Photo and Photo News

I was so excited to take my camera to our Youth Conference, which took place last weekend on the beautiful campus of Troy University in Troy, Alabama. And while it is a lovely campus, I didn’t find a lot of compelling shots. I did see things I wanted to photograph so I could remember them, but nothing really photographic.  While waiting for our group to assemble for a photo, I did look into the face of this fella and deemed him camera-worthy. A little brightening up in the Gimp, and you can actually see his facial features.

Speaking of the GIMP (which is an acronym for Gnu Image Manipulation Program), I went round in circles trying to find a converter that would let me use it to work with RAW image files. Photoshop uses Adobe Digital Negative Graphics converter to take the RAW file and convert it into a DNG file, which Photoshop can open. And, what’s really cool, is that when you open a RAW file “with Photoshop,” a pre-Photoshop program that will let you make some basic changes to the images themselves.

Well, I wanted to do that with GIMP, and I’ve heard a few different things about how to do it. One article indicated that nothing at all was needed. Well, that didn’t sound right, and when I tried it, I was right, I got a bunch of TIFF errors, indicating that GIMP didn’t really know what to do with the RAW file.

I kept seeing articles that UFRaw would do what I needed it to do, and that GIMP for Mac already has it installed. There were installers for Windows and Linux, but not for Mac. Well, obviously my version of GIMP didn’t have it installed, because if it were, I wouldn’t be getting the errors. I found a fork of UFRaw called NUFRaw, and installing that didn’t work any better. I did find, though, that I was using GIMP version 2.8.16, and the version referenced was 2.8.14. So I rolled back my installation of 2.8.16 to 2.8.14, and —voila– GIMP is now able to open and work with RAW image files.

A final word and then I’m done for this week. I’m really disappointed in Instagram not letting people use it on a static platform. It seems like a bunch of bratty developers said, “It was designed for mobile, if you want static you’ve got other platforms.” I can still put stuff on Instagram from my computer but it’s a few extra steps. As a result, I’m not likely to do so. More’s the pity for Instagram and it’s advertisers.