Dave Mainwaring 

Blogs from Mainwaring Publishing ...historic 2006

Satos and Gatos (dogs and cats)http://satosandgatos.blogspot.com/

Satos and Gatos of the United States of America !!! Share your pet's pictures, stories,and participate (post your coments). Send email to Dave mainwaring@rcn.com to be invited to be a member of the S&G blog. Members may post pictures.

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Model Boats and Ships http://modelboats.blogspot.com/

Boat and Ship Models display or powered by Sail, Steam or Electric power Scale and Semi-scale, Radio Control Sail Boats. Modelers of all ages and abilities are welcome to blog with us.

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Marine Modelers NewsBasket, http://marinemodelers.blogspot.com/

News, Announcements, Commentary -- learn, discuss, debate, share photographs! Marine Modelers and Model Ship Builders welcome.


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MainZone Publishing http://mainzonepublishing.blogspot.com/

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Kite Flying Breeze Chasers http://kiteflyingbreezechasers.blogspot.com/

BreezeChasers, Those individuals who enjoy the breezes and activities powered by the winds. Perhaps you have flown a kite , model airplane gilder, sailed a boat, or flown a sail plane. There is nothing so delightful as watching a kite riding in the breeze. You may send an email to mainwaring@rcn.com and request to a BreezeChaser bloggers team member. Visit www.breezechasers.com Breeze Chasers Online Kite Shop!.

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Tugboats and Towboats http://tugsandtowboats.blogspot.com/
Classic working craft
(and ship models)
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DimBulb Association http://dimbulbs.blogspot.com/

Dimbulb Associates is an collection of individuals taking a holistic "New Age" approach to finding the best solution to hardware and software needs -- a parody of high-tech equipment suppliers. Our moto: Complex solutions to simple problems

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MainZone International Bloggers http://mainzoneib.blogspot.com/

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Sailing Models Breeze Chasers http://sailingmodels.blogspot.com/

Share your model sailing pictures here. Radio Control Scale and Semi-scale Model Sail Boats of all types. Contact Dave Mainwaring mainwaring@rcn.com

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Newsbasket http://davesnewsbasket.blogspot.com/
Under Construction

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News-Basket
http://newsbasket.blogspot.com/
Under Construction

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Building Model Boat and Ships http://buildingmodelboats.blogspot.com/

Construction photographs, articles and discussions regarding model building. Coverage includes models powered by Sail, Steam or Electric power Scale and Semi-scale, Radio Control Sail Boats. The RC_models@mainzone.com is the companion on-line Internet e-forum. Visit www.mainzone.com/ You can become a contributor to this blog by writing to Dave, mainwaring@rcn.com

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Fishing Boats of the Northeast http://fishingboats.blogspot.com/
Working craft of the Northeastern United States

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MainZone Network http://mainzonenet.blogspot.com/

JustBlogIt with a simple right-click.

JustBlogIt with a simple right-click.: "The next time you find an interesting item to blog about, just select something you want to quote, right-click and JustBlogIt. You can also skip the text-selection step and JustBlogIt will do something reasonable.

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Model Boat Building Resource http://modelbuilding.blogspot.com/

Plans, snapshots, notes and resources for scratch builders

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Dave Mainwaring's Blog http://mainzone.blogspot.com/

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Laughing Mozzie http://laughingmozzie.blogspot.com/
-- Papier Mache Blog --
for Crafts-People and Artists

Papier Mache is one of the most amazing craft materials. This blog is for those who are beyond grade school.
We suggest you visit www.papiermache.co.uk/ where you will find all you need to know about papier / paper mache.
Crafts People and Artists are invited display their photos of projects (finished or under construction).
Contact laughing.mozzie @ rcn.com (remove the spaces)for information

Marion_Mainwaring_Publications

Marion_Mainwaring_Publications

Mainwaring, Marion

Overview

Works: 25 works in 90 publications in 7 languages and 4,426 library holdings

The Buccaneers : a novel by Edith Wharton ( Book )

35 editions published between 1992 and 2010 in 4 languages

The portrait game by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev ( Book )

Mysteries of Paris : the quest for Morton Fullerton by Marion Mainwaring

Murder in pastiche, or, Nine detectives all at sea by Marion Mainwaring ( Book )

11 editions published between 1954 and 1989

Murder at midyears by Marion Mainwaring ( Book )

6 editions published between 1953 and 1956 in English and Swedish

John Quincy Adams and Russia : a sketch of early Russian-American relations as recorded in the papers of the Adams family and some of their contemporaries by Marion Mainwaring

Youth and age : three short novels by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev ( Book )

1 edition published in 1969 in English

GIMP Hint

How to Make Skies Beautiful with GIMP

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Do the skies in your photographs look somewhat "blah"? So long as you take your photographs thoughtfully, you can make them pop with a few easy tweaks in GIMP, the renowned open-source image editor. These tweaks are also a great introduction to some of GIMP's more advanced features, such as layers, layer modes and layer masks. Here's how to do it.

