Picnik For Linux Users

Much of the blogosphere has been talking about Flickr finally adding more advanced some photo editing features through a partnership with Picnik. Advanced photo editing features have been on my Flickr wish list for a long time, so I was excited to take it for a test spin and see how well it works.

Having tried Picnik in the past, I was less than impressed as a Linux user. On my first attempt to upload an image I came across a Linux specific bug that prevented me from seeing any of my image files in their file picker. A month or so after reporting the bug I heard back from Picnik and the bug had been fixed (a bad regex was to blame). Great, now I can try Picnik again, or so I thought. Although I could select files, every attempt to upload failed (badly - taking Firefox down with it). So I reported the bug and promptly forgot about Picnik after being told it was due to a bug in Adobe's Linux Flash player and that I should take it up with Adobe.

Fast forward to today and Picnik is available through Flickr - and working much better on Linux (this is probably due to the fact that I don't have to use Picnik's file uploader since files are already on Flickr).

How is Picnik from a Linux users point of view? Awesome because it brings photo editing tools into the work flow of uploading and organizing photos in Flickr. Picnik also does a good job of making image editing tools more understandable than PhotoShop or the GIMP and increasing the chance that I will actually use them.

Picnik still leaves room for improvement however. The application (flash-based) took a long time to load (a full 60 seconds). For now, I'm attributing the slow load to poor Picnik server performance after the Flickr launch. This will be a show stopper if it doesn't improve though. Also, some of the image editing tools performed quite well while other tools made the application unresponsive and hard to work with. Perhaps these are rough edges in the Linux Flash Player or just problems with Picnik itself.

Overall, Picnik is a nice option to have integrated into Flickr. As I get more time to play with the tools, I'll post tips and tricks that might be useful.

Faking Shift Tilt Photography with the GIMP

If you use Flickr at all or read Digg, you have probably come across the Shift Tilt Photography Craze, or more precisely the trend of faking it with Photoshop. I recently came across a great Photoshop tutorial for this effect but was not able to translate into steps that worked in the GIMP... until I found this awesome blog dedicated to translating PhotoShop tutorials for GIMP users.

The instructions were simple enough and I was able to apply this effect to one of my own photos with reasonable success. If you read the article, you will note that the author recommends using aerial photographs to achieve the best result. This is true because it reduces the chance of taller objects extending from in-focus to out-of-focus and vice versa. Since a taller object usually has the same depth (especially from a distance), its in-focus or out-of-focus state should really be maintained.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't have many (read zilch) aerial photos to choose from. The best photographs I have are scenery/landscape photographs taken from a distance. However, with a bit of work it is possible to salvage these photos and get a good shift tilt result. The trick is to create a duplicate layer of the original image and copy select objects from it into the layer you are applying the shift tilt effect to. In fact, this is what I did to bring some of the trees in the image above into focus while trees in the background remain out-of-focus.

Here's how I did this.

Follow along with the gimparoo tutorial up until step 10 dealing with the colours and follow these steps:

1. Closely look at your image and pick out the objects that have an incorrect focus for their depth (tip: don't be too picky and just pick the most obvious objects)
2. Bring your copied layer to the top of the stack and zoom in to an area showing an object you picked out
3. Use the 'Select Shapes from Image' tool to select the object (no need to be too picky)
4. Copy and paste the object into a new layer
5. In the case of bringing an out-of-focus object into focus, you don't need to do much as the object you just copied should be sharp. If you need to make the object appear blurry, apply the Gaussian Blur filter to your new layer.
6. Merge the new layer down into your shift tilt layer
7. Repeat for as many objects as you would like to fix (you can quickly drive yourself crazy if you pick too many)

Once you are done, head back to the original tutorial and complete the colour adjustment steps.

Cheers and I hope you found this useful.

My Flickr Wish List

The G.I. Joe Folk Art image was taken at a little cafe in Victoria, BC called Habit. Quite possibly the Coolest. Coffee-house-art-show. Ever. Check it out if you are in town.

The image is composed of 4 digital photographs that I had to painfully stitch together using the GIMP. As I was doing this, I began to think of all the features I wish Flickr had:

• Photo Stitching Tool
• Other photo editing tools (filters, effects etc. - perhaps like www.picnik.com)
• Trip Plotter - a tool to place all your photos in a set onto a private map and add reach annotations (useful for documenting trips)
• Some way to download all your photos and meta information
• Last but not least, any sort of evolution in the service. Is it just me or has Flickr not introduced any new features in a while?