Posts Tagged ‘digikamrecipes’
digiKam Recipes 3.9.33 Released
Besides a handful of minor tweaks, the new version of the digiKam Recipes ebook includes the following new material:
- Tethered Shooting with digiKam
- Soft Proofing in digiKam
digiKam Recipes in FBReader for Android
Readers who already purchased the book will receive the new version free of charge. If you haven’t received your copy, please send your order confirmation as proof of purchase to dmpop@linux.com, and I’ll email you the latest version of the book.
Happy reading!
Tethered Shooting with digiKam
While digiKam won’t rival dedicated software for tethered shooting, you can use the application’s Import interface to trigger the connected camera and instantly fetch photos from it. This functionality can come in handy when you want to have an instant preview of photos you take on a large screen.
To make use of this feature, connect your camera to the machine running digiKam, and turn the camera on. In digiKam, choose Import → Cameras and select your camera model. You can then trigger the camera using the Capture button. There are a couple of things you need to keep in mind, though. digiKam can’t control camera settings (shooting mode, aperture, shutter speed, etc.) remotely, so you should set them beforehand. The images captured from within the Import interface are not stored on the camera’s storage card, so make sure you import them into digiKam before you disconnect or turn off the camera.
digiKam Recipes 3.9.31 Released
Besides a handful of minor tweaks, the new version of the digiKam Recipes ebook includes the following new material:
- Prevent Photos in digiKam from Disappearing
- Simple Color Toning
- Simulate a Washed Out Effect
Readers who already purchased the book will receive the new version free of charge. If you haven’t received your copy, please send your order confirmation as proof of purchase to dmpop@linux.com, and I’ll email you the latest version of the book.
Happy reading!
Prevent Photos in digiKam from Disappearing
Versioning in digiKam provides an excellent mechanism for non-destructive editing, but it does have a tiny quirk that can be a bit confusing if you are not aware of it. With the Versioning feature enabled, digiKam automatically displays only the most recent version of a photo and hides all the previous revisions, including the original file. This functionality helps to avoid clutter in the main thumbnail view, but this creature comfort can also cause panic when you all of a sudden can’t find the original photos. Fortunately, digiKam provides several ways of solving this conundrum.
Select the latest version of the photo, expand the Versioning right sidebar, and you should see all revisions of the selected image along with its original. If you want to make the original file visible in the thumbnail view, hover the mouse over the original’s thumbnail in the Versioning sidebar and click on the Show item permanently icon.
Alternatively, you can disable the hiding functionality altogether. To do this, choose Settings → Configure digiKam → Editing Images and untick the Always show original images and Always show intermediate snapshots check boxes.
Add a Vintage Effect in digiKam
Want to add a vintage effect to your photos? digiKam has all the tools you need to turn your digital snapshots into vintage masterpieces. Open the photo you want for editing, adjust exposure, white balance, and tweak other settings as you would usually do. The first step in the “aging” process is to add film grain to the photo. To do this, choose Effects → Add Film Grain. There are a lot of parameters you can configure, but you don’t have to enable and tweak them all. You can start with adjusting the Grain Size parameter as well as trying different values for parameters in the Luminance Noise section. You can preview the result at any time using the Try button. Next step is to tweak the color balance to make the photo look aged. One way to do this is to tweak the color balance settings, so the photo looks washed out with a slightly yellow cast imitating aged photo paper. Choose Color → Color Balance and adjust the Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow parameters to achieve the desired result.
The exact values for each parameter depend on the given photo and your personal taste, but you can start with the following values:
Cyan: 37
Magenta: 25
Yellow: -25
To make the vintage effect even more realistic, add vignetting to the photo. Choose Enhance → Lens → Vignetting Correction, tick the Add Vignetting check box and adjust the available parameters to your liking. Finally, sharpen the photo using Enhance → Sharpen to make the film grain more pronounced, and you are done.
digiKam Recipes 3.9.19 Released
This release features the new Add a Vintage Effect in digiKam recipe along with a raft of minor improvements, tweaks, and fixes.
Readers who already purchased the ebook will receive the new version free of charge. If you bought the ebook via Amazon, please send your order confirmation as proof of purchase to dmpop@linux.com.
