Found this in the photivo flickr group looks interesting ..

quote

Delaborator out only 15 hrs
http://code.google.com/p/delaboratory/


The goal of delabortory:

Dan Margulis is Photoshop expert, but the stuff he described is not photoshop-specific, you can achieve that in many tools, and I tried to follow his steps in GIMP, RT and gmic. The goal of delaboratory is to support everything Dan Margulis described.

about Dan Margulis and his methodes of prosessing raw's

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Margulis
delaboratory is a Free Software color correction utility, it allows you to modify color/contrast of your photo in a creative way - using curves, mixer and blending in different colorspaces (RGB/BW, XYZ/LAB, CMY/CMYK, HSL/HSV) with floating-point precision, each operation is stored as an adjustment layer and you can watch a realtime preview.
Most of the stuff can be achieved by using curves, color mixer and blending. Sliders like "brightness" or "contrast" or "levels" are just interfaces to curves, it's good for newbie but you shouldn't use "contrast" slider to increase contrast on your photo if you don't want to clip your highlights and shadows, curve give you full control.

The truth is that with mix of curves, mixers and blending you can achieve very interesting effects, and they will look much better than when drawing with brushes on your photo.

delaboratory should be used in the middle of the workflow - after RAW processing, before final retouch, I use it between RawTherapee and GIMP

functions.
"http://code.google.com/p/delaboratory/wiki/HowToUseIt" rel="nofollow">code.google.com/p/delaboratory/wiki/HowToUseIt


Did download it, will try to install and test it.

Update:

Install is a breeze on my Ubuntu natty (with the by some disliked, but by me beloved PAE kernel)

First remarks

0. It is very apha thoug:
1. it is lightning fast.
2. It seems to open a new road to manipulate colors indeed.
3. As he says the GUI is still primitive
4 **** i can't code as if this and Photivo could be merged :-P
5 have to play quite some time with it to give final verdict and see or it can fit in my Geeqie / Photivo workflow.
6 to bad i can't or don't know how to scale the curves window
7 It is very intuitive. the layers work exellent. Did do some on a Photivo processed image and a world goes open. The converstion utility is awsome.
8 it is very, very flexible.

I am very curious what others do think of it. Jos? Dr Pat? Steve?

did play some with it.

import Photivo processed image:



delab edit:





It is just a first try. and i don't know or i could do the same in Photivo. It seems the lab L curve has also some soften effect but that might be me. (or my Photivo workflow as that was very complex)

Though it is lightning fast for sure. and very intuitive. Update, it also has a kinda eye dropper.

To really get to work with it. I will need to study the Dan Margulis stuff.

It feels very powerfull. (end of quote )

Dan Margulis' name is huge in the Photoshop world PC. He's written several PS books (a lot of folk brag about him a lot on the forums I frequent outside GIMPChat that is). Not sure if he was involved with ACR but I can tell you it processes RAW files extremely fast and good. ACR is pretty much the only (and I mean only) reason I use Photoshop for my Leica captures. I've done some Pixelbender stuff too which is a very cool GPU accelerated plugin for PS. There is a stand-alone and not sure if you can use Shellout to call the stand-a-lone (stand-a-lone is free by the way).

Did someone succeeded in using ShellOut ?
I have only so many mistakes.
["Delaboratory", "\"/usr/local/bin/delaboratory\"", "png"] - Error
["Delaboratory", "\"/usr/local/bin/delaboratory\"", "tiff"] - Error

Hello,

Thanks for announcing it here
(I wasn't aware of this forum, announced it only on flickr and gimp talk).

I never used shellout, is it a way to call delaboratory from GIMP itself?
I will try to fix the problem when I will be able to repeat your steps.

The png won't work for sure, the tiff may be problematic if it has 4 channels instead 3 (it's already fixed on SVN).

PhotoComix you can't scale curves window, curves editor is not finished as you can see, but I really have no idea how scaling should work, because size of the curves panel is fixed (this is related to the way I store curve), the only solution I see is to define size of panel as 1000 and then downscale it to 500, 250, etc...

