Collage Making App - Design Sketches

While trying to put together a collage yesterday showing an amusing sequence of shots of a silvereye swallowing a ball of fruit it had yanked from a nearby fruit from the Autumn Birdy Berry Tree, I was reminded yet again just how frustrating this process is, with practically none of the tools out there really letting me do what I need + want (or at least none of the ones I currently have access to). Sure, I could ultimately bolt this together using some scripts / command-line tools, but it's a bit of a pain iterating on visual stuff like this that way.

 

My Requirements / Process-To-Automate:

* 1) Arrange my chosen images in a line, side-by-side (with ability to reorder them, add/remove items in this lineup, preview different combinations, etc. to get the flow of images right)

   NOTE: You can somewhat do this with existing tools, but it's always *a pain* to do  (and in some, it requires starting over / creating multiple draft solutions)

* 2) Allow bulk cropping the width of these to just an interesting section 

   NOTE: This requires ability to interactively preview + see the effects of such cropping, to make the iteration process fast + painless. This practically rules out all the command-line / scripted approaches. Also, no simple collage maker tools come close to even considering this possibility.

* 3) Allow ability to adjust vertical alignment on each of these individually (to fix framing differences) then v-crop any messy / scraggly bits on either side due to image sizing differences

   NOTE: Same story as above with #2

* 4) Make the canvas fit the whole strip of images (i.e. typically a very wide but not very tall image), at the highest resolution possible (from which I can then compress / resize as needed to satisfy upload constrants)

   NOTES:

        i) This last step in particular *always* manages to stump most tools out there. I get it - those are all optimised for the Insta / FB / etc. folks who have fixed "square" templates to fit their shit into. But, I don't particularly care about that when doing this.

        ii) This is actually a major gripe I have with most of our "creative" digital tools too - from painting apps to music scoring systems: i.e. The need to know and specify up front a "box" that will be big enough to fit whatever you're trying to do into (and if not, to then continuously grapple with various resizing + re-fitting tools to get more space to work in).  In that sense, that's one of the things I'm particularly proud of with Grease Pencil - that it provides an infinite canvas, free from these constraints (and is why I use/used it as my drawing tool) :)

 

Hence, I finally decided to bite the bullet, and see if I could hack together a solution for this.

Mirrorless Camera Observations - A Few Months In (Part 2 in Series)

As a followup to Part 1, here are my observations on the mirrorless camera having used it for a few more months (and for long periods instead of my old DSLR).

 

Pros:

Unfortunately, this list is currently still a lot smaller than it should probably be... especially given the price tag on this thing.

1)  As mentioned last time, the overall improved sharpness + richness of colour range the sensor are capturing are a definite improvement. Especially loving being able to use decent / normal-ish shutter-speeds that I want to be using at night, and *still* getting the shots with reasonable quality is something that's been a real benefit of using this at night and/or in marginal lighting conditions

2) As expected, when dealing with sharply varying lighting conditions (e.g. shooting birds in a backlit tree, where taking one step to either side can land you in a patch of bright sunlight + a different exposure), having a digital viewfinder is a real improvement as it allows seeing in real-time the exposure changes. Also, just having this all be via a digital screen vs sun-rays passing through a zoom lens direct to eyeball is a real safety measure that's good to have. Same too the ability to use the viewfinder while recording video. Basically all the expected benefits of shooting with a mirrorless camera (and subsequently having "live view" in the viewfinder) are proving to be as I epected

3) When it works, the auto-focus is good for tracking moving objects - Operative word: "when" it works... More on this later.

4) Having 3 (or actually 4, if counting the one on the new-style lenses) dials able to be used for controlling various settings is a big improvement on only have 2! Particularly as the third one can now be mapped to controlling ISO in manual mode, making that mode actually useful if you want to lock in camera behaviours with the other 2 then use ISO to get the desired exposure (i.e. typically underexposing relative to what the camera's metering things the scene requires)

Cons:

This list is unfortunately still a lot longer than I'd like, with a bunch of these being ever-frustrating things that grind you down everytime you use it. (Nothing puts these into focus as much as just switching back to shooting on old DSLR for a change, and suddenly no longer having to deal with most of this crap)