Exploring digital painting with open source software. I did three sketches this last couple of days with My paint. Inspired from photographs I did last february.

Last February I took part in a scientific mission to Morocco as a photographer. My mission was to produce images by following the scientific to explain their work. With my colleague Beatrice Pellegrini we also worked together to tell a story as a blog. Beatrice was responsible for writing the article. I was in charge to update the blog and integrate my images.

You can see the blog here: http://www.pwagneur.com/blogmaroc/

For this job I decided to use only free softwares, mostly for practical and ethical reason. I do not regret this approach! I want to share that experience with you.

The first thing to do was the instalation of  my computer. What I need is a very light computer, to carry it up easily. My choise was a 10″ netbook. Then the operating system need to be rock solid, reliable and open source, so I installed Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) on a 500 go hard drive with all the graphic software I need.
First Linux is a free and open source operating system. It can be  bootable from a usb key or SD card ( very usefull if your hard drive crash ).

When you make a lot of pictures in a day, the evening you need to transfer the images on your computer. To do this I used a very nice software called Rapid Photo Downloader. It works very promptly. If you shoot photos an videos on the same card, it will separate the files in two different folders. It will also help you to backup your pictures on a external hard drive.

To manage my pictures i don’t use a truly open source software, but Picasa. I like the simplicity of it. you can easily organize your pictures with it, and export them in smaller sises. You can easily install Picasa on Linux Mint with the software manager.

Then when I need to edit picture I use GIMP. As I use Photoshop everyday, since 1997 !  when I use Gimp, I find it fun, it’s a kind  breath of fresh air. I  have to find new path for my creativity and it is very stimulating.

Well that’s it. Next I will explain you how to publish you picture with a free and open source blogging tool and content managing tool as WordPress.

Some more pictures in Donegal’s skies gallery

It was a stormy day here in Ireland, so I made a selection of skies  during my trip

MyPaint 1.0.0 is released, I tested it this week-end ( thanks to the rain ). Free software for a free hand….

You can find a good review here:

http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/mypaint-1.0-there-can-never-be-too-much-awesomeness

Some pictures I made some days ago.

And a small videoclip about a radio-controlled glider the Rhoenlerche KA4 . I made the video with a Panasonic GH2,  the editing on linux with Openshot.

Openshot is a very nice  open source video editor, powerfull and simple.

http://www.openshot.org/

Bat.

Still playing with MyPaint

around midnight I crossed a hedgehog