ello all. I have a question regarding point and shoot cameras and how to edit the final photo. My wife runs her own business of making artisan hand crafted makeup products. We are begining to take photos for the website of powdered eyeshadows and etc.

Please forgive but i do not know the technical term, but what i am trying to achieve in gimp is what a professional grade camera can do. Its where you can set the focus on the object and it will blur the rest out, creating the focal point to the product.

However, if you guys feel there is a better way to showcase the product, such as in light box or on a plain white background. Let me know. I am not a photographer by any means. We are just trying to get as close as the exact color of the product online. So maybe light box is best way??

These are my current questions as of now. Thanks much and i hope to hear back from you all.

Do you have an example?
Have a look at the G'MIC blur options like, Degradations / Blur [depth-of-field].

I knew we had a script that does that but I can't think of the name of it or where it is. I have used it. You can select the part you don't want blurred and it will blur the rest, it is a very cool script. I was using it for flowers that were further away in a picture.

Well to get a blurred background, the focus blur plugin is one way to go: http://registry.gimp.org/node/1444

Personally I'd try to get the original picture as good as you can get in-camera and I'm more inclined to go with a plain white background:



Kevin

Nice results Kevin and thanks for revealing the simple studio setup.

awesme thanks guys. @kevin, thanks for the photos, we took a cardboard box and cut out each side to make windows. covered said windows with white fabric and bristol board on the inside. haha. we will test tonight.

@others, thanks for links to specific plug ins, i knew i could find my answer here. All we have is a cell phone camera from my htc or a cannon power shot.

thanks

matt

for cosmetics, it might look nice for each item to be photographed on a small mirror, I have seen them in several shapes for cheap at craft stores. As for depth of field, most point and shoot cameras can be set for that. I think it's called the macro setting on my camera. This page gives a pretty good explanation for simple cameras.
Click ----> Point and shoot depth of field information.

I think the concept behind Google's Lens Blur app is pretty cool -- though I'm a little suspicious of the image quality when contrasted with a well-composed still photo* (not to mention the poorer quality of cell phone cameras).


* The concept of the app is to film a "movie" of your subject as you sweep the camera in a linear motion. This movie is analyzed to determine the distance of each element in the frame, and then a depth map is created. This depth map can then be used for selective blurring of portions of the image.

Thanks for the link for field of depth on a simple camera. That will help me out.

Ok as for taking the photo, i have ran into an issue. We have made our light box and it looks awesome. Well, we put the light above and its all perfect, snap a picture and low and behold, the camera is picking up on emi given off by the light. The frequency of the bulb is some how creating unseen lines of "shadow" when my camera takes a pic. Its like taking a picture of an lcd screen. The camera used was an htc phone camera. I am at work so i do not have my cannon powershot to see if it is actually the lens in me phone or the bulb itself. Haha.

Thanks.

Some random info that might be helpful.

• If you have manual mode on your point and shoot (worth a look either way).
  Cambridge in Color: Depth of Field
• Trick a point and shoot camera without manual mode.
  How to Control Aperture and Shutter Speed on an Entry Level Point and Shoot Digital Camera
• If you have a basic Canon point and shoot camera.
  Unlock the Secret "Pro" Features of Your Canon Point-and-Shoot with CHDK
• Know your modes.
  Preset Camera Modes
• Know how to disable the flash
• If you have them; how to use Av (aperture priority), Tv (shutter priority).

emi??? (Sorry, I have a violent reaction to unexplained TLAs)

It sounds like your phone is managing to capture the flicker of your light source due to mains frequency.

I would suggest not using a phone and stick to the point-and-shoot. Also, you haven't said what your light source is - so if there's a possibility of changing the type - from incandescent to compact fluorescent or vice-versa you might get a better result.

Kevin

Ok thats what i thought it was. We studied this in physics and chem class last semester. My calc and diff eq professor was into photography but he doesnt know of gimp.. yet haha. Anyway i find it interesting that phones can pick up on that type of interferance. Electricty and magnatism is amazing haha.

We will try with the point and shoot. Oh and we are using a full spectrum incondescent bulb. 60 wat.

Thanks

thanks odin for the way awesome links for my camera. Way awesome and should be stickied

I d'led Focus Blur and tried to compile it.
Gave up when I discovered that it expected gcc-3.
My Linux is well into gcc-4.

But I discovered that G'Mic has it too ( and probably better).
You can find it under "Degradations -->Blur [depth of field]".
Tried it and you can move the sharp in focus part anywhere you want.
Lots of other adjustments too.
Gerard.

I had no problem compiling it with gcc-4.8. I just had to delete the two #include lines in src/aaa.h and substitute a #include <glib.h>

Thanks Saul,
I made those changes and make got a lot further before it errored out.
I then used "LIBS=-lm" with ./configure and it finally installed.
What that does I don't know,saw it in one of the comments in the registry.

What Focus Blur does is different from the gmic plugin I wrote about earlier.
There's no way to have part of a picture in focus like with gmic.
You see the progress bar moving but the picture doesn't change.
It's too old for 2.8.10 I guess.
Gerard.