What is Curve Surgery?

Most Nikon DSLR’s allow, through the use of Nikon Camera Control, to upload a custom curve into the camera. Unfortunately once the curve IS or ISNT embedded into your NEF file there is no way a changing that curve in Nikon Capture.

Curve Surgery allows you to extract/create/edit/embed curves to and from the NEF files.

So what?

The image that is displayed in Nikon Capture is AFTER the default curve or your in-camera curve has been applied. If your curve clips highlights badly, or you under/overexpose there is little way of reversing this effect. All other curves and levels edits in Nikon Capture are applied over the top of the default/user-defined curve.

And?

With Curve Surgery you can adjust these curves to your liking and then embed them back into a file. This means you are able to do some impressive post-editing at the most basic level of the RAW data.

Check it out here:

http://www.rawmagick.com/

GREYCstoration is an image regularization algorithm which is able to process a color image by locally removing small variations of pixel intensities while preserving significant global image features, such as edges and corners. The most direct application of image regularization is image denoising. By extension, it can also be used to inpaint or resize images.

GREYCstoration is based on state-of-the-art image processing methods using nonlinear multi-valued diffusion PDE’s (Partial Differential Equations). This kind of method generally outperforms basic image filtering techniques (such as convolution, median filtering, etc.), classically encountered in image painting programs. Other comparable image denoising techniques are available (for instance, Noise Ninja, Neat Image ) but are not open-source, and the corresponding algorithms are kept secret.

On the contrary, the source code of GREYCstoration is freely available and distributed under the CeCILL License (compatible with the well-known GPL). It gives similar results (not to say better) to existing closed-source denoising filters, and is absolutely free to use. Compared to other PDE-based regularization methods, our approach has several advantages : It performs very fast and is able to preserve thin image details since it works at a sub-pixel accuracy.

The tool is still a little bit hard to use (command-line based), but I hope the simple C++ API will ease the integration of the algorithm in more user-friendly interfaces. Previous versions of GREYCstoration are already available in Digikam and Krita.

There is a GIMP plug-in version available now which makes it a lot easier, I hope to see a Photoshop version soon.

There are a couple of GUI version here and here too.

You can download it here:

GREYCstoration-2.5.2.1.zip

Important note : You will need to install the ImageMagick’s package in order to be able to read compressed image formats (JPG,PNG,etc…). On Unix systems, this package is often installed by default, on Windows, you can get it here. Please download one of the static package only.

You can read more here.

1. Open a new image by going to File> New. Any size will do, as long as it’s not tiny. The background contents should be the default, white. Click OK. Set your colors to the default (black in the foreground, white in the background) by typing D on your keyboard. Then choose the Type tool from the toolbar or get it by typing T on your keyboard. Click on your image to start typing (this will automatically put your text on a new layer).

2. To make the © using a PC, hold down the Alt key and type 0169. On a Mac, press Option + G. Then type in a copyright notice (your name, your company, etc.) as you want it to appear. Pick a font you like — you’ll be stuck with it.

3. Now hide the Background layer. Do this by clicking the eye icon to the left of the Background layer’s name on the Layers Palette. Make sure your Type layer is still selected (click on it if not). Then select your text: Go to Select > Color Range, move the Fuzziness slider all the way to 200, and click OK.

4. Then make your custom brush: Choose Edit > Define Brush Preset. Enter a descriptive name for the brush (like MyCopyright), and click OK.

5. To test your new brush, open an image you’d like to stamp. Grab the Brush tool (type B). Then, from the Options bar at the top of your screen, pull down the Brush menu and scroll to the bottom. The one you just made is the last on your list. Click on it to select it, then click the spot in your image where you want to stamp your copyright. If it’s too small to see, increase your brush size.

Pretty amazing stuff, done with Photoshop 7 and a tablet of course, this kind of stuff is virtually impossible with a mouse.

You can find the artists site here (Nico Di Mattia):

http://www.speed-painting.com/

And grab the wallpaper version of John Locke here.

I found this a while back on Digg I think, it’s really neat!

Creating your own Planet style pictures from Panorama shots. Most compact cams have a panorama mode and even the newer phone cameras have the feature which allows you to easily stitch a few shots together.

Our pal Dirk wrote up a tutorial that shows you how to turn any panorama or landscape photograph into a full-fledged planet!

Best of all, once you’ve selected an image to work with, the process takes only 5 minutes. (Launching your new planet into solar orbit may take a bit longer.)

360 degree shot of San Francisco taken from the Coit Tower made into a planet.

Pretty neat eh?

You can find the full tutorial and examples here:

How to Create Your Own Planets Using Your Panoramas

There is also a big Flickr set of examples and a Flickr Group dedicated to this.