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Book

I wrote a book about editing photos using free software. The title for this book is “Beginning Digital Image Processing: Using Free Tools for Photographers”.

I have been using great open source software for editing all my images over the years. Many times I talked to other people about these programs but only a few knew about them and what they are capable of. After one of those conversations, I decided to write a book about these free tools so that they are known and used by more people.

The first two chapters are used to give the reader a solid introduction in photography and digital images. That way, everybody starts at the same level. The next chapter covers the most basic photo editing techniques, such as resizing or cropping. In chapter four, the concept of color in general is covered, for example white balance, brightness and contrast, hue and saturation, etc. In chapter five I describe some of the most important filters, such as noise removal, blur and the unsharp mask. Chapter six deals with photo retouching, such as red-eye removal, object removal, a.k.a. content aware fill, selective colorization, and more. Chapter seven talks about High Dynamic Range images (HDR) and how to create them. Chapter eight is about distortion correction, caused by the lens as well as the perspective. In chapter nine I teach you how to stitch normal images together to create a panorama. Chapter ten deals with movie editing and chapter eleven covers Canon’s Hack Development Kit (CHDK) which enhances some Canon point and shoot cameras. In the appendix are the instructions on how to install all the software that I use for Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu. In this book, I show you how to use Gimp and some of its plug-ins, Hugin, Imagemagick, Luminance HDR (formerly known as Qtpfsgui), UFRaw, Avidemux and ExifTool.

You can get a copy of my book from amazon

Note that the links to my book here are affiliate links, so if end up buying it, I might get some commissions from it.


3 Responses

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  1. kartik iyer says

    hello sir,

    I am new to image processing. I am working right now and doing a project on vehicle surviellance system where the video is captured at traffic signals and feed is given to the pc. then this video is to be filtered and converted into frames/images. then from those frames we have to extract how many vehicles are there using some algorithm. then we have to show how many vehicles are passing and which vehicles are passing. coding is in c++ using opencv libraries. I am finding it difficult on how to approach and which techniques should be used for filtering of videos and detection of vehicles in frames. please help me with this. this is very important project for me as this is my first project for evaluation of my job. save me sir.

  2. samontab says

    Hello kartik iyer,

    First, you should learn about statistics, image processing, computer vision, as well as machine learning. After you understand the basics of them, you should start learning about topics that may be useful for the specific problem that you have, which may include 3D projections, segmentation, tracking, estimators, action recognition, etc.
    Each of those topics contain different possible solutions to your problem.

    And well, I just assumed that the cameras and lenses that you are using are perfectly chosen, positioned, calibrated, etc., which is a whole other area.

  3. Chitresh Kaushik says

    Sir, I am an absolute novice , I am a computer science major. I am working on a project which basically depends on object tracking and image capturing , But I have no idea , where to start from. Kindly , help me taking my early steps in world of Digital image processing.
    Thank you Sir



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