Last week I have had the opportunity to attend my first Libre Graphic Meeting conference, this year located in Leipzig (Germany). Not being much of a graphic person, I must say that I was sometime lost a bit in some of the talks (being during a presentation or at the coffee corner), but on the other side I have learned a lot! I discovered a whole new side of the Open-Source Software community working on low-level tools and algorythms for image and video manipulation. Meeting these people with such a deep understanding of computer science and photo, for example, was a really extremely enriching experience.
I have learned about image manipulation and the cool effects provided in gimp by the g'mic project. I have met some of the dev of the darktable and inkscape projects, these guys are doing a remendous work, kudos!
On the Friday, we had a presentation about the gooseberry project by the Blender foundation. If you have not pledged to help them, go do it now!. Their project is amazing and need more help!
Another amazing talk was Sebastian Koenig presenting us his work on reviving a medial manikin with Blender. Basically the story is that a museum in Leipzig (the GRASSI Museum für Angewandte Kunst Leipzig) had this old maniki (22.5cm tall) which used to be animated, you could move her arms, legs, fingers or toes but it got old and stucked. So the museum in collaboration with the university did some sort of scan of the manikin and they asked Sebastian Köning to see if he could reconstruct the manikin using Blender. The resulting movie is now on display in the museum next to the actual manikin. I found this research amazing both from a technical and a historical point of view! And icing on the cake, since they had the mesh to reconstruct the animation on Blender they have also been able to make a 3D printed replicate of the manikin giving it back its ability to move.
On the last day, I was able to attend a workshop offered by Tobias Ellinghaus darktable developer and Patrick David about image manipulation on darktable and gimp. I had to leave before the end but the workshop was really, really interesting. Patrick did a live image editing demo in gimp, performing it on photo taken just a few minutes before. I need to practice this a little bit otherwise I'm going to forget all the good tips that were given.
I could also discovered some cool project related to DSLR such as the Magic Lantern which provides a new OS for Canon DSLR, awesome right? There is also the entangle project allowing to remotely control your DSLR, quite handy for macro or astro photos.
I was also given the possibility to contribute to the party. gnokii and I gave a presentation about nuancier as a FOSS contributing and voting application for wallpapers. I think it was well-received and there is apparently already interest to update it to support font. In addition, I took the opportunity, during a lightning talks session, to present HyperKitty and its demo instance which also seem to have brought quite some interest.
All in all, this was my first LGM meeting, I learned a lot about the whole libre graphic ecosystem, met a lot a new people and was given the opportunity to introduce a couple of projects dear to me. I really enjoyed it and would advise it to anyone interested, even remotely, into libre graphic.
Thank you for anyone that helped me attend or enjoying it (Gnokii, Ryan, Garrett, Chris and all the others ;-))!