No matter how good your camera is, taking a well-exposed photo of a high-contrast scene like a black bird on snow can be really tricky. Even if you switch to the manual mode and tweak the exposure settings, there is still a risk that you will end up with a shot containing under- or overexposed areas. One way to solve this problem is to use exposure blending. This technique involves taking several shots of the same scene or subject with different exposures and then fusing these shots into one perfectly exposed photo. Continue to read

Hello to all digikam and KDE fans!

My name is Gabriel Voicu, I am 20 years old and I come from Bucharest, Romania where I'm studying Computer Science and Engineering at University Politehnica of Bucharest. I enjoy programming, playing basket-ball and spending time with my girlfriend.

I was very happy when I saw that I was accepted to this year Google Summer of Code with the project "Reverse Geocoding and Improved Map Search" because I consider this feature very useful when talking about images geotagging.

Hello to all the great KDE people and especially digiKam fans!

My full name is Martin Klapetek, but everyone calls me Marty and I can be found on most services like IM or IRC by the name mck182. I'm 22 and I'm from Czech republic and ever since I started with Linux, I immediately become a huge fan of KDE (3.5 back then). I'm a terrible musician (playing guitar, bass guitar, sometimes even piano [you don't want to be there]), promising art painter and hopefully-soon-to-be graduated college student with bachelor's degree in Computer Science.

I've been accepted to this year's Google Summer of Code with project to enable non-destructive image editing and image versioning for digiKam.

I'm very keen on taking photos and I've been using Google's Picasa for organizing the quantum of pictures I've taken. But the Linux version was more and more unusable lately for me, mainly because problems with multilibs (I'm running 64bit system and Picasa needs 32bit Qt libs and I'm using non-official-distro Qt packages, so there were some conflicts) and also because I hate it's wine-ish look & feel (& speed) and non-integrationess. So I've decided to use something more KDE fashioned and the sight was set on digiKam.

I like Picasa's possibility to edit your images in any way and then anytime you come back and feel like it's not good enough, you can simply reset the image to its original state and start over. This is the feature I'd like to bring to digiKam during this summer. This will go along with feature for having multiple versions with different modifications of one image and easily switching between them.

The non-destructive editing will work fully automatized. Now when you do some changes eg. use some filters or adjust levels, you need to save your image first and if you just save, you lose the original. With the non-destructive editing, it will automatically create new version from the original and it will store all the changes there, all without bothering user about saving the image and without actually touching the original. Every time you switch to the original and start new modifications, it will create another version alongside with the first one. Each version will also be manually forkable to another new version.

That's in short my project for GSoC 2010. I'm very excited to finally do some real work for KDE and to contribute to the world of open source. I'm looking forward to work with the already-shown-to-be-awesome people from digiKam team and especially with Marcel Wiesweg, my mentor :)

I wish happy coding and lots of fun to all the accepted students. Let's make KDE proud of us :)

Marty

PS: More detailed posts will come when the real work will start ;)

Dear all digiKam fans and users!

digiKam team is proud to announce Kipi-plugins 1.2.0 !

kipi-plugins tarball can be downloaded from SourceForge at this url

Kipi-plugins will be also available for Windows. Precompiled packages can be donwloaded with KDE-Windows installer. See KDE-Windows project for details.

See below the list of new features and bugs-fix coming with this release:

NEW FEATURES:

Dear all digiKam fans and users!

digiKam team is proud to announce digiKam 1.2.0 release!

digiKam tarball can be downloaded from SourceForge at this url

digiKam will also be available for Windows. Pre-compiled packages can be downloaded with KDE-Windows installer. See KDE-Windows project for details.

Since a very long time, my TODO list included a complete review of digiKam Film Grain tool.

Last summer I saw bug #127321 an thought, this can be done by me (partly at least).
After some (successful) prototypic implementation, most of the time where spent into smooth integration in the existing
project:

• adding a solution for migrating from SQLite to MySQL and vice versa
• add possibiliy to start an own database server
• and bug fixing...

Because only a few persons trying out this work (which resides atm. in a dedicated branch), the most bugs are possible undiscovered.

So if you are brave enough to crash your whole existing database structure (images are not touched), have a little amount of free time or you would like
to have the future right now and you are able to compile your version by yourself: You are the right person :)

Dear digiKam users

Few months earlier I started to work on HTMLExport plugin and first two updates I made are mentioned in the TODO file or request on bugzilla.
The first one is showing template preview alongside theme description as shown in the next screenshot:

Dear digiKam users,

A new export plugin has been added to the Kipi-plugins development
trunk: an export to Piwigo plugin!

Some of you may not know Piwigo yet: it's a powerful web gallery based
on usual PHP/MySQL technologies. It's a good solution if you want to
self-host your photos and avoid third-parties services like Picasa or
Flickr. It can be compared to Menalto Gallery, which is already
supported by Kipi-plugins, even if I find Piwigo lighter and more
complete when it comes to browsing capabilities (hierarchical
categories, tags or chronology).

You will be forgiven for thinking that copyrighting photos belongs to the realm of the professional photographer. Even if you consider yourself an amateur, providing copyright and contact information for your photos is a prudent thing to do. Embedding copyright info into each photo may sound like a daunting proposition, but digiKam provides a nifty template feature which lets you create copyright templates and apply them to multiple photos in one go.