Red Row Studio

A couple of quick observations – this was a cheap split image screen off ebay.

• Installation was extremely easy; the package didn’t come with any instructions but I was able to follow those on the Katz-Eye web site.
• The screen goes matt side upward, i.e. facing toward the mirror/prism.  It wasn’t clear to me which side was the matt one until I held it so I could see the reflection of the ceiling light in the shiny side.
• I got a couple of specks of dust on the screen while changing it, but I was easily able to clean them off with a bit of compressed air.
• The split image works fine up to f/4, it blacks out at some eye positions at f/5.6 and is completely dark by f/8
• Focus seems extremely accurate; the microprism collar is most useful when there’s a fair amount of texture on the object you’re focusing on, and the split image in other cases.

I’ve been using this trick for ages to make simple cards from photograph – starting with a photo and making a card like looks like this:

Once you know how you can make a card very quickly, and it’s certainly quicker than rushing out to the shops when you need a card in a hurry.  Here’s how to do it.

1. Open your photo in GIMP and crop it to the correct ratio.  I like square cards, and I have a bunch of square envelopes, so here’s my starting image:

2. Double the width of the image, to allow for folding the card in half. Go to Image -> Canvas size, then click on the lock icon to unlink width and height.  Change the drop down box to percent, and type 200 in the width box.  Finally, drag the photo over to the right hand side in the box below, and select All Layers from the Resize Layers drop down box. It should look like this before you click resize:

and after, your image should look like this:

The white half of the image will be the back of your card, so if you want anything on the back (I sometimes add the title of the photo) add it now (or do it by hand after you’ve made the card!)

If you want a card that hinges on the top rather than the side (which is sometimes better for wider photos) then change the Height to 200 instead of the Width, and drag the image to the bottom of the box.  If you do this, then your printed image in step 4 will be twice the height of your final card, but the same width.

3. Add a border. A thin black border all the way around the card will show you exactly where to cut and make sure that the back and front of the card are the same size.  Go to Filters -> Decor -> Add Border.  Set the X and Y size to 5 and the colour to black.  Set the Delta Value on Colour to 1.  It should look like this before you click OK:

And after clicking OK, your image will look like this (actually the border will probably not be this wide):

4. Print and cut out. Hopefully it’s now obvious what the next stage is!  Print out the image (remember that the it will be twice the width of the finished card), cut along the black border, then score along the middle line and fold in half.

A quick note to share a great source of material for making reflectors.  White paper or card is fine for DIY reflectors, but usually a bit floppy.  Cardboard is stiffer, and easy to get hold of, but the normal brown colour doesn’t reflect enough light.  I discovered a perfect material being thrown away at work a few days ago – silver-backed cardboard used for packaging that contains dry ice.  Not the easiest thing to get hold of, but if there’s a university with a biology department nearby, it might be worth keeping an eye out.  Here’s a sheet that I nabbed from the recycling bin:

And here’s it in use, on a quick portrait of my willing subject, Molly.  Photos are taken with a Pentax k100D, 50mm lens at f/1.7, raw conversion using Bibble with no altered settings.

Without reflector:

With reflector.  Much nicer, and look at the lovely catchlight in her eyes:

Here’s an uncropped version of the above, showing the cardboard wedged behind the sofa cushion.

It occurs to me that the cardboard might also be ideal for making a DIY softbox, as it’s only reflective on one side – I’ll write up another post if I do so.

I’ve been using Linux to manage, edit and print my digital photographs for a few years now, but it’s only in the last few months that the available software has really come together.  Here’s a quick guide to what I’m using, why I like it, and what the alternatives are

Photo management

A.k.a DAM (digital asset management).  I use DigiKam 0.10 (the official 0.10 version has just been released) because

• It has a very nice, logical user interface with multiple tabbed panes
• It reads metadata nicely from raw files (and will soon be able to write)
• Very quick tag searching
• It’s easy to integrate with other apps (see my post here)
• Manages both raw and jpg files

Alternatives: F-spot, Picassa

RAW conversion

The best software I’ve found for raw conversion is Bibble – currently version 4.10, but looking forward to version 5 which is in development. It’s not open source, but I use it for the following reasons

• Very fast, takes advantage of multiprocessor machines
• A great range of plugins that I couldn’t live without
• Flexible output batches to allow you to customise a really quick workflow
• Integrated noise-reduction software (a simplified version of Noise Ninja)

Alternatives: RawTherapee and RawStudio are both promising open source projects.

