Will Knott

A little background for you. I stopped using Facebook a while back due to lack of interest. Recently I’ve updated my version of Tweetdeck, which now allows cross posting of your updates to both Twitter and Facebook.

I cross-posted that I had uploaded my photowalk photos, and the question arose (from my dead account); “What is a photowalk?”

Well, generally a photowalk is what it says on the tin. Two or more people get together and go for a walk taking photos. In practice, the walk portion can be replaced

But what makes that different from the clichéd image of a hoard of tourists snapping everything in site, including each other? (Yes, photobloggers take photographs of the other photowalkers).

So I posted the question on Twitter. And a few replies came back.

Tommy pointed out that “In my experience, photowalks are done by people from the same country. Also, tourists want keepsakes, p’walkers want good quality pix”. Given that the organiser of the Dublin photowalk isn’t from the Republic of Ireland, this isn’t quite true. Besides, I think that I have a few “keepsakes” in my collection. This was promptly followed by an invitation for the usual Irish photowalkers to go on a photowalk in Amsterdam. So there goes that definition.

McAWilliams then chimed in with “generally we take good photos and not snapshots!”. The “generally” then had a little discussion. Maybe photowalkers edit the results (literally edit the photos and not just sort them in to a ‘display’ and a ‘hide’ pile).

Eventually K.E. Southall came up with my favoured definition “photowalk = pre-emptive gathering of like-minded folk snapping random things. Tourists snap loved ones in front of famous sites”.

And she is right. Photowalkers tend to snap strangers that they find interesting, sometimes in unknown places.

And sometimes not even people.

But certainly random.

Click,
Will Knott

Before you go to a Twestival, how should you keep an eye out for your friends off Twitter? Well, why not wear your Twitter friends? (yes that does sound like a very bad superhero team).

Wear their faces on your chest. (eewww) OK, pictures of their faces. Better? Or have their mug on your mug.

Walter Higgins at Sxoop (pronounced Skoop, or Scoop) is a image manipulation software developer for a a while now. The headlined Pixenate, an online photo editor, is integrated on many sites worldwide. He also has a history of making image manipulation tools for Twitter. He’s responsible for all the Santa hats this Christmas, and he’s brought out something new, the Twitter Mosaic.

You tell it your Twitter user name (no need for a password) and it generates a mosaic of all your twitter friends or followers. A big image. This can be turned into Mugs, T-Shirts and Bags.

All of this is made possible because of Web2.0 and the philosophy of open APIs (both Twitter’s and Zazzle’s). What has been done recently at http://sxoop.com/twitter/ simply wouldn’t have been possible a few short years ago. Needless to say, these APIs are being battered at the moment. Walter has more details on how to get things running quickly too and the end products seem to be reviewed very well.

So you can create a physical social (media) object and drink to the health of your fellow Tweeters from a Twitter Mosaic mug  (hopefully full of  clean water thanks to Charity:Water) and wear your friends in public.

The Twitter Mosaic is indeed the beneficiary of a Tuesday Push, so soon after demoing it at the Cork Open Coffee Club. And yes I got to know Walter through the Open Coffee movement. However its a cool idea, a great set of products and it since to see someone in Ireland making money in there times. And making money while Twitter is still trying out how.

take care,

Will Knott

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sxoop Technologies turn a buck on Twitter (patphelan.net)
• Tuesday Push was Sxoop (web2ireland.org)
• Twitter Mosaic: Using the long tail to make money from Twitter (antonmannering.com)
• My Twitter Mug is here – Merry Christmas to me! (u-g-h.com)
• Tuesday Push: Twitter Mosaic from Sxoop Technologies (ewritecork.com)
• Push it: Twitter Mosaic from Sxoop Technologies (cjwriting.com)

Get your twitter mosaic here.

How does September 20th strike you as the day to take all the Pink Portraits for October, and try to get the models to show up at various points in various cities?

Does the day suit most of you? Since I would like to have you working in teams, having and agreement on date, time and locations are important.

I suspect I really need to make a site for this too…

take care,
Will Knott

Just over a week ago I gave you, dear reader, a little homework to do.

But as well as step-by-step instructions I asked if you would telly me how yo tried to perform your selective colourisation of the red cuff against the red background.

No one got back to me with their solution. No one.

So I’m going to give it another week to see if any innovations are out there. I already said how I would do it. (Carefully)

I’m not expecting any, but still.

take care,
Will Knott

Hello again.

This post is going to be very image intensive, and I’m used thumbnails to help the bandwidth impaired.
Click on the image to see a larger version.

A quick word on Selective Colourisation, someone asked “what is it”…
Well, this is a colour image.

and this is the same image using selective colourisation on the yellow parts.

