Lab curves and edge avoiding wavelets for GIMP

Posted Fri, 18/06/2010 - 21:54 by mike

Hi folks,

so, out of the dlRaw development there are two small tools for you... I wanted to have a smaller version of dlRaw, which should be easy to adopt to new filters or new situations... To give it an additional purpose I added wrapper scripts for gimp and started with a long needed feature for GIMP: L*a*b* curves.

So you can finally play with curves in L*a*b* color space (using 16 bit calculation) and with preview. the best, it fits seemlessly into GIMP. Just call the script, the image is transferred to the program and when you're done, click save and you get back to you working space in gimp... 

Since the edge avoiding wavelets plugin (kindly offered by elsamuko) seems not to work on windows, I made an additional tool for edge avoiding wavelets on L* (which works on windows Wink).

Feedback is very welcome.

greets mike

Comments

been using these plug-ins

by Steve (not verified) - 03/08/2010 - 20:35

Mike,

Along with the Advanced Tone Mapping script, Lab Curves and EAW have become 2 of my most widely used plug-ins/scripts in GIMP. They are extremely useful. Thanks.

Steve (Spodeworld)

Glad you like them. Enjoy

by mike - 03/08/2010 - 21:57

Glad you like them. Enjoy Wink

greets mike

Normal or Value mode?

by Steve (not verified) - 31/07/2010 - 01:19

Any thoughts as to whether Lab Curves is best used setting the resulting layer mode to Normal or Value? What about EAW?

Hi Steve, well it is designed

by mike - 31/07/2010 - 12:23

Hi Steve,

well it is designed to give a useable result with normal mode. However, if for your desired look the value mode (or any other mode) is better just choose this. It depends completely what you want to achieve.

greets mike

Thanks!

by Gary W (not verified) - 20/06/2010 - 17:02

This looks great. Thanks for the effort.

Hi Alexandre,  did you copy

by mike - 19/06/2010 - 13:20

Hi Alexandre, 

did you copy the python script to your plugins directory, too? Set this also executable. Without that there won't be anything in the menues...

Please try this and report back, because it is working on both my machines without any problems (32bit Gimp 2.6.8 and 64bit Gimp 2.7.1).

greets mike

Okay, first comments I'm not

by Alexandre (not verified) - 20/06/2010 - 01:15

Okay, first comments Smile

I'm not sure I understand the whole thing about 1:4 zoom and so on. I can see how using less memory is important, but it just look blurry, and if I go for 1:1, I have to wait for every change. Is it possible to rescale from original in a way that wouldn't make the image blurry?

The app always tries to smooth the spline, whereas is many cases one needs straight lines between control points on a curve. It's quite important.

Whenever I add a new control point, the app tries to reprocess the image. Why? Nothing has really changed, because the new control point is always on the line.

The presets are not exactly descriptive, but that's just my problem, perhaps Smile

Hi Alexandre,  thanks for

by mike - 20/06/2010 - 12:23

Hi Alexandre, 

thanks for your reply.

Well the resizing to 1:2, 1:4 or 1:8 is just for the preview, the final image will have the original size. Using your mouse wheel you can zoom the image, if you zoom to 100% it won't be blurry... Sharp, nice and fast upscaling is not possible as far as I know, that's why it's blurry then... If you know such an algorithm let people know, many will like it Wink (see e.g. gegl list for recent algorithms in that direction) However, since one will alter only on a global scale, one should get enough preview even with a little blur. But this tool is not really made with netbooks or so in mind, when doing serious image editing I expect people to have a quite modern CPU with at least 2GB of memory... 

Considering the curves, it would be possible to have them completely linear, but mixed will need a lot of new code and that's on very low priority at least on my list. However, some other tools do a different smoothing, which is closer to linear at some points, that would be ok for me. So, if you know a suitable algorithm (with reference implementation) please tell me. But keep in mind, at the moment the input is 8bit, doing harsh curves will most likely introduce banding. Actually, an example image where you would need such a curve would be nice to see.

Up to now, new points alter the spline, so it needs to be reprocessed... This spline implementation was not my work, this is still from Jos back in his active dlRaw times. I just made it available for gimp, and I'll try to improve it, where I'm able to...  

greets mike

Hi, yes -- I got it to work

by Alexandre (not verified) - 20/06/2010 - 00:02

Hi, yes -- I got it to work now. Many thanks. Looks interesting.

Um...

by Alexandre (not verified) - 19/06/2010 - 12:34

I tried only LabCurves and it doesn't work.

What I did is:

1. Unpack 32bit Linux version
2. Copy LabCurves to ~/.gimp-2.7/plug-ins/
3. chmod +x ~/.gimp-2.7/plug-ins/./LabCurves
4. Run GIMP

Nothing ever appears in the menu. The relevant console output is just "Usage : LabCurves Input Output".

What am I missing?

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Smileys
:):D:bigsmile:;):p:O:|:(:~:((8):steve:J):glasses::party::love: