On 03/30/2015 12:14 PM, C R wrote:
Elle, to answer your question, I'm a graphic designer mainly, but I use
photography as a graphic design tool. I would consider myself a decent
photographer, but I'm much better at photo-editing than I am at
photography, to be perfectly honest. :) From me, you would get a variety
of workflows, which range from focus-stacking and layer duplication with
layer mode filters and masks for non-destructive editing.
I would be very pleased to see your workflow as well, as it may help
improve mine. It's always those one of two things that you don't think
of, that just save you ages.
For example, in product photography, I used to fuzzy-select (magic wand
in PS) the white space and shadow areas, and erase to white as close as
I could get to the shadow area to maintain a clean transition, and then
clean up the shadows a bit. These days, I use fuzzy select (or the
curves tool for white object on white background, since fuzzy select
doesn't work as well in these situations), then selection-to-mask
(inverted), and erase the mask outward from the base of the object until
I have as much shadow as I want. This ensures a smooth transition
without any extra clean up, and allows much greater control over the
image in a non-destructive way that only requires a few more button
clicks, and is so much less of a pain-in-the-ass, it's ridiculous.
I will do a video of my various workflows, and make UI suggestions based
on each of them, if that will help the team.
Let me know if this is something that would be useful.
Hi C R,
GIMP users can provide helpful suggestions for improving GIMP
useability. But GIMP code still gets written one line at a time by
whichever developers and code contributors have the time, ability, and
inclination.
It's very possible that the core GIMP code is not at a point where it
makes sense for the developers to worry too much about workflow-specific
useability issues. That's why I asked about whether the developers would
be able to use information about people's workflows and personal "top
ten useability issues". I'm pretty sure that eventually the answer will
be yes, but I'm not sure if now is the right time.
You are right about those "one or two [or 10 or 20] things that you
don't think of" that make your workflow easier. Shift-click plus
dragging a color to a layer is certainly one of those things for me. So
even if the GIMP devs aren't at a point where worrying about useability
is a high priority, GIMP users can learn from each other about ways to
improve our workflows, if people want to share such information.
Mostly I use GIMP for editing photographs, and like yourself I like
working in the digital darkroom as much or more than actually taking
photographs. My photography workflow is pretty simple. If I'm starting
with a camera jpeg, I use RawTherapee to recover crushed shadow detail,
deal with lens vignetting, etc. If I'm starting with a raw file, I use
RawTherapee or darktable to produce a "flat print" with no alteration to
the original image other than fixing things like lens vignetting and
chromatic aberration. Many people do most of their editing in a raw
processor and only use programs like GIMP or PhotoShop for touch-ups.
I'm sort of old school - I use GIMP for almost the entire process of
creating a final black and white image. Using GIMP, I make any necessary
repairs to flaws in the original image, and then make a luminance-based
black and white rendering, recovering the original channel information
at the same time in case it might be useful. Then I modify global and
local tonality layer by layer, using masks to confine modifications to
the desired area.
This page has a couple of screenshots showing typical layer stacks, but
doesn't talk about useability issues (it's a tutorial on some layer
blend modes that haven't yet made it into GIMP master):
http://ninedegreesbelow.com/photography/gimp-lch-blend-modes.html
Elle
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