Printing

Another piece of non-free software – Turboprint.  Printing has never been particularly easy on Linux, in my opinion, but this piece of software makes it much slicker.

• Fully colour managed printing with custom colour profiles
• Integrates with GIMP
• Gives you ink and printer status updates

Alternatives: Most linux distributions ship with GutenPrint, which takes care of printing on most printers, but the experience isn’t so good, and you have to take care of colour management at the application level.

Any comments about your own workflow?

In the etsy forums I’ve recommeded the software Inkscape to several people who were looking to make banners, business cards, flyers etc.  There are not many tutorials available for Inkscape, so I thought I would share one – how to make a simple banner like the one below (note the similarity to mine!)

A quick note before we start: I’m going to assume that we have a background image that we want to use, and it’s already been cropped to 760×100 pixels.  The reason for this is that, while Inkscape is great for laying out images, it’s not that great for editing images (hopefully the difference will become clear).  So, crop your image to 760×100 using GIMP/Photoshop/Picassa before starting this tutorial.  If you’re not sure how, just leave a comment saying which software you’re using and I’ll add instructions to future versions of this tutorial. Here’s the background image I’ll be using – pebbles on a beach from a recent walk.

1. Create a new document with the right dimensions

Right-click  here and choose “save link” to save the Etsy banner template file,  then open it in Inkscape.  Alternatively, create a new document (File -> New -> Default) then edit the properties (File->Document Properties) and under Custom Size set the width to 760 and the height to 100, then set the Units to px from the drop-down box.

Because the banner we’re making is quite small, it’s best to view the document at 100% (View->Zoom->Zoom 1:1).

2. Add the background

Go to File>Import and find your background image, then click Open.  You should see your image has been added to the current document, but it’s probably not the right size or in the right place.  Bring up the Transform window by clicking on Object->Transform. The Transform window should show up on the right of your screen. First we’re going to make the background the right size.  Click on the Scale tab, then type 760 in Width and 100 in Height.  Make sure your background image is selected (it should have a dotted box round it) then click Apply.  Your background image should now be the same size as the black rectange which represents the whole document.

Now to centre the background image so that it takes up the whole of the document.  Make sure it’s selected, then bring up the Align and Distribute window by clicking Object->Align and Distribute.  We want the background image to be centred both horizontally and vertically in the page, so make sure Page is selected in the Relative To drop-down box, then click these two symbols.

The background image should jump to its proper place and cover the whole document.

3. Add the center stripe

To add the stripe down the center of the banner we need to draw a rectangle.  Don’t worry about the shap or position – we’ll set those later.  Select the rectangle tool and drag to create a new rectangle.

It will probably be bright blue with a thick black border.  We’ll change that later on; for now, we’ll leave it as it makes it easier to see what we’re doing.  We want the rectangle to be 760 pixels wide (the whole width of the banner) and 50 pixels high (half the height of the banner). Select the rectangle and go back to the Transform window, and enter the width and height in the Scale tab like you did before.  You’ll have to make sure that Scale Proportionally is NOT ticked.  Then use the Align and Distribute window just like to did before, to center the rectangle horizontally and vertically.

You should have a big blue rectangle covering half of your background image. Now to give it that nice transparent effect.  Select the big blue rectangle and click on Object->Fill and Stroke to bring up the (you guessed it) Fill and Stroke window. In the Fill tab, move the R, G and B sliders all the way to the right, to give you a white fill.  Then move the A slider to about 200 to give you the transparency (experiment with this one to find a look you like).

Move to the Stroke Paint tab and click on the X to choose no Stroke.  The black border round the rectangle should disappear, giving you something like this:

4. Add the text

Select the Text tool then click and drag to create a text box.

As with the rectangle, don’t worry about the size or position at this stage.  As soon as you have drawn the box, you should see a flashing cursor in the upper left corner.  Type your text here, then select the text and choose a font and size from the drop down box near the upper left of the screen.

Press F1 to switch to the cursor tool, and you should be able to click and drag your piece of text around.  Instead of trying to position it manually, though, it’s better to use our old friend the Align and Distribute window, exactly as we did for the background image and the rectangle.

5. Export the file as a PNG

You’re done! Save your document (you have been saving after each step, right?) then go to File->Export Bitmap and choose a filename ending in .png.  Upload your new banner to Etsy and see how it looks.  For my example, I noticed that because of the font I used, the ‘g’ and ‘f’ letters were outside the transparent rectangle, so I increased the height to 60 pixels to accommodate them.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for improving this tutorial, please leave them as a comment.