Open source lomography

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Super-cheap lo-fi medi­um-for­mat plas­tic cam­eras with wide-angle lens­es and leaky box­es, like the famous Russ­ian Hol­ga, are all the rage for lomo photog­ra­phy. There’s a few ways to “fake” the lomog­ra­phy effect with dig­i­tal images using the Gimp and open-source, free soft­ware tools.

The first way is to fol­low any of the many Photoshop tutori­als on the sub­ject and try to apply them to the Gimp.

I’ve had good suc­cess using Flickr user tos/ultrapop/”>ultrapop design’s straight­for­ward tutor­i­al, which she has on this page with her beau­ti­ful fakelo­mo of the tos/ultrapop/2408734426/”>Palace of Fine Arts, San Fran­cis­co (one of the best fakelo­mos ever!); fol­low the step-by-step instruc­tions and try to apply them to the Gimp. (Not all com­mands and tools will be the same.)

There are oth­er Photoshop tutori­als you can use to base your work on, too: there’s one on
“Fak­ing the lomo effect” and anoth­er way, quite sim­i­lar. Anoth­er site has a toshop­tutorials.ws/photoshop-tutorials/photo-effects/velvia.html”>photoshop tutor­i­al on get­ting a “Velvia” look and toshop­tutorials.ws/photoshop-tutorials/photo-effects/lomography.html”>another one on lomog­ra­phy.

One of my favorites is part of the “two minute tricks” series (no. 14): Hol­gafy

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There’s a Photoshop lomo tutor­i­al that’s been rewrit­ten for the Gimp.

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Some tutori­als have been writ­ten specif­i­cal­ly for the Gimp. Here’s instruc­tions for fak­ing lomo with gimp.

There are actu­al fakelo­mo plu­g­ins for the Gimp. I’ve only had mod­er­ate suc­cess with them.

Plu­g­ins: tos.org/gimp-lomo-plugin/”>gimplomo.scm page, an updat­ed lomo fil­ter, lomo-gimp, a “Photoshop-qual­i­ty lomo plu­g­in for the GIMP”; and lomo­fu [tos/kmf/4916250/”>example].

But the the best plug-in of all might be this gimp 2.4 script that also mucks with the col­ors, giv­ing that ear­ly-70s look.

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For further reference

Lomo Fak­ers League (Flickr pool)

Get the book that details the phi­los­o­phy: [amazonify]1861542305::text::::Don’t Think, Just Shoot[/amazonify]

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