Hy Jacek
, that was a quote not my comment ,i didn't used so long to have a opinion except that i llike the originality of the project

ShellOut is a python script for gimp that allow to send a image (active layer or copy of the visible ) to a external program, and to get back in gimp the edited image at soon the other program is closed

...quite cool !

delaboratory 0.2 has been released

- Blur layer
- ND layer
- GUI improvements and bugfixes

I admire the pace of development. For one developer has to be hard work!
Maybe this is not the moment - but I will ask: do you thinking about the function SEND TO GIMP?

Can't wait for a 32 bit compile for windows.
How is Partha doing?

I am very happy. - It's already a Windows version.

http://www.partha.com/

Unfortunately, the use of send TIIF to Gimp - gives an error and closes the application (XP 32 bit).
The Widows application runs as fast as in Linux.

Dziękujemy Panie Jacku !
Thank you Mr Partha !

We are waiting impatiently for the next versions.

If anyone is interested this is the solution of the problem:
to call Delabolatory (0.5.9.2 beta ) in GIMP menu - adapted from an earlier version of Michael Munzert'a plugin Python (written for Photivo)
Limitation for Windows: Delabolatory not be in a directory whose name contains spaces - as default location C: \ Program Files \ Delabolatory change such as c: \ Delabolatory.
Delabolatory correct path to the program is part of the line 67 [path] - edit: opening plugin in a text editor (preferably Notepad + +).
Two versions of the plug: for Windows (Export this Delaboratory Win.zip) and Linux (Export this Delaboratory Linux.py.tar.bz2) in annex.

We should be releasing another beta soon. So, stay tuned to the gimp forum on Flickr. Please test out the new beta. We (that is Jacek and I) would appreciate any feedback.

Thanks,
Partha

I was going to try your 2.7.5 Partha but I have switched over to Fedora 16. I don't know if you can run that over there or not. There is just the 2.6.11 in the repository, I think.

Hi Molly,

No reason why 2.7.5 should not compile on Red Hat. Has been a long time since I used fedora. Let me know if you have issues compiling it.

Partha

@molly,
Most Linux distro's carry experimental software.
I'd suggest check Fedora repositories.
You might not find gimp-2.7.5 but 2.7.4 or 2.7.3 will be available.
Gerard.

I installed the newest release of Delaboratory.
A issue with the histogram.
Also there is no edit>Undo?
Will an Help>About be added in the future?

Hi Rod,

I see that you installed version 0.5. Can you install 0.5.9.3 beta and give us feedback on that? Some of your other questions are still work in progress with Jacek should be able to answer. I have already sent him an email.

Thanks,
Partha

Yes this is much better.Nice results too.
I like the export to Gimp-2.7 option.
Here are my two examples.

Inside Delaboratory



Result after Gimp-2.7 fixes



I like it quite a bit.

hello again

there is no "Undo" because one need to design what should it do, each operation is an adjustement layer, let's say you change the curve, then you hit undo, what should be the result of undo? move back last point on curve you clicked? move curve the the previous stage (which one)? rewind layer stack to the point when curve was not there? that's a question to think about

about the deer - I tried to implement zoom and it was working, however, I failed with good design of UI for it, I put it under mouse wheel but then I needed to move the view after zoom in and I connected that to mouse move with button pressed down, then I realized there is a conflict between zoom, sampler and curve markers, so I decided the best solution is to remove zoom support for now, I will back to it later

That is a good point.
Glad to hear zoom may be included also.Perhaps you could use the keyboard + for zoom in and - to zoom out?
Just a thought.

Thanks again for a great color adjustment program.I am looking forward to more upgrades.

zoom in and zoom out is not a problem, it can be +/- and it can be mouse wheel
the problem is how to move image when it is zoomed in, if you use mouse for that, then mouse can't be used at the same time for samplers, because it's quite confusing
I must resolve that out until introducing zoom again