Original photos for wallpaper etc.

[spinxweb2]

Hi,

This is a macro shot of a petunia. I took this photo in July at our home near Edmonton. The trick with this one was to get the color intensity without either over-exposing the shot, or getting too much glare from the bright sky in the background.

[DownTown22]

Hi,

This is a macro shot of a petunia. I took this photo in July at our home near Edmonton. The trick with this one was to get the color intensity without either over-exposing the shot, or getting too much glare from the bright sky in the background.

Where's the photo?

[em3raldxiii]

Wow! I didn't get any email notifications that this thread took off, but I want to express my deep gratitude for everyone's submissions!! It'fantastic, and I now feel the urge to post some more of mine!

It should also be noted that I felt like commenting on *every* single picture in here! I am going to DL all of them for my own desktop (I like to randomly change them, but I hate doing the work of finding new ones ROFL).

More of mine will be coming soon

[em3raldxiii]

Any suggestions on a good Ubuntu logo to add to this photo?

I am going to set it up as a wallpaper.

I would recommend putting the logo in the water of the pool at the bottom, in 3D of course, so that it looks like either it's floating on the water, maybe slightly below the surface?

I would also recommend using muted colors ... if it's too bright, it might appear too cartoony, if you know what I mean.

[em3raldxiii]

Something totally different (when compared to unedited macro shots.)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/naggobot/4913691526/

You can find the 111.5 Mb Gimp .xcf of this image from Ubuntu one URL

http://ubuntuone.com/p/DRX/

(I may need to remove high res at some point due to 2GB space limitation)

This is a stereographic Hugin composition of 26 images. After composing the image has been edited with Gimp. Edits have been:

1. Selective Gaussian blur of the image to get rid of CCD grain.
2. Unsharp mask to improve sharpness
3. Sky has been copied to separate layer and has been mixed with color mixer and then masked (If I remember right). This works as a soft light mask with opacity. Over all effect increases the blue end of the sky.
4. Ground part of the image has been copied to separate layer (addition setting) and then it has been masked with inverted BW mask with edited color levels. This brings out the shadowed parts of the tower structures.

Both have been blurred and overlay image layers are also blurred.

On top of everything there is a blanked layer containing the original image for easy comparison.

Edits are actually nothing special. I have been just starting to study editing and my primary source f information has been

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/

I used Samsung WB500 camera which is a medium sized consumer pocket camera with a 10x wide angle lens (25-250mm in Kino measures if I remember right). All of the 26 shots were hand held and actual focal length was 4.2 mm which is as wide as the camera allows.

Please note that the same CC license that applies to Flickr low res image is applicable to high res .xcf image.

See, now this is the kind of info I love reading about. It seems that I am not alone in my passion for messing around with photos. I just wish I had more time and energy to devote to the art, but alas ...

Anyway, thank you very much for this wonderful detail, and for the link! I am going to see about learning about masking and so-forth. I think I have only barely just begun to scratch the surface of The Gimp's capabilities.

[Naggobot]

Thank you em3raldxiii.

I too am a bit surprised about the versatility of the Gimp and also I am positively surprised about how easy and quick it is to make photo manipulations as long as no actual painting is included. Of course it is not the fault of Gimp that I seem to be no painter.

Here is another highly edited image which does not anymore qualify as a photo.



http://flic.kr/p/8y59dN

This an image of some weed (I do not know the English or Latin name) and of a bedrock. Image of the leaves has first been channel mixed to greyscale (output was green) then the bedrock has been used as a bump map to elevate the rock seams out of the leaves and after that the image of the rock has been set to overlay layer on top of bump mapped image of the leaves. Then the layers are merged and levels corrected using histogram and gamma correction. Result is a bit different if the leaves are not converted to bw first.



http://flic.kr/p/8xZnt4

I placed the original unmodified images to flickr so you can view them if you want to.

Since my palm tree image has had a whopping 77 views in the flickr (lame isn't it ) I decided to include a link to a package of the high res images I have posted to this thread.

http://ubuntuone.com/p/Exm/

Package as also some other images, most importantly it has the whole palm tree if some one is interested in seeing the whole plant (Warning, it will be a huge disappointment)

Also I have included these two images to the package



http://flic.kr/p/8wmEWn

This is a Hugin composition of 22 images, sharpened whit Gimp unsharp mask filter and then sepia masked. Same shot can be taken using a wide angle lens and you can compare the end-result if flickr if you want to.

Also this


http://flic.kr/p/8wpCu5

which is a door knocker on the door of the Notredame. Unfortunatelly you can see the cheap pocket camera effect on the corners of this image. Image has been selectively blurred, sharpened and addition masked whit the original image.

You can use the images from the high res package whit the same CC license as is set for the flickr counterparts.

The 53Mb package is (now at the time of writing) updating to the Ubuntu one through my 60 kB / sec upstream so it might take a while until it has updated. Let me know if you have issues whit the package (assuming someone wants to download it)