Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with imagemanipulation

The Digital Darkroom

Garak — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:44:41 -0800

What are some good books on the digital darkroom in general, and not just Photoshop? I'm an amateur photographer, and I postprocess my photos in Aperture. I also have Pixelmator. I know how to work the camera pretty well, but learned most of what I know about postprocessing from random tutorials on the Web. I'd like to learn more about digital postprocessing and digital images in general from a more formal, authoritative source. Specifically, I'm looking more for things like levels and curves and less for things like the clone stamp. Maybe what Ansel Adams would've written as the digital update to "The Negative" and "The Print." (I haven't read those yet, but plan to.)

Aperture books seem to just state the obvious ("To adjust levels in your image, open the Levels palette and drag the sliders below the histogram") and Photoshop books are, well, about Photoshop. I've got nothing against Photoshop, but I don't have it yet and would rather learn about the "theory" before I learn any specific interface. It's okay if the book uses Photoshop as an example, of course.

Triple gratitude points if it somehow makes a connection to the film days ("Kodachrome images are different from Velvia images because X, and this corresponds to Y in the digital world.")

Help my turn images into eye-candy

parma — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 10:21:28 -0800

What is the best tools to turn image collections into eye-candy? (Printable a bonus!) Example: John's Background Switcher [homepage] will take a folder and randomly arrange images on your desktop. [screen]. What other programs (Photoshop plugins?) have you come across that give similarly nice effects?

Insert the image of a vid's timecode onto the picture itself ?

bryanzera — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 13:39:52 -0800

How can I insert the image of a video's timecode onto the picture itself ? [MI] I have lots of footage from a department in our company on non-timecoded format that is to be included in a presentation.

What I'd like to do is to capture each tape, burn a DVD of the captured footage with a cohesive timecode displayed on the screen so the person chosing the footage can take the DVDs home and come up of a list of clips referenced by time rather than description.

Currently, I'm using Adobe, but am not adverse to using other programs.

PhotoBlogging

skryche — Sun, 06 Jun 2004 07:48:58 -0800

I find myself uploading pictures to my blog an awful lot, which means sampling, cropping, resaving, and then uploading. Is there a light program that can do all these things at once? ImageWell looks perfect, but it's Mac-only (I use Windows). What do you recommend?