Automatic script

[drummingpariah]

This is a little nontraditional, as most of you are using Lightroom/Photoshop and are doing your post-processing by hand and I'm not.

I spent a lot of time messing with GIMP and with Photoshop, basically just adjusting Levels/Curves and adding a watermark to my images. In my world, nanoseconds hold value. Every second I'm waiting for a computer to finish what it's doing to continue working is a wasted second. So, I decided to write a small script to do some hard-and-fast processing for the web. Basically, I just import all my raw photos into Shotwell from my camera, then Favorite the ones worth showing to anyone and crop them. I hit the EXPORT button, and I go grab some coffee. Before boring you with the details of what the script actually does, I'll show you the before/after. (click the images for high-res versions)

BEFORE


AFTER

Originally, my goal was just to automate the watermarking process, but I quickly realized that I was defaulting to the same series of actions and settings for virtually all images. If it was overexposed, I'd bring the levels down so the darkest sport was black. If it was underexposed, I'd change the curves so there was better contrast on the darker end of the spectrum and basically even the photo out. I'm sure everyone does virtually all the same things for pretty much everything.

So it corrects the exposure, turns up the contrast a little bit, runs noise removal, adds a faint vignette, intelligently scales it down to 1280x{keep the same aspect ratio}, sharpens slightly (somewhat intelligently, I cobbled together a short algorithm that seems to work well), then adds the watermark on.

I realized that it was running really slowly on my laptop (around a half hour for 25 images), so I set up another script to 'manage' the processing. It loads whatever I've exported onto my server, tells the server to run the processing script, then pulls the post-processed versions back to the laptop so I can review/manage them. So far, I've been satisfied with the results, and it seems to work flawlessly on any images that I did a reasonably good job of taking in the first place. It doesn't rescue shots that don't deserve to be rescued in the first place, though. Now the entire script goes through 25 images in 5 minutes, and 100 images in 8 minutes (the uploading process is the slowest part, so lots more images don't actually take lots longer).

It's certainly less artistic than spending time in a darkroom was, but I'd argue that sitting in front of a computer is less artistic than standing behind a camera, and this frees up a LOT of my time and stress, decreases my turnaround times significantly, and allows me to focus on taking better shots.

Thoughts? Feedback? I spent a lot of time going back and forth on whether the vignetting was too much, or if it should be a case-by-case basis, and I'm colorblind so the contrast increase might be throwing off the saturation values (the histogram seems to indicate that, but there isn't much serious color clipping). I'm interested to hear what others think of this process.

[4umfreak]

While the changes to the image are difficult to identify from the images posted, I love the idea of automating the basics. I have something similar to convert my raw images to jpg but haven't spent the time to add watermarking etc.

It sounds like you're using the same tools that I am and I'd very much be interested to see your script and how you've automated the tweaking.

[drummingpariah]

Here's the script, as it currently sits. It requires ImageMagick and it's certainly not foolproof (if you don't have ~/images/Working\ Directory/ created, it'll just explode... and I've set it up to ONLY process .png images stored in that folder. I'm not a fan of JPG images, typically)

#!/bin/bash
# Authored by Jesse O'Brien
# http://uptimefirm.com

if [ ! -d ~/images/Working\ Directory/processed_images ]; then mkdir ~/images/Working\ Directory/processed_images; fi;

#cleanup temp file, in case last process was interrupted
mkdir ~/images/Working\ Directory/.temp

photos='~/images/Working\ Directory/*.png'
for f in $photos;
do
	echo "Beginning processing $f"
	convert -monitor -filter box -background black -noise 1 -sigmoidal-contrast 4x45% -unsharp 4x0.5+1+0.05 -vignette 500x200-150-150 $f ~/images/Working\ Directory/.temp/$f
	echo "Creating PRINT source for $f"
	convert -monitor -filter box -background black -noise 1 -sigmoidal-contrast 4x45% -unsharp 4x0.5+1+0.05 -vignette 1000x200-150-150 ./$f ~/images/Working\ Directory/processed_images/$f
	echo "watermarking $f"
	composite -dissolve 75 -gravity south '~/images/Working\ Directory/Watermarks/drivendaily.png' '~/images/Working\ Directory/.temp/$f' ./processed_images/drivendaily_$f
	composite -dissolve 75 -gravity south ~/images/Working\ Directory/Watermarks/photopalooza.png ~/images/Working\ Directory/.temp/$f ./processed_images/photopalooza_$f
	echo "removing original $f"
	rm $f
	echo "***** Processing complete for $f *****"
done

echo 'Core processing complete, cleanup in progress.'

#cleanup temp file
rm -r ./.temp
echo "Finished cleanup. Enjoy your processed photos!"