Effective isn’t it. The technique works best on a strong colour, unfortunately pink has many shades. Something which complicates things later on. And when yo do this technique on your own images, clean them up first. Red eye looks silly in black and white. However you could try selective colourisation and have a black and white photo, with red glowing eyes. Very zombie.

Anyway, in part one you downloaded your tools, and I gave you an image to play with.

So lets start.

Open the photo and you’ll probably have this view. The picture itself and the toolbar. However, in order to do make the changes, you’ll need to see the layers. To bring up the “Layers Dialog window” from the menu bar of the photograph, choose “Dialog” and then “Layers”.

And you then have the layers window.

What we are going to do first is create a new layer (a copy of the photograph) and turn that copy in to a monochrome version.

So go to the menu bar of the photograph again, and this time choose “Layers” and “Duplicate Layer”.

This… does nothing to the photo. But if you look at the layers window, you can see that there is now a second entry.

Make sure that the upper-most layer is selected, because we are finally going to make that colourful photograph a lot less colourful.

To make the image black and white, go to the menu bar of the image (who by now is an old friend) and choose “Colors” and “Desaturate”.

This causes a new window to open asking you “How do you want to make this image black-and-white”.
Actually its asking “How do you want to make this layer…”, but you’ve probably going “I don’t know which one of Lightness, Luminosity or Average to pick”.

Well don’t worry about it. Remember how I said that selective colourisation works best with a strong colour. You will want the maximum contrast between your selected (eventual) colour and its surrounding monochrome. So at the moment you can’t know. If you want to be really sure, you can always take the same image make multiple layers… and try out the technique on them all. Then you can pick the best looking one. Or make use of “undo”.

Anyway, pick one.

You now have a black and white image. But if you look at the layers window you can see that the colour photo is still available. (You can click on the green arrows at the bottom of the layers window to change the view between the black and white image and the colour one).

So now its time to put some colour back. You don’t use some colour selecting tool, but a mask.

Go back to the picture’s menu bar, and choose “Layers” then “Mask” and “Add Layer Mask”.

This causes a window to pop-up. The default here is “White (Full Opacity)”, choose that one and click “OK”.

The way we get the colour back is to “cut” through the monochrome image. If you look in the layer window you can see that there is not a white rectangle next to the monochrome image. This is the layer. White here means that you can only see the selected layer. Black here means that the layer is transparent, which lets the image in the layer below show through. To do this we’ll use the paintbrust tool from the tool bar.

The paintbrush is the 4th from the left and the 4th one down. Pick this tool and you should see the selected (and alternate) colour for the brush. The topmost one should be black, and the one below it should be white. You can see the selected brush in the image above its called “circle 11″.

You can try out the process. Put you mouse over the image and holding down the primary button, scribble on the image.

See the colour show through?
You can easily get rid of this scribble by choosing “Edit” and “Undo” from (you guessed it) the menu bar of the image.

While the above brush is fine, you should really chose a fuzzy brush. Its more forgiving if you go over the edge of the item you want to return to colour. Click on the “image” of the brush and you’ll see a selection of brushes. Pick a fuzzy brush (you can switch over and over)

and go back to the photograph.
Before you start re-colouring the image, you had better zoom in (“View”, “Zoom” and either “Zoom In” or select a ratio) so that you can more accurately colour the image.

Now you can start to colour in your photo. Use small strokes, that way you can use “undo” as needed.

Personally I prefer to go along the edge of the part I’m colouring in. Filling in is the easy part.

At this point it might be worth looking at the mask itself. Choose “Layers”, “Mask” and “Show Layer Mask”.

And you can see the parts I’ve changed.

You can also see a little “scratch” next to the sleeve. That is a mistake for which I can’t use undo. I can however use the paintbrush to make that black mark white again.

Back on the toolbox, you can see a little two headed arrow where the chosen colours are. Clicking on this will switch the colours.

Now with my brush “painting” in white, I can erase the mistake.

Switching the colours back to black, I can cheat.
Since I “painted” the edge of parts I want to re-colour, I can use the “fill” tool (in the picture above it’s the left-most column, 4th one down with an icon of paint being poured from a tin) to, well, fill in a chunk of the image…

… and switch back to the brush to tidy up the image.

When you are doing the selective re-colourisation, I’d advise you show the mask so you can see if you missed a bit.

You can now turn hide the mask (“Layers”, “Mask” and select “Show Layer Mask” to deselect it) and see the image.

Using the green arrows in the layers window to see the full colour and selective colourised image to see if there is another part you wish to colour in.

Now it’s time to save your image. Go to the menu bar and choose “File” and “Save as”.
Why “save as”? Firstly, if you are using a borrowed machine, you need to make sure you are not overwriting the original image, and that the location you are saving on is going to be on your own removable media. The other reason? Well, GIMP uses the file name extension (the 3 letters after the main file name) to decide how its going to save the image. If you save with a “.xcf” then you are saving n GIMP’s own native format. And it retains all your layer information if (like me) you will need to return to the file to edit it. If you don’t want to return to editing, then the file name extension of the image file sill still be set to the file type you opened (in this case a JPEG or .jpg file).

When you save after editing you are going to get a few warning boxes.

This one reminds you that you are going to loose your layer information. Since that’s the point choose “confirm”.

This one tell you that since a jpeg can’t handle the transparency its going to turn your multi-layer image in to a single layer one. Again that’s the point; choose “export”.

And finally (you will get this one)

The scroll bar on the top wants to know about compression. Since these images are going to be for printing, choose 100%. However if you are just trying out the technique, (and the 100% reslts in a large file size) you can leave the quality levels at a lower setting. Once you are happy with the quality setting click on the “Save” button.

We now have a selective coloured image.

If you look at the pointing hand, I didn’t colour in the cuff. This if you remember is the difficult part.
I could use the same careful drawing technique that I used before (or just leave it as it looks OK) but I won’t.

I’m going to leave it to you. This is the reason for the half post. I want you to tell me the techniques you used to colour in this part. Leave a comment below or e-mail me I’ll post the replies next week.

Take care,
and do your homework,
Will Knott

When I wrote “Pink makes the money goes around” I requested that a technique called Selective Colourisation (or selective Colorization if you prefer). When I mentioned this a while back a photobloger (who shal remain nameless) said that (s)he didn’t know how to do it.

So Dr Kno(tt) is here to teach you how.

First off, you need the tools.

I’m not going to assume you have a PC (yup, that simple) but if you have a camera, you probably have a memory card somewhere.

You can install (and run) a photo editing site off that card. I’m talking about the portable app version of GIMP called (naturally enough) GIMP Portable.

Download it, install it on a USB drive or a memory card (even the memory card your use for your camera).

Why?

Well if you don’t own a PC, you can get access to one. At school, in a net cafe, at your friendly neighbourhood co-working facility and even in an emulator on an Apple Mac. The advantage of this method is that you then have an easily accessible photo editor, and you can use it without altering anything on the borrowed PC.

If you have access to your own machine. Use the full version of GIMP. Its available for a wide range of operating systems, and its free (for personal use anyway, which is this P4O project).

So download it and play with it for a while, and tomorrow we’ll be seeing the selective Colourisation of this photo.

I’ve chosen this photo for a few reasons. I’m going to select only the red of Séan Creagh’s top and the Star on the poster he points to. The poster is about a play in Cork called Prisoners which runs on August 15 and 16 (and the trailer for it is below), so its a little topical.

And because this arm covers a red advertisement on the window. Red against red. Something which makes this difficult.

So download the software and install it on your removable media, take a copy of the photo, and we’ll start editing it tomorrow.

take care,
Will

Dear photobloggers. I want you to do something. Raise cash for the Irish Cancer Society!

Most of you are at least aware of the internet phenomena that is Pink for October. This is a breast cancer awareness programme, where websites and blogs go pink for the month, and photobloggers show pink photos for the month.

However, it occurred to me that the one thing this internet outreach does not do is actually help cancer charities. So lets fix this.

Last time I was in Cork city I called in here…

my local Irish Cancer Society shop. I’m not sure if the Castle Street shop in cork city is unusual, but they tend to have big window displays. So I chatted with the manager (nice lady) about making a window display using pink photos for October. In Cork, the Jazz festival will have its own display, but since she hadn’t planned anything from the start of the month until the festival, she is willing to display the photos.

However it might be worth going one better… donate the photos to the charity not just for display, but to be sold and raise money for the charity.

And while photos of pink objects might sell, portraits will sell, to the subject at least.

My plan is to go to the streets of Cork with model release forms and approach people wearing pink (anything pink from a splash of pink lipstick, to a pink bow in the hair or a pink tie). Explain to the subject why I’m taking the photos and if they would be willing to pose and (under no obligation) buy the photo (I’m thinking €5 at most) from the Cancer charity shop and have the photo displayed online. With a bit of publicity I suspect there would be volunteers lined up on the streets.

Personally I would like to perform a selective colourisation on the photograph so that its a black and white photo with only the pink coloured, but that isn’t a requirement.

Then in the middle of September, present the collection of A4 printouts to the charity shop for display and sale.

So what am I asking you to do?

