How to change GIMP defaults?

[Walter Dnes]

On Wed, Jun 08, 2011 at 07:01:23AM -0400, aaron d wrote
> Stewart got it. Use the right tool for the job.
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 10:15 PM, Stewart Russell <scruss-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
> > I just use the crop tool (Scalpel) which doesn't have these limitations,
> > and has an optional aspect ratio if you need a particular shape.

  Imagemagick would be more useful than the scalpel tool.  Let me
explain what I do, and why I can't take the "obvious" shortcuts...

1) I start by opening a raw image file in GIMP with the UFRAW plugin.
As much as I'd like to, I *CANNOT* script the conversion by UFRAW to
PNG.  This is because each photo has a different histogram, and I have
to manually tweak the F-stop correction to push the histogram over to
the far right, while avoiding too much overexposed area, before
importing.  This is non-negotiable.

2) There are 2 reasons I crop...
  a) The raw file has an area of 4352x2868, but the rightmost 43 pixels
are "for internal use only", and they come out black.  So my first step
is to cut the image down to 4309x2868.  Just to add to the confusion,
UFRAW "helpfully" rotates the image to match the intenal camera sensor
from the EXIF data.  So the image sometimes comes out 2868x4352 and I may
have to crop the top or bottom, depending on how I was holding the
camera.  I defy anybody on this list to manually select the correct
4309x2868 area (let alone 2868x4309) on even a 1920x1080 monitor.  For
now, I've thrown up my hands, and...
- save the 4352x2868 image to a PNG file
- run the following script on it (I have separate versions for top or
  bottom cropping) "convert" is an Imagemagick utility.

#!/bin/bash
convert -depth 8 ${1} -crop 4309x2868 dummy.png
mv dummy-0.png ${1}
rm dummy-1.png

- open the cropped image *AGAIN* in GIMP and continue.

  b) If I'm shooting for personal use, I'll keep the big PNG or convert
to JPEG for emailing.  I also belong to a camera club.  They have a size
limit of 1024x768 for submissions, no ifs/ands/ors/buts... that includes
no 768x1024 submissions.  What I usually do is bin the image by a factor
of 4 down to 1077x717.  I still have to do some cropping.  Sometimes I
manually crop the image first, and then bin down the cropped image,
maybe by a factor of 2 or 3.  After that, I still need to make sure it
fits into 1024x768.  Manual cropping is *NOT* the right tool here.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
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