In Photos dot Org » Words

Aftershot Pro B&W Workflow

Donncha O Caoimh — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:30:47 +0000

Martin, over at Photoakademie.eu created a workflow video showing how a photo was processed and eventually turned into a black and white image using Aftershot Pro.

Coming from a GIMP background I used layers and layer masks but never used adjustment layers to keep changes separate. Quite an eye opener for me!

Plus another demonstration of Aftershot Pro and a Google Plus account dedicated to sharing presets.

You can download a 30 day trial of Aftershot Pro here (I should be on commission for this..)

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HOWTO: Add a copyright notice in Aftershot Pro

Donncha O Caoimh — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 18:14:14 +0000

This is a tutorial that will explain how to add a copyright notice to your photos in Aftershot Pro. It can even be done automatically when you export the image as a Jpeg for publishing online. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create a new preset called “My Copyright Text”. This tutorial uses the zText plugin.

This is what a simple copyright message will look like but you can change it to suit your own needs.

After you install zText find it in the plugins tabs and enable it, type your copyright notice and set the size appropriately.

You can adjust where the message will appear on the “Preset” tab of the plugin.

Once you’re happy with your copyright message hop over to the Presets widget and click the + “Add Preset” icon.

This window will popup, rename the preset to something meaningful and click “None” to unselsect everything.

Go into the Advanced tab and select zTextPlug and you should see the settings you already configured. Click OK.

Click the Show checkbox next to your new preset and the “Done” button on the Preset widget.

If you have an output job configured you can add the copyright notice as a preset in the job settings to automate the task every time you export a file. One advantage of doing this is your image in Aftershot Pro won’t have the copyright text making it easier to export it again using a different batch output job.

Hope that helped, want some more Aftershot Pro tutorials?

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Stupid Photo Thief

Donncha O Caoimh — Fri, 20 May 2011 10:02:00 +0000

It’s inevitable that photos put online will be stolen. It’s a fact of life unfortunately. People think that just because something is on a website they can use it and claim the photo is there own.

Sometimes it just gets silly however.

Check out this guy’s photos on photo competition site pictures2win.com. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you may recognise this photo. It looks very familiar doesn’t it?

With the help of Google Goggles on my Android phone I checked a few more photos. This photo of Venice (despite the author saying it’s in Pakistan) looks suspiciously like this one from the National Geographic. I’m sure they won’t be too happy to see that.

The Pictures2Win T&C of course include the condition that photos “must be the work of the individual submitting them” but there’s no link to report stolen images. I contacted Martin at that site. Hopefully he’ll take a look at that user’s account and take appropriate measures.

Thanks to _jmphotography for telling me about this photo theft.

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Fort Camden

Donncha O Caoimh — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 10:13:00 +0000

Fort Camden overlooks Cork Harbour near Crosshaven and was abandoned years ago. I’ve never been inside but Joleen Cronin and Siobhan Russell were and took some amazing photographs of this decaying military fort.

Lots of photos in the post above, on Abandoned Ireland too, with forum discussion on celticradio.net.

In 2010 a 4 man team Vince Farr, Noel Condon, Paul Brierly and Skully formed the Rescue Camden group.
With the help of Noel O’Driscoll (Cork Co. Council) in July 2010 restoration work finally began.
22 July 2010.
The handing over of the key to the RESCUE CAMDEN Committee
In 1938 The British Navy marched out of the fortress for the last time, handing it over in pristine condition to the Irish free-state army.
Sadly, since then Fort Camden has been neglected, and recently it has been systematically vandalized. Not one single part of this stunning facility has been left undamaged.

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Straighten and Crop with the GIMP

Donncha O Caoimh — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:49:15 +0000

One of the more awkward tasks to do in the GIMP is straightening horizons. You have to manually rotate the image using that tool which always seems to be fairly hit and miss.

I had hoped that GIMP 2.6 would have the “draw a line and rotate” function that Bibblepro and I think Photoshop have but unfortunately it’s not there. Not to worry because the Straighten and Crop plugin by Bert Hinz does the job too! (There’s another Straighten and Crop plugin too. I haven’t tried it. What’s it like?)

Install the plugin by copying the .py file into .gimp-2.6/plug-ins/. You might need to chmod it to make it executable. Fire up the gimp and using the Path tool (press B) mark two points on the horizon with left clicks of the mouse. Run the plugin (from Image->Transform->Straighten and Crop) and it will rotate the image.

Nice and simple and has worked on the couple of images I tried it on. (via)

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Negotiating a photography job

Donncha O Caoimh — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 09:31:06 +0000

Photographers have a tough time negotiating with clients. Slightly NSFW speech but very funny video by Graham Trott about how to conduct yourself when offered a photo assignment. (via and here)

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Montenotte Photowalk

Donncha O Caoimh — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:46:20 +0000

When: Saturday 26th of September at 10am.
Where: Start at the Montenotte Hotel (map), Cork and continue into town.
Who: Me, you and anyone who likes taking photographs.

