Learning
Image Editing 3 : Colour Select with Seashore for Mac
Image Editing Videos
I’ve been asked if there are any more image editing tutorials after having published image editing lesson 1 layers and image editing lesson 2 the clone tool so here’s lesson 3 which looks at the colour select tool. The use of gradients is also introduced at a beginners level. Seashore free image editing software for Mac is free and open source, it fills a sizeable niche doing much more than iPhoto but being simpler and a lot less expensive than photoshop.
If you’d like to try this exercise using the same example you may download the picture used below in various sizes from the Flickr photo page.
Image Editing lesson 2 : The Clone Tool
The second video tutorial in this series about image editing concerns the use of the Clone Tool. In the first lesson we looked at image editing with Layers, and again I’m using the Seashore free image editing software for Mac but the same principles apply to many other image editing software packages.
Image editing with the Clone Tool
One simple use of the clone toolis to extend some background over part of an image that doesn’t fit in, effectively making some obtrusive feature vanish. The limitations to this are that the background has to be something relatively uniform. If you want to try your hand at editing the photograph used as an example in this tutorial then you will find it here on Flickr with a creative commons license that allows derivatives to be made and published, with attribution.
Image Editing Lesson 1 : Layers
Seashore image editing Video
On request I’ve made some Image editing tutorial videos and this is the first in a series of at least five. Lesson one is an introduction to using Layers. Layers are essential to the construction of drawings and can be used in a similar way when building up effects onto photographs. They make it much easier to come back and change or redo image effects later by leaving each stage intact – a process called non-destructive editing. Anyway, here’s the video from youtube, I hope you will bear with me and keep watching, it gets much more useful after a bit of a slow start I know that – and your comments and reviews are very welcome both here and on the youTube page.
Free image editing software for Mac
The software I’m using is called Seashore and it’s an open source image editor for Mac using the native Cocoa interface, so it feels like a proper Mac application, not a migrated one.
You can download this free software from Seashore at Sourceforge. If you find that iPhoto doesn’t do all that you want and photoshop is just too big and cumbersome then Seashore could be the image editing application to get you started on acquiring some really useful skills.
Future image editing Tutorial Videos
The next four tutorials will cover:
- Using the clone tool effectively
- Selecting colours and applying changes
- How to photograph a ghost
- Subtle use of tinting
If you’d like to receive notice when these are published then you need to subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog and join the newsletter (see sidebar)
School Of Everything
Last night at Channel 4 in Horseferry Road, London The School of Everything launched. I’d heard about school of everything from various places over the past year, and gathered the idea is to encourage informal learning about subjects that people wish to learn more about, rather than agendas to promote qualifications and assessment. So people with a need to learn can be put in touch with people who have some knowledge or skills to share, so it’s a matching service.
Upon arrival at the school of everything homepage, you are greeted with the simple slogan in large bold type “Learn more”
and then you get the chance to either sign up as a person, or as a teacher.
Within the UK, this might provide a vibrant alternative for all sorts of learning which are no longer covered by the run down local authorities’ adult education sectors. The school of everything also has ambitions to become a well populated international website on the global startups scene.
Enterprise RSS?
I’ve clearly got a lot to learn about Enterprise 2.o. For example, what exactly is the point of standardising on one mandated brand of RSS reader software for every employee in an organisation?
In my understanding an RSS reader is a personal productivity tool, a way of organising the way a person works with their chosen reading matter. But people do not all consume information in the same way. Some like to organise everything into neat folders, others prefer to have everything in one big pile with the latest at the top. Some like to quickly scan through everything and then deal with the most important first, others prefer to work through their incoming notifications one at a time. You get the picture. There are also preferences for the style of presentation, because some people have different eyesight capabilities. For different folk, certain styles and coloured fonts work better than others or they need specific colour backgrounds to work from. Some like three panes visible at once, others a single paned window. Some work with one highly customised computer, others need to be able to log in from anywhere on a variety of machines.
So I can’t work out yet what would really be the problem facing an Enterprise IT department if people were allowed to choose for themselves which RSS reader they prefer to use. What are the benefits of standardisation, and to whom?
to Wikiversity or not to Wikiversity? Vote now.
I noted with interest when the Wikiversity project started up last year some time, wondering how quickly it would develop, and if the emphasis entirely on content rather than process ( roughly an opposite position to that taken by Ultraversity ) would prove problematic. Now it seems there is a need for a vote in order to justify the very existence of the project amongst wikimedians. I haven’t been following the debate and I may be incorrect in surmising that the essential question seems to revolve around whether the wikiversity is a premature distration from the wikibooks project, or a larger project which will encompass wikibooks within it. It’s always interesting to see how people attempt to constitute rules for online voting though.
Voting rules:
1. Voting starts on 15 September 2005 at 00:00 UTC. You can still translate the voting instructions and the proposal page into other languages after the start of voting.
2. To vote, you need a registered account here on Meta with a link on your meta user page to the user page on the wiki you edit most.
3. Voting will end on 1 November 2005 at 00:00 UTC (voting may be extended one week if deemed necessary).
4. The proposal needs a two thirds (2/3) super-majority in favor in order to be passed to the board for consideration to start as a beta project (the higher the support, the shorter the ensuing beta period will be).
5. If, after one week of voting, there is more than 90% of overall agreement, and more than 10 votes, the project can be launched immediately, pending approval of the Foundation board.
6. NOTE: This is a vote to determine if Wikiversity should be started as a Wikimedia project at all in any language. Whether or not Wikiversity will be started in your language will be determined separately if this vote succeeds and if the board approves the project.
