Author: isaac

I like cats. he/him

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Playing with c2g in Gimp

I learned about the very cryptically named c2g GEGL operation in Gimp from this post at the Linux Photography blog. I like to convert soft wide-open photos to black and white, but I’m not always happy with the results – when I increase the contrast to get the black parts like I want the transitions between black and white often get weird and eroded. c2g doesn’t always work well, but I especially like it when I blend a c2g’d layer back into the original image – the results remind me of colorized Civil War era photos. Here’s a before-after, the first with just a levels adjust and the latter c2g’d and blended back in.

Monument & ChannelChannel & Monument

I certainly wouldn’t recommend doing this to every photo, but I’ll probably at least give it a try now and then.

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Grilled beef short ribs

Grilled short ribs

I love braised beef short ribs, but in the middle of summer I hate using the oven. It’s not as if it makes the house a lot warmer, but it sure feels like it. So, I grilled these lovely specimens after rubbing them down with some creole seasoning. They did end up a little tough, but that was easily overcome by slicing them thinly.

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Photopress 1.7

This version adds a few new features:

  • Switched to thickbox for the popup, like flickpress.
  • Added paging for the main album page, helpful if you have a lot of categories.
  • Added a jquery show/hide form for logged-in users to edit image info right in the album.
  • Fixes localization based on Renato’s comment.

The album paging feature is a little flaky – when permalinks are on it only works for month- or day-based setups. You’ll also probably need to refresh your permalink setup to get it going.

I still have a problem on my family blog now and then where a few categories mysteriously get changed to default. It never happens during testing, so I’m not sure how to figure out what’s going on.

I haven’t updated the options to break pre-2.8 compatibility, but I expect to do that for the next version since it’s supposed to improve security.

Update: Fixed a little bug in the album paging thing – replaced 1.7 with 1.7.1.

Download: photopress_1.7.1.zip

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flickpress 0.9

This update adds a bunch of error checks and notices to make sure that you enter a working Flickr API key and a working capability in the settings. I set “edit_posts” as the default capability to use the plugin since choosing that was a little nebulous. I also fixed a bug where only the first page of search results was showing up (which I noticed while adding some jquery show/hide stuff for the license lists). Finally, I added an option to turn off captions by default. They’re still turned on to start with, but I figure that if you’re just using this plugin with your own photos you might not want captions.

There’s now a nice changelog in the WordPress Plugins Directory that you can check out to see if I missed anything.

Get flickpress 0.9 from the WordPress Plugins Directory.

…or right here: flickpress_0.9.zip

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Buzz

Buzz

The purple coneflowers are looking a little tired, but apparently they’re still fine for this bee. EXIF says I wasn’t using the FA 50/1.4…I think I used the 50/1.4 SMC for this shot – the 50/4 macro lens doesn’t make bokeh like that.