So, next photowalk is on the 26th. It’s a Saturday but this time it’s early in the morning at 10am. We’ll start at the Montenotte Hotel, where we (or some of us) may get access to the roof to shoot a cityscape of Cork City. Bring your wide angle and telephoto lenses!

After that it’s a stroll down the hill to Dillon’s Cross, and then wherever we fancy. We’ll be close enough to the train station to pop over there (although there may be questions of public liability insurance if we go in there as a group unfortunately).

We can head down to the quay then and on towards the bus station and into town or towards City Hall. Wherever.

Will suggested having a scavenger hunt on the walk which is a great idea. Anything else we can do to mix it up a bit?

As I mentioned previously, The Montenotte Hotel is putting on a special deal for us photowalkers:

As a special deal for photographers, the hotel is setting aside 20 rooms for us on the night of the 25th. 17 are discounted with single rooms costing 39 Euro including breakfast and double/twin rooms at 29 Euro/pp, also including breakfast.
After the photowalk we’ll descend on the Boardwalk Bar & Grill for a complementary lunch, and there may even be an opportunity for a select few to head out on a speed boat along the river.

The 3 free rooms are already allocated but that still leaves the 17 discounted ones. If you’re interested, email Pat O Neill at pat @ hotelconsult.ie and he’ll organise the room for you. Don’t bother ringing the hotel.

I guess the complementary lunch was originally intended for those who stayed in the hotel but as the take up of the rooms on Friday night has been so slow I don’t know for sure what’s happening. I’m pretty certain the ride in the speed boat is still on though. I’ll pass on that, I prefer to stay on land!

So, if you’re interested in going on the photowalk please leave a comment here! This doesn’t mean you’re going to stay in the hotel. I don’t want to hear about it. I just want to go on a photowalk. Email Pat if you want to stay at the hotel! (it is a good deal, and the hotel is a gorgeous one!)

If you left a comment on the previous post expressing interest in the walk, please leave a comment here again, just so we have a rough idea of numbers without having to go digging into old posts.

If you don’t want to walk up the hill to the hotel, meet us in town later. I’m not sure how we’ll organise this but it’ll probably be “12 noon at the bus station” or some such arrangement.

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15% off prints for 3 days only

Donncha O Caoimh — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:20:27 +0000

Woo! Redbubble are offering 15% off all framed and canvas prints until the 27th. The promotion has been running for the last few days but they only emailed everyone this morning. Grrr.

Anyway, if you’re interested in a print, leave a comment on this post with the url of the photo and I’ll do my best to upload it today so you can get that discount.

I need to upload a few more shots anyway as a few people have asked about prints.

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F-spot and Bibble 5 Preview updated

Donncha O Caoimh — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:24:31 +0000

I noticed this morning that F-Spot 0.6.0 came out a few days ago. I haven’t tried it yet but I’m downloading it now. Unfortunately if it requires any dependencies not present in Ubuntu Jaunty I’ll leave it for another day, or until a .deb exists. I don’t have time to go chasing this stuff any more.

Bibble Labs continue their progress to a final release of Bibble 5 with a new preview release. I downloaded preview 2.2 last week and it converted my large 11GB catalog to a new format while I went off and made a cup of tea. On loading nothing much had changed but lots of bugs have been fixed. I have over 75,000 photos loaded into it so it’s a bit of a memory and CPU hog. When I plan on browsing through my photo archive I shut down the other memory hog on my computer, Firefox.
Can’t wait for a final release. You should try it out.

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Walking the photos in Cork

Donncha O Caoimh — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 09:34:37 +0000

Here’s a possible route for our 2 hours photowalk around Cork today:

Start at the GPO, near the big A marker above.
Head south (down) to the river to Morrison’s Quay where we can shoot Holy Trinity and the river bank of the South Channel.
Head west towards Sullivans Quay where we can shoot Parliament Bridge and St Finbarre’s Cathedral in the distance.
Over either Nano Nagle bridge to the Grand Parade or the bridge to St Main Street. The old Beamish Brewery is on South Main street and we can then go back to Grand Parade.
Shoot the sparkling new streetscape of Grand Parade and then into The English Market.
Bump up the ISO and shoot indoors in the English Market.
Out again eventually and either wander over to Cornmarket Street or down Patrick Street to do some street photography.

Throwing a spanner in the works is the Lee Swim, a swim down the North Channel, around the tip near the docklands and up by the Clarion. Here’s the course map. It could be starting at 2pm and if it is, it would be worth our while heading down the Clarion to photograph the finish and the crowds. The Clarion itself is worth a look and the nearby Elysian too. I’ll update this post when I know more.

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