Two weeks back, I was in Barcelona for LinuxCon Europe / KVM Forum 2012. While there Jeff Cody acquired a photo of many of the KVM community developers. Although already visible on Google+, along with tags to identify all the faces, I wanted to put up an outline view of the photo too, mostly so that I could then write this blog post describing how to create the head outline :-) The steps on this page were all performed using Fedora 17 and GIMP 2.8.2, but this should work with pretty much every version of GIMP out there since there’s nothing fancy going on.
The master photo
The master photo that we’ll be working with is
Step 1: Edge detect
It was thought that one of the edge detection algorithms available in GIMP would be a good basis for providing a head outline. After a little trial & error, I picked ‘Filters -> Edge-detect -> Edge..’, then chose the ‘Laplace’ algorithm.
This resulted in the following image
Step 2: Invert colours
The previous image shows the outlines quite effectively, but my desire is for a primarily white image, with black outlines. This is easily achieved using the menu option ‘Colours -> Invert’
Step 3: Desaturate
The edge detection algorithm leaves some colour artifacts in the images, which are trivially dealt with by desaturating the image using ‘Colours -> Desaturate…’ and any one of the desaturation algorithms GIMP offers.
Step 4: Boost contrast
The outline looks pretty good, but there is still a fair amount of fine detail “noise”. There are a few ways we might get rid of this – in particular some of GIMPs noise removal filters. I went for the easy option of simply boosting the overall image contrast, using ‘Colours -> Brightness/Contrast…’
For this image, setting the contrast to ’40’ worked well, vary according to the particular characteristics of the image
Step 5: Add numbers
The outline view is where we want to be, but the whole point of the exercise is to make it easy to put names to faces. Thus the final step is to simply number each head. GIMP’s text tool is the perfect way to do this, just click on each face in turn and type in a number.
No need to worry about perfect placement, since each piece of text becomes a new layer. Once done, the layer positions can be moved around to fit well.
And that’s the final image completed. In the page I created on the KVM website, a little javascript handled swapping between the original & outline views on mouse over, but that’s all there is to it. The hardest part of the whole exercise is actually remembering who everyone is :-P
I am pleased to announce a new release 0.4.1 of Entangle is available for download from the usual location:
http://entangle-photo.org/download/
This release focuses on bug fixing, but throws in a couple of small feature improvements too
- Fix leak of image pixbufs when changing image in session
- Keep toolbar directory in sync with session dir
- Fix leak when displaying image popups
- Fix leak when closing image popups
- Fix key bindings in session browser
- Add image histogram display
- Load libpeas introspection data for plugins
- Main plugin list in preferences
- Add object type checking in all APIs
- Fix image mask aspect ratio conversion to avoid locale problems
- Fix build on GTK < 3.4
- Remove obsolete conditionals from GTK 2.x days
- Populate list of supported cameras in help menu dialog
- Add a simple man page
- Add accelerators for many menu options
- Fix unref of cairo surface objects
- Avoid GTK assertion when range is max-min is zero
- Avoid crash in control panel when updating after camera disconnect
As before we still need help getting the UI translated into as many languages as possible, so if you are able to help out, please join the Fedora translation team:
https://fedora.transifex.net/projects/p/entangle/
Thanks to everyone who helped contribute to this release & troubleshooting of the previous releases.
I am pleased to announce a new release 0.4.0 of Entangle is available for download from the usual location:
http://entangle-photo.org/download/
This release introduces a number of new features requested by users:
- Better use of GtkApplication class
- Add support for multiple windows & cameras
- Add ability to sync capture/preview across windows
- Add preference to control whether cameras autoconnect at startup
- Add ability to apply aspect ratio masks to images
- Add key bindings for common actions (see README)
- Rewrite session browser widget to not use GtkIconView
- Add popup menu with session browser to allow open and delete of captured images
- Fix memory leak during preview
- Fix memory leak in session browser widget
- Add ability to DPMS-blank screen during capture for consistent lighting environment
- Add ability to render a focus point during preview
- Add ability to render grid lines during preview
- Merge “New session” and “Open session” toolbar buttons into one “Select session” drop down / menu
- Add custom icons for toolbar capture/preview buttons
As before we still need help getting the UI translated into as many languages as possible, so if you are able to help out, please join the Fedora translation team:
https://fedora.transifex.net/projects/p/entangle/
Thanks to everyone who helped contribute to this release & troubleshooting of the previous releases.
I use the wonderful Digikam application for managing my photos on Fedora 16. I don’t mind that I’m running a KDE based application under GNOME shell, since it themes itself to match & its featureset easily beats any other open source desktop photo management application. Normally the UI theme when running Digikam under GNOME looks like this:
And then a strange thing happened last week. When I launched Digikam on my laptop the UI style suddenly changed to this:
Notice in particular the different tree view expander icons and the different scrollbars. More interestingly though, the overall UI felt more responsive when interacting with Digikam. Next time I launched Digikam, it was back to the “normal” GNOME compatible theme. Wierd. And now just last night the same behaviour occurred on my other laptop – Digikam launched in a different theme, but upon restart, went back to the original theme. WTF ?
I tried playing with the ‘Themes’ menu in Digikam itself and all I can change is the colour scheme, not the widget styling. Trying to change the KDE application theme in KDE Control Center had precisely zero effect on the Digikam theme.
Can anyone explain this behaviour ? Is there some trick to controlling KDE application themes when running under GNOME on Fedora 16 ? Most importantly how I can get back this alternative Digikam theme? I really liked how responsive it felt to interact with, compared to the standard GNOME-like theme.
I am pleased to announce a new release 0.3.2 of Entangle is available for download from the usual location:
This release has focused almost exclusively on i18n, integrating with the Fedora Transifex team for translations
- Major code style cleanup
- Mark all translatable strings in code & UI files
- Register with Transifex for translations via Fedora team
- Pull in translations (German, Polish, Ukrainian, Japanese: full, Spanish, Chinese: partial).
- Add m4 macros for compiler warnings, missing from previous release dist.
There are a great many languages with no coverage here, so if you are able to help out, please join the Fedora translation team:
