haha, good post, keep em coming

Hi there PV's folks =)
 
Todays' BS versa sobre Possible mostly free 32bits photo developing OSX workflow
Though most tools have linux and win version too =)
 

Things you'll need:

Raw Photo Processor (OSX only)

Darktable (linux, OSX, win)

XnConvert  (linux, OSX, win)

So let's start with the SOOC jpeg, I shot raw and extracted the embed jpeg below. You can clearly see a kind of darkish-amalgamation-with-uttermost-implausible-future-whatsoever-matter; mr. histogram confers =)

I always get amazed by Ufraw, RPP, darktable, Rawtherapee, LightZone's, etc. (all free) colour engine (mostly based in Dave Coffin's dcraw) and how much they manage to extract from the raw, specially side to side with the big boys. For further reading this very interesting Review of Raw Processors by Nine Degrees Below. And also below's a comparison between RPP and Lightroom. See that RPP got so much image that one can see the lens' hood, crazy!!

RPP it is not complicated, we could even say it's fairly simple. After some tweaking and tinkering with its controls, one should get comfortable and satisfied (oh no, you're sinning big time brother, you cannot be satisfied!!!) with a set of chosen settings. In my case I experimented with 32bit ProPhoto Tif export. BTW I checked the Optimize image for post processing drop down menu, not that disregarding it would ruin your output, but once Andrey Tverdokhleb (developer of RPP) has created that option, might as well use it, wouldn't you say?

With the tif under my armpit, poor tif, we went into a stroll to chopotop, I mean photoshop. If you want to edit 32bit image there are not sooooo many options out there. There are some drawing/vector programs that can handle it, I tried a couple, there's also Pixelmator. Darktable is an amazing cataloguer and non-destructive image processing platform, it can also export 32bit tif and EXR. Though I have covered it before in this thread, I really like its set of tools and specially fond of their beziers and the possibility of blending every single setting within (I normally use average one) anyway I've used PS for more than 13 years and it's not that I feel like cheating, it's just less hassle (see Fincher's Gone Girl).

So below and just with demonstrative (o demonios tratados en castellano) purposes I applied a couple very simple layers: levels and kodak 5218 - 2353 LUT. When going from 32  to 16 bits one can further tweak the image or make a pause for a nice glass of Douro wine.

Denoised, vigneted, perfumed and completely desaturated, I end up with the pic at the bottom. Still I haven't decided if and where to crop it, just left some possible marks. That's how lovely Diana checks her email, on autumn rainy Tuesdays while the men are working inside the house =)

XnConvert is a fantastic batch image processor, easy, yet complete and accurate. Very important also free :P I use either good professor  S. Sverdlov’s C3C algorithm (handles grain better) - @Vitaly's good advising - or XnConvert (lanczos) to downscale my images, to change colour space and to other daily tasks. Effects and properties are easily stackable and there's a myriad output formats and options for the geeky users =)

I also used ImageOptim to further compress the jpegs/pngs for the web and SetExifData by Marc Vos, both free. If you're using any of the before mentioned apps for commercial work, please donate to their developers, chen kiú

Finally seize the opportunity and fill up your vehicle's gas tank (it might be your last trip, juo jua juahh) • gashô

This year World Press Photo competition is nothing but a big fiasco - 20% of finalist images disqualified and one of the winners being accused by the portrayed city itself {with some important arguments} of staging his photo essay - which is something it was bound to happen.

First of all the idea of making an exhibition with photojournalism material is... "indelicate". Despite I only have attended to 1 WPP exhibition and was because at the time I was working at the host museum and of course curious, it was immediately clear to me that hanging a huge print of a tutsi man with his head deformed {by a machete stroke or something} and all stitched up in "the temple of most elevated craft done by humans" - museums are yet another story for a better occasion - was something rather contradictory and literal that I would want to avoid in the future.

I'm all for improvisation, instinct and guts... but sometimes it seems that there's a lack of thought and analysis for more delicate matter. Example; when I started with photography everybody reverenced Sabastião Salgado. Then I saw the pictures and thought to myself "these guy is a technical monster"... it took me some time before I understood that despite all the plethora of aesthetics and rhetoric bullshit there was something brutally cynical underneath the immense skills and wonderful technique; he was earning money, getting famous and respected for anesthetizing people's misery.
I hope nobody confuses here the work I'm talking about, it is not photojournalism - for which I have a big respect - it is documenting the alienation of fellow humans and elevating that to art. There's no denouncing, not a true care, the emphasis lays on capturing the moving scene and make it breathtakingly gorgeous.

