Darktable

After my post about my Wacom tablet and mediocre drawing skills, I thought I’d show you two more pics that I did just for my Flickr account.  Both of them were intended to teach myself about a wonderful piece of freeware called Darktable.  This is a photo processing program for Linux and Mac OS X (and vague Windows support), and it’s a rather marvelous piece of software.  You can do all types of interesting post-processing with it.  I’ve barely scratched the surface with the possibilities it opens up.

This first photo was taken when I got very interested with what you can do with point lights and the shadows that can be generated in SL with them.  Now, of course, I use point lighting all the time in my photos.  I even wrote up a very basic tutorial on how to set up lighting for a shoot.  I used Darktables to play around with the contrast to get the shadows to pop more and to add even more light coming through the window that I got with the photo I took in SL.

In the second photo, I used Darktable to desaturate the image and add photo grain, and again played around with lighting curves to get the look that I wanted and to darken the shadows.  I’m pretty proud of both results, even though they’re so different and similar at the same time (did someone mention “bum”)!