P. sent me a bunch of photos he’d taken for a client in Chile. The camera they have at the office isn’t exactly a Canon Mark III, and they were all taken inside, in the shop that has the lights up on a zillion-foot high ceiling; the shop that is set up for human beings with fully functional vision, working on gigantic locomotives, not for photographing them (or bits of mysterious equipment shoved back into corners). They were all very dark, he said, so he asked me to lighten them a bit. No big deal…adjust the levels (or curves, if appropriate), maybe boost the saturation a little if bright colours looked a bit washed out, save and send ’em back. I didn’t even need Photoshop for it (I gots teh GIMP sK1Llz!) I thought perhaps if they’d all been taken in the same place, and the subjects were similar, I could just run a batch process on them…except I don’t know how to do that with GIMP. I know how with P-shop, but couldn’t be arsed to reboot to icky-picky ol’ Windows  for something simple like that. I know GIMP can do batch processing, and I know it works from a CLI, but I wondered about a GUI, just out of curiosity. It turned out that his photos were unsuitable for batch processing anyway (too many different subjects of different colours), but I was still curious, so I looked for a plugin or something for GIMP. There is one called David’s Batch Processor that looked like what I wanted, so I downloaded the source and tried to install it. I have g++ and thought I had the GIMP headers to compile plugins, but when I ran the makefile, it wouldn’t compile. I didn’t bother reading the errors because P. asked me to re-do the photos (said they were still too dark**) but after I finished with them, I opened the makefile in gedit, just to see whether I could find the problem.

The first line in the makefile:

# all our Makefiles are lovingly handcrafted by our semi-skilled technicians

Hehe. Made me smile…”lovingly handcrafted”…”semi-skilled technicians”. I like nerd comment-humour. ♥

Turned out that I didn’t have the GIMP dev headers after all (I was sure I’d installed them at some point in time) and that’s why the plugin wouldn’t compile. Yep, that’ll do it! Once I got those, the plugin compiled just fine, and now I have a GUI for batch process actions in GIMP. Yay, me! 🙂

** I replied to P. and asked whether he was sure it wasn’t just his monitor because although the originals were indeed a bit dark, they looked fine on both of my monitors after I’d finished, and if I’d booted the laptop to look, they’d have looked even lighter (voice of experience). I re-did them for him anyway because I know him and I knew there would be long-suffering, “Why can’t you just do what I asked even if I know nothing about photo editing?” sighs emanating from his office, but whilst I was working on them, I got another message from him, saying he’d forwarded them to Adalberto and that they looked fine on his monitor. The reason made me laugh most heartily…P. was offered a new monitor a year or so ago, but refused and kept the one he had. Why is that funny? Just last weekend, I finally managed to convince him to retire an absolutely ancient CRT that he’d had here for…oh, if not eight years, it was close. The poor old thing was on its last legs, and was just plain burning out. The rich, dark red of his DG website looked like dried-to-brown blood, and what should have been bright white was grey. I’d tried once before to switch him to an LCD, but he complained because he didn’t like the way his games looked, and then one day, his XP BSOD’d, so he blamed the LCD (he knew better, of course, and so did I after I was the one to get stuck cleaning approximately four pounds of crud from his heatsink and fans) and went back to that godforsaken old CRT. This time, I think he’ll be okay with the LCD, and I hope so, because I not only dragged that huge, five-ton CRT downstairs, but I moved a bunch of plastic storage containers and boxes, and put it waaaaay in the back. My thinking was that if I put it out of sight and made it a pain in the arse to retrieve, he’d be too lazy to bother with it unless he absolutely could not stand the LCD (do I know my husband? YES!) Anyway, that’s what amused me so much about the photos at work today. He’d been offered a new monitor and refused, choosing instead to keep…his ancient CRT, which is burning out. He’s refused a new DVD drive, and the HDD I offered so he could have a second drive for storage is still sitting on the shelf in the spare room. He once told me he’d like to learn Linux, so I said I’d set him up with a dual boot, making XP the default and a KDE distro look enough like XP that he wouldn’t have any trouble finding stuff. When I asked him to backup his stuff and defrag so I could resize the partition and create space for Linux, he said, “Not right now,” and that’s as far as he ever got. What is it with that man and old computer stuff? Offer me something new and I’m all over it. Him? It’s like he’s married to the goddamned things or something! 😛