1. Go to your nearest Cancer Charity shop (In Ireland it’s the Irish Cancer Society, I’m not sure what it is in Northern Ireland let alone the rest of the world)
2. Ask the manager of that shop if he or she would be willing to accept the donation of photographs as part of the “Pink for October Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign“, display and sell the photos. You might have to explain the Pink for October story and that model release forms will be produced.
3. Take the photographs. Print the photographs. Yes some time and expense will be involved. Anything worth doing involves a bit of an outlay.
4. If you wish, do put some identifying marks (like a web address to the online version of the photo) on the printouts. A Pink for October logo and link should also be included.
5. Present the photographs (and at least offer the release forms) on (or around) Friday September 19 2008 to the charity shop so that the manager has time to display the photographs. (I can see Kilkenny photoblogers being a little later if they want to include a Podcamp Ireland photowalk)

So, is this a dumb idea?

At the moment I’m looking for a little help with this. Could you help me with…

• Commitment to join in. You have over two months to do something this year
• The wording for the model release form. I’m not sure how it should be worded and what details are required.
• Would I (or anyone else doing the street portraits) need a licence of some kind? If so where and how would I go about getting one?
• While I’m willing to print out my photos myself, does anyone know of a willing printer?
• Anything else I should know about?

Happy snapping,
Will Knott

update September 3 2008. The 2008 Pink for October Ireland portraits won’t be happening. Details in this post.

So King Damien wants us to go and do our own “Fluffy Links”.

I can do that…

On the odd but technical front we have a game of the 80’s classic “Defender”. But an odd twist on it. Ok how about making it really really small. Say 16×16 pixels.? And what about putting it in the favicon of the site instead of in a page. And lets make it playable too? (Knott warning, doesn’t work in all browsers, and I’m sure it won’t work in the iPhone).

On the technical and might just be useful front, how about a “Multicolr Flickr search“? Its a search tool for Flickr which selects “interesting” (their quotes) pictures from Flickr based on colr.. I mean color… I mean colour. Dang this spelling. Consider that my entry in to the Redmum colour post challenge.

On the self-referential front (and the fact that I think I need a photo in every post), Conor O’Neill has a shot of me taking the shot below of him.

And since there isn’t a fluffy due to the Mulley man going to see The Dark Knight, let me offer you “ItsJustSomeRandomGuy“’s take of the expectation of the movie in the “I’m a Marvel and I’m a DC“. He’s been doing these for a while.

So did it meet expectations?

take care,
Will Knott

“So when are you going to upload those photos?”
John, the stage manager wanted to know.

“I’ve uploaded the first lot, Well there is a bit of editing to do, and I’m getting home late, and I’ve an exam…”
“So you’re lazy?”

Well now with the exam over (this morning) and a bit of time, I’ve finished editing the 230 photos from my second night of stewarding Corcadorca’s production of “The Hairy Ape” by Eugene O’Neill.

The delay is caused by the photos themselves, and the fact that I try to take them circumspectly during the show. The first lot has blurring problems. The easiest way to fix this is to reduce the shutter speed… but I’m taking photographs in low light. Reducing the shutter speed simply makes things darker.

So I have to increase the gamma levels on each photograph. And yes, I love the gimp right now.

Which means you can take photograph files like this…

and turn them in to something like this…

or even better.
this dark and hidden photo…

can turn in to this

where you can make out the faces of Peter Gowen (seated at the bottom) who plays “Yank”, Hector Harkness (standing) who plays “Long” and Will O’Connell (seated on the top with the bare feet) who plays “Stoker”.

Also

Here you can clearly see Frank O’Sullivan, who plays “Paddy” when he was an indistinct mass on the unedited photo. The main problem is, you need to edit every photograph to see if there is any salvageable data in there.

I know I would have simply deleted the “empty” shots before now.

take care,
and take a shot of the dark.
Will Knott

Let me tell you about Walter Higgins…

Walter created the Pixenate site which allows you to do online photo editing (so no need to download Gimp et al).

I think Walter explains it better in his interview with Intruders.TV

Well, at 9.30pm last night, after a bit of annoying him, he started working on a FaceBook version of Pixenate. At 3.30pm today he finished the FaceBook edition of Pixenate… yes folks that’s 18 hours later and that time included a full nights sleep and at least on school run.

So now you can edit the photos you uploaded to FaceBook (or like me, failed to upload due to Java incompatibilities with my FireFox)

So please tell me how well it works…

Hopefully I can get to congratulate him in person at tomorrows Open Coffee. unless of course he’s gone off celebrating with the Junior certs tonight.

take care,
Will Knott

tags : Walter Higgins, Pixenate, photo editing, intruders.tv, FaceBook