You can only vote once. Please read the full Wikiversity proposal before voting. You can ask questions about Wikiversity on the #Wikiversity IRC channel (irc.freenode.net). If this vote is successful and the board approves the creation of this project, then de.wikiversity.org and en.wikiversity.org will be launched as experimental pilots. After 6 months the board will review the progress of these pilots and determine if they should become beta projects, shut down, or if the pilot period should be extended. If the board approves Wikiversity as a beta project, then at that point other language versions could be launched as betas. Existing Wikiversity projects in languages other than English and German will continue on Wikibooks as a temporary home, and development can continue there until after this beta period is over. No new Wikiversity projects should be started in other languages on Wikibooks. During the voting period you may change your vote. If you choose to do so, please remove your previous vote. Voting both yes and no will be removed from both.
Should we launch the Wikiversity project as described on Wikiversity?
Please indicate by your vote if you would be interested in participating in this project
Robots.txt, mediawiki and Google Sitemap
I used to have my ukcider mediawiki excluded from most search engines through a robots.txt file which looked like this:
User-agent: * Disallow: /wiki/
but then I decided I’d like to have another go at allowing the Googlebot to index some of the really useful content which has been building up there recently, so I removed the robots.txt file for a few days and monitored carefully.
What appears to be happening is that the googlebot visits about once per day and spiders a little further down into the Wiki each day, but using up an ever increasing amount of bandwidth as it does so – not good. So the list of french cider producers can already be searched for, but the Asturian Campsites – not as yet.
My own webstats and research told me that Googlebot can get caught up in a wiki site, spidering all of the previous versions, page history, user contributions and so on, and if you are paying for the remote hosting then this needs to be avoided. So rather than disallow /wiki/ I’ve disallowed “oldid” and “contributions” for now, and maybe I’ll tweak it a bit later or go fishing for the definitive mediawiki (not pretty URLs) robots.txt configuration. Meanwhile in my travels, I came across a reference to Google sitemaps which should allow me to tame the over eager googlebot some more. I’ve included data to the effect that the site is updated weekly, which should help towards my goal of having deep-linked pages listed on search results without having all the bandwidth used up by spiders.
Googlebot is not the only search engine spider, there are many others ( such as the enigmatically named “inktomi slurp” it’s just that the Gb is probably the most important and also the most resource consuming.
BA (Hons) Busking
Year Three of Ultraversity‘s ground breaking online degree consists of an Action Research project devised by the student based on our own circumstances.
Working Title: Busking for improvement
Context:
It’s two months since my short term contract at Marsdon School wasn’t renewed, and there’s no sign of any fees coming in from my new IT consultancy business yet, so in desperate need of a bit of liquidity, the clock turns back thirty years: I picked up my old guitar and headed down town to work as an itenerant street singer (busker)
The Problem:
Busking in London is hard work so: how can I increase revenue and play less hours while still paying the bills?
Action:
I will make a series of busking expeditions each of a fixed time, trying out different techniques which I think might increase the takings. Based on an assumption that I perform best when I’m enjoying the songs I will also record how I’m feeling about the session every 10 minutes or 3 songs (qualitative) as well as counting the money, both in total and as sets of different denomination coins. (quantitative)
Participation:
In a further cycle of the enquiry I will employ the services of an assistant whose job is to hold the hat and collect the money (a bottler). The bottler will be invited to make suggestions for further cycles and we may make joint decisions on the fly about the playlist according to which songs appear to be going down well (emergent action). With adequate assistance it may be possible to collect video data as well. By convention, the takings will be split 50/50.
Audience:
The exhibition will be presented live to a populous but frequently changing audience of strangers, so I will need to have good mechanisms in place for collecting feedback data from a small self-selected volunteer sample of people who are willing to stop and leave comments.
Literature Review:
None, because “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (Zappa, 1974)
Potential for further cycles.
Plenty. For example the location could be changed to Paris (via Eurostar) or the entire music element could be dropped and replaced with an empty vodka bottle and a dog on a piece of string to see if takings go up or down.
Ethics:
In consideration for audience sensitivities there will be no Simon and Garfunkel.
Tachnorati Tags:
ultraversity,
busking, actionresearch,
music
You and your action research project
You and Your Action Research Project
by McNiff, Lomax and Whitehead
is recommended by Eve in preference to Robson.
available from Amazon both new and second hand
ultraversity
ALERT e-portfolio problem
The following needs to be shouted from the rooftops in order to avoid losing students’ work and mistakenly marking incomplete assessment products, which by all accounts has already happend.
“All folders you create in your File Cabinet are ‘ghost’ folders – they don’t really exist. Folders are for you to help you organise your work. If you upload documents with the same name, the latter upload will replace the older.”
[..]
“As I said above, folders are not real items; use different names for your documents otherwise your older work will be overwritten by the newer upload.”
The implications of this may not have sunk in to everybody at Ultraversity yet.
Say you create a folder and call it MODULE-1
then upload some work into waht you think is MODULE-1/intro
MODULE-1/main and MODULE-1/conclusions
You hand that in to be marked, then start work on module 2.
If you create another folder called ACTION_ENQUIRY-1 and then upload a file into it called “intro” it will overwrite the file called “intro” which you thought was all safely tucked away in MODULE-1. You may well not notice this. The person marking your work might not even notice, and you get back a coversheet which says “This work is good in parts, but doesn’t hang together very well”.
Pretty serious, huh? Or maybe the explanation from technical support is all wrong, in which case somebody will let me know and I’ll delete this entry.
ultraversity
Thanks for reading Andy Roberts articles about Learning on Darnet
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Catch me on 
