We Had Another Quiet Day In,

in fact it rained on and off most of the day,

but both on Monday and yesterday I was a tad busy, I have often referred to Photoshop, but never used it, it is a hugely expensive piece of software that allows you to manipulate pictures, as far as our pictures go what you see on our blog is 99% what come out of the camera, just 1% or so having the horizon made horizontal or the picture cropped and even more rarely using the 'Auto Correct' the program I always use is Microsoft office 2010, but I thought I would try some photo manipulation, so I looked for an alternative to Photoshop and found GIMP, it is a free program and looks to do all that I want it to do, to manipulate a picture properly it is photographed in RAW, a setting on most cameras and if you are lucky your camera can be set to take a 'normal' picture and one in RAW so that is what I did as the start to learning about RAW photo manipulation, above what you see when you load two images one a normal picture, the other appears to be an unopened file, this is the RAW image and does not contain a picture, just information about the picture,

 but as always with me and technology GIMP did not recognise my RAW images, it appears every cameras RAW was not created equal, reading more it appears that the RAW image has to be changed to a PNG image, which also did not work as for some reason the image when it appeared was so small it could not be worked on, back to the books, I then found out that GIMP was missing a few important lines of code, it appears you had to add them to the program, which I did the program is called UFRaw, which I downloaded and added to the GIMP file, you know me, it did not work!

it finally appears that I had downloaded the latest UFRaw file, what I should have done was downloaded UFRaw 0.18, a much older set of instructions and it worked! if you look at the two images above, the top picture is the 'normal' picture you see when you look at it or print it, the one immediately above the is the RAW image, as you can see there are coloured curves and a histogram that can be altered to suit you taste, I am guessing the finished image can then be exported back to GIMP for final adjustments, but I have not got that far yet! this will be the only post for today as I am off early for my 8.00AM hospital appointment, after our evening meal we watched a few more Game Of Thrones and with that we were off to bed.