Anyway I don't know what S.S. is doing these days and if he ever understood, acknowledged and/or made anything to heal his liability and socio-cultural footprint still present in hollow prizes and "philosophies" as the one hold by WPP. Honestly I also stop caring about him and channeled my energy to understand by my own means the emphatic way we see ourselves, we understand and care for each other; and finally how to express and relate that to a code, a language.

One of sources -http://goo.gl/gwqeag

 
Ahhh, I had to let this out of my system, ufff.

Onone is offering perfect effex 9 for FREE - here

 
Finally and despite MikeLinn has already post it, I think this 2 part tutorial is rather watchable and Z Arias acts as and probably he's a cool guy. Enjoy it or at least enjoy Page's incredible exercise on... holding her own hands :P

@maxr Is that really your grandmother in those beautiful "1913" photos in your last post? Also, whats the story with the swollen guy in the hospital?

DOWNSCALE & COMPRESS IMAGES

What up PV's?
Latest google's compression algo Guetzli made headlines on all important tech sites. Other open-source advancements hardly ever are brought to the general public's attention. I'm not here to judge, but rather to share my view on the subject matter and some "better" alternatives. I've been using ImageOptim and jpegoptim (CLI) for quite some time, I've tested JpegMini, TinyPNG and Guetzli.

IMO there's no point in bloating a thread with images that are quite difficult to differentiate at 1:1
So I'll skip directly to the cheese. The best possible quality/compression ratio I'd managed so far was downscaling in PS with Sverlov's (free) c3c - thanks @Vitaliy - set to micro-contrast and sharpness 0 or 1 and live with its small gamma shift. Then exporting with tinyPNG within jpeg flavour. Smallest possible files. Now, not always want I go to the serious pro room {fart}, so we shall find an all FOSS alternative =)

So I bit the bait and went on trying Guetzli... and it's painfully slow, unusable almost, we're talking 50 to 100 times slower than say mozjpeg or jpegoptim. Guetzli's still in diapers and parallel processing is possible but only for different inputs, so forget it for now. The good thing that came out of it is that now I've changed to Mozjpeg which is better than jpegoptim, fast and to be honest 99% the quality of google's within even smaller file sizes.

From some time now, outside of photoshop I've been using Imagemagick to rescale the images. The documentation on IM's scale options is overwhelming, I've tried some of the output options and finally was happy with the standard.
Downscale with IM and compress with mozjpeg gives me a ridiculously smaller file and an IQ almost identical to c3c+tiny WF.

For me it's not practical to batch these ops from the CL, so I've created watched folders that apply the settings - plus sometimes EXIF strip, tag, rename and so on - to dropped files. You can opt to simply use a bash, a service, create a droplet from automator, etc. possibilities are endless =)

 
The GOOD stuff

This (wrapped in a bash) for ImageMagick, 1200 pix:
convert "$f" -resize 1200 "${f%.*}_1200.jpg"

This - compression 84 - (wrapped too) is what I mostly use for mozjpeg,
but you can get away with much much smaller files:
cjpeg -quality 84 -dct float -dc-scan-opt 2 "$f" > "${f%.*}_web.jpg"

 
 
JpegOptim I used with:
jpegoptim -f -m84 -b -P -v --strip-all --all-progressive "$f"

Guetzli tried both with normal
guetzli --quality 84 input output

and multi-threaded
parallel 'guetzli --quality 84 {} {.}.jpg' ::: input

 
Wrapping up. Contrary to what everybody and their dog say, I never sharpen images after downscale, instead I use algos that retain the perceived original sharpness adapted to a smaller size. Using imagemagick for downscale and mozjpeg to compress the output render tiny files (e.g. B_chart_magic >> moz in the attached 5300KB > 143 KB) with almost zero perceptual difference. All progs mentioned here can be also installed via homebrew. For a free full-fledged GUI batch image converter, check the multi-platform XnConvert, just don't use lanczos to downscale ,-)

 
TESTS - 18 images
Here are some chart images if you want to peep, bear in mind they all have been stripped from any metadata. - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxtrjp4jb-YsZzF2bUxYeVhfSUE/view?usp=sharing

 
The whole truth about...

As I was posting this elsewhere I thought Maybe Vitaliy might like this one... hung somewhere on a forums' wall and so I'll leave it also here. Talking about photographers that inspired us... Allan Sekula, a tremendously honest and hard-working artist. Had the incredible privilege of assisting him for a couple days.

 
From Dear Bill Gates