Happy reading!
Check and Optimize digiKam’s Databases
By default, digiKam uses two SQLite databases for storing essential data: digikam4.db and thumbnails-digikam.db. And to make the application run fast and smoothly, it’s a good idea to check and optimize the databases every now and then. To do this on Ubuntu or its derivatives, you need to install the sqlite3 package using the sudo apt-get install sqlite3 command. Once you’ve done that, back up the digikam4.db and thumbnails-digikam.db databases. Open then the terminal and switch to the directory where the databases are stored. First off, you should check the integrity of both databases using the following commands:
sqlite3 -line digikam4.db 'pragma integrity_check;'
sqlite3 -line thumbnails-digikam.db 'pragma integrity_check;'
If both databases are in order, you should see the integrity_check = ok message. To optimize the databases, run the two commands below:
sqlite3 -line digikam4.db 'vacuum;'
sqlite3 -line thumbnails-digikam.db 'vacuum;'
Run then the integrity check once again to make sure that everything works properly, and you are done.
digiKam Recipes 3.9.15 Released
First off, the digiKam Tricks book has got a new title: digiKam Recipes. Why? Because I like the word “recipe” better. To celebrate this momentous event, a new version of the digiKam Recipes book is available for your reading pleasure. The new version features the Check and Optimize digiKam’s Databases recipe as well as a few minor tweaks and corrections.
Readers who already purchased the book will receive the new version free of charge. If you haven’t received your copy, please send your order confirmation as proof of purchase to dmpop@linux.com, and I’ll email you the latest version of the book.
Happy reading!
Create Slick Slideshows with digiKam
It’s easy to dismiss digiKam’s slideshow functionality as a feature of no particular use. After all, most photographers prefer to publish their photos using the photo sharing service of their choice. But the slideshow feature can come in handy when showcasing photos on your machine is the only option. Running a simple slideshow in digiKam is as easy as selecting the desired album or pictures and choosing View → Slideshow → All (or Selection). However, digiKam has something even better: using the View → Slideshow → Advanced Slideshow command, you can create rather impressive slideshows with smooth transitions and soundtracks.
The Advanced Slideshow dialog window is split into four sections. In the Main section, you can specify which photos you want to include into the slideshow as well as configure the transition and playback options. Using the available options, you include all photos in the current album, or limit the slideshow only to a specified selection. Choosing the Custom option allows you to hand-pick the photos you want and specify their order. When you choose the photos for the slideshow, digiKam conveniently displays the total number of photos and the slideshow’s duration time based on the delay between images. If you are using a fairly modern machine with a decent card, you can enable the OpenGL transitions in the Video subsection and select the desired transition type from the Transition effect drop-down list in the Playback subsection (the Ken Burns effect is always a good choice). If you don’t use the OpenGL transitions, you can enable options in the Content subsection. Here, you can choose to display a progress indicator, file names, and captions. Enabling the latter allows you to select the font for the captions and tweak its settings.
To spice up the slideshow, you can add a soundtrack to it in the Soundtrack section. You can add as many music files as needed, and the Time comparison subsection displays the current length of the added music tracks and the duration of the slideshow.
Once you’ve configured the slideshow settings, launch it by pressing the Start Slideshow button. And if you need to pause the show, adjust volume, or jump to the previous or next slide, move the mouse to the upper-right corner of the screen to access the slideshow controls.
Use the Focal Length Analyzer Script with digiKam
The Focal Length Analyzer is a nifty little Bash script that pulls focal length data from digiKam’s database back end and generates nice graphs based on the extracted data.
To perform its magic, the script relies on the sqlite, gnuplot, and imagemagick packages. On Ubuntu and Debian-based distributions, you can install these packages running the apt-get install sqlite3, gnuplot imagemagick command as root. Download then the latest version of the script and make it executable using the chmod o+w focalAnalyzer.sh command. The script accepts two switches: -png and -pdf. Use the -png switch to generate separate graphs for each camera model in the PNG format and the -pdf switch to produce a multi-page PDF file. The script automatically detects whether digiKam uses the SQLite or MySQL database back end, so you don’t need to do anything beyond running the script with the switch you want, for example: ./focalAnalyzer.sh -png
