choose Effects → Add Film Grain. There are a lot of parameters you can configure, but you don’t have to enable and tweak them all. You can start with adjusting the Grain Size parameter as well as trying different values for parameters in the Luminance Noise section. You can preview the result at any time using the Try button. Next step is to tweak the color balance to make the photo look aged. One way to do this is to tweak the color balance settings, so the photo looks washed out with a slightly yellow cast imitating aged photo paper. Choose Color → Color Balance and adjust the Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow parameters to achieve the desired result.
The exact values for each parameter depend on the given photo and your personal taste, but you can start with the following values:
Cyan: 37
Magenta: 25
Yellow: -25
To make the vintage effect even more realistic, add vignetting to the photo. Choose Enhance → Lens → Vignetting Correction, tick the Add Vignetting check box and adjust the available parameters to your liking. Finally, sharpen the photo using Enhance → Sharpen to make the film grain more pronounced, and you are done.
digiKam Recipes 3.9.19 Released
This release features the new Add a Vintage Effect in digiKam recipe along with a raft of minor improvements, tweaks, and fixes.
Readers who already purchased the ebook will receive the new version free of charge. If you bought the ebook via Amazon, please send your order confirmation as proof of purchase to dmpop@linux.com.
Happy reading!
Check and Optimize digiKam’s Databases
By default, digiKam uses two SQLite databases for storing essential data: digikam4.db and thumbnails-digikam.db. And to make the application run fast and smoothly, it’s a good idea to check and optimize the databases every now and then. To do this on Ubuntu or its derivatives, you need to install the sqlite3 package using the sudo apt-get install sqlite3 command. Once you’ve done that, back up the digikam4.db and thumbnails-digikam.db databases. Open then the terminal and switch to the directory where the databases are stored. First off, you should check the integrity of both databases using the following commands:
sqlite3 -line digikam4.db 'pragma integrity_check;'
sqlite3 -line thumbnails-digikam.db 'pragma integrity_check;'
If both databases are in order, you should see the integrity_check = ok message. To optimize the databases, run the two commands below:
sqlite3 -line digikam4.db 'vacuum;'
sqlite3 -line thumbnails-digikam.db 'vacuum;'
Run then the integrity check once again to make sure that everything works properly, and you are done.
digiKam Recipes 3.9.15 Released
First off, the digiKam Tricks book has got a new title: digiKam Recipes. Why? Because I like the word “recipe” better. To celebrate this momentous event, a new version of the digiKam Recipes book is available for your reading pleasure. The new version features the Check and Optimize digiKam’s Databases recipe as well as a few minor tweaks and corrections.
Readers who already purchased the book will receive the new version free of charge. If you haven’t received your copy, please send your order confirmation as proof of purchase to dmpop@linux.com, and I’ll email you the latest version of the book.
Happy reading!
digiKam in c’t Digital Photography
The latest issue #6 of c’t Digital Photography features an in-depth article about digiKam by yours truly. c’t Digital Photography is a relatively new quarterly magazine published by Heise, one of the most respected magazine publishing houses in Germany.
For my money, c’t Digital Photography is the best photography magazine on the market. And I’m saying that not because I write for it. The magazine caters for serious amateurs and professional photographers alike, offering high-quality articles covering a wide range of topics: from macro photography and panorama stitching to lens adapters and lens correction techniques. The current issue #6, for example, is chock-full of great articles, including excellent pieces on DIY studio gear and macro focus stacking. Linux users will also appreciate that c’t Digital Photography covers Linux-based photography tools as well as open source software for other platforms. In fact, issue #4 of the magazine features a comprehensive article on photography software for Linux, while issue #5 covers photography apps for iOS and Android.
c’t Digital Photography is published both in German and English, and your magazine subscription is available internationally at reasonable rates. The magazine’s editor has kindly provided me with two extra copies of the English version of the current issue which I’ll be more than happy to share with Scribble and Snaps’ readers. Leave a comment to this post, and I’ll randomly pick two lucky recipients.
Buy digiKam Recipes, Get the Concise Guide to phTagr
Piwigo and Gallery are probably the most popular open source web-based applications for hosting image galleries on your own server, but they are not the only fish in the sea. Take phTagr, for example. This application has all the essential features you would expect from a decent image and video sharing application wrapped into a lightweight and user-friendly interface. The application’s real strength, though, lies in its tagging and searching capabilities which make it a solid solution for maintaining a web-based image and video archive.
The Concise Guide to phTagr can help you to deploy phTagr at get to grip with this photo publishing application. The best part? When you buy the digiKam Tricks book, you receive a copy of the Concise Guide to phTagr free of charge. This offer expires in Saturday, December 31.
Easy Geotagging with ExifTool
Need to quickly geotag a bunch of photos taken at a specific location? ExifTool is your friend. Using this powerful command-line tool, you can geotag multiple photos with a single command. Before you proceed, make sure that ExifTool is installed on your machine. To install ExifTool on Ubuntu, execute the sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl command. Next, you have to obtain the longitude and latitude of the desired geographical location, and feed the coordinates to ExifTool as follows:
exiftool -GPSLongitudeRef=E -GPSLongitude=139.7513889 -GPSLatitudeRef=N -GPSLatitude=35.685 *.jpg
This command will geotag all JPEG images in the current directory. If you are running Windows, download the latest version of the ExifTool executable and rename it as in the example below:
exiftool (-GPSLongitudeRef=E -GPSLongitude=139.7513889 -GPSLatitudeRef=N -GPSLatitude=35.685).exe
Drag and drop the photos you want to geotag onto the executable and ExifTools will do the rest. Besides GPSLongitudeRef, GPSLongitude, GPSLatitudeRef, and GPSLatitude, ExifTools supports a number of other tags. Check the GPS Tags page for further info.
Split Toning with GIMP and darktable
In this tutorial well explain what sepia actually is, and how this effect is best achieved in GIMP and darktable. Continue to read
Washed-out and Golden Skintones Effect in darktable
A fellow darktable contributor asked about the washed-out effect he discovered in one of my pictures.
Normally, when you want to adjust skintones in studio environment, there always are golden and silver reflectors around. That’s the right way to do it. But if you really mean the global washed-out effect, you could make use of darktable.
The trick is basically a two-step operation: raising color temperature while lowering saturation.