Steps

Getting It Right To Start With
You can make your job much, much easier (or, rather, not impossible) by following a couple of steps when taking your photographs.

1. Shoot at a slow ISO speed, if your camera supports changing this. For point and shoot cameras, this should always be the slowest speed you have. If you have a digital SLR, this is less important, but you should still err towards using slower speeds. Our example used 100 ISO on an ancient Canon D30; more recent digital SLRs will be fine at much faster speeds. We'll get to the reason for this in a bit.
   
2. Use a graduated neutral density filter when taking your photos. Consider getting one if you don't have one. A graduated neutral density filter blocks out light in part of your photo; since skies are typically much brighter than whatever is below them, this allows you to get a more consistent exposure across your photo. But, if you don't have one, or you have no way of fitting filters to your camera or lens, don't worry about it; see the next step.
   
3. Underexpose if you're not using a neutral density filter. This can be by as much as a stop or two; anything that ensures that your sky does not go pure white (or largely so). The lost detail in dark areas can often be recovered later. Blown highlights (from an overexposed sky) can never be. The opposite is often true of film cameras; even massive overexposure does not result in blown highlights, but shadow detail is often impossible to recover. This is part of the reason you should shoot at a slow ISO; recovering shadow detail brings out noise. Also, the technique used here will bring out any noise that is in the sky, too. If your photo is already noisy (as it will be at faster ISO speeds), then the end result will be ugly.
   

Editing your Photo with GIMP

1. Open your image (File -> Open).
   
2. Create a duplicate layer of your photo. Open the Layers dialog (with Ctrl+L). Right click on the Background layer and go to Duplicate, or use the button.
   
3. Add a layer mask to your duplicated layer. Right click on the "Background copy" layer and go to Add Layer Mask.... Hit "Add"; none of the settings are relevant to you here.
   
4. Select your gradient tool. Press L to select the gradient tool, or bring it up from your tool. Go to the main GIMP window and ensure that the foreground colour is set to black, and the background is set to white. Ensure that the gradient is set to black-to-white (one of the ones called FG to BG).
   
5. Draw a gradient on your layer mask. Hold down your Control key (this ensures a straight line). Click and hold down your left mouse button on (or at some point above) the horizon line and hold down your left mouse button. Drag your mouse pointer to some arbitrary point upwards; you will have to experiment with this to see what works better for your photograph. Release your left mouse button. In the Layers dialog, right click on the "Background copy" layer and go to Show Layer Mask to ensure that you've done it right. Do the same again to turn off the display of your layer mask.
   
6. Set the layer mode to "Soft light" from the drop-down "Mode" list. You will notice that the contrast and colour of your sky has improved. This is what you want. We'll call this the "soft light layer" from here on.
   
7. Duplicate your soft light layer to taste. Zoom to 100% on your photo (View -> Zoom -> 1:1). Then, in the layers dialog, right click on your soft light layer and go to Duplicate Layer. Do this until either you're either happy with it, or until you start seeing large blocks of colour (when you hit the latter, this is sensor or film noise taking its toll).
   
8. Merge your layers by right clicking on any layer in the Layers dialog and going to Merge Visible Layers. Hit "OK"; none of the options are relevant here.
   
9. Kick up the saturation in the sky a little. This is optional. Use the freeform select tool (hit F) to loosely select the sky. Go to Select -> Feather, use a Radius of roughly 1%-2% of the height of your photo in pixels. Go to Colors -> Hue/Saturation and slide the Saturation slider over to the right to taste. As earlier, it might be best to zoom to 100% in order to ensure that you're not bringing out too much noise in the process. Hit "OK" when you're happy with it.
   
10. Recover the shadow detail from below the horizon. You can skip this step if you used a neutral density filter on the sky. Duplicate the bottom layer and add a layer mask, as we did in steps 2-5; except this time you want to do it backwards by drawing the gradient starting at or just above the horizon line, and ending at some point just below the horizon line; the end result is that the ground will be in the white area of the layer mask, and the sky will be in the black area. As before, you'll have to experiment with this. Set the layer mode to Dodge or Screen. Duplicate it to taste, then merge them, as before.
    
11. Do any other processing that you see fit to do. In our example, the sky was crudely de-noised a little with a selective gaussian blur (Filters -> Blur -> Selective Gaussian Blur), then the area below the horizon was sharpened (Filters -> Enhance -> Unsharp Mask), and finally a single pass of Harry Phillips' "tone mapping" script was applied.
    
12. Admire the finished result. Or don't; go away for a few minutes, come back and compare it to your original to see if it really was an improvement. Chances are good that it was; but it doesn't hurt to go back to the start and experiment with different layer masks, and so on.
    

Things You'll Need

• A camera, and a photograph with plenty of sky in it taken therewith.
  
• The free GIMP image editor; see How to Install GIMP.
  

Tips

• Using Hard Light or Overlay instead of Soft Light for your sky layer can give better results.
  
• For digital SLR users: When you take your photo, try using center weighted metering. Point your camera at a bright part of the sky and hit your auto-exposure lock button. Then recompose and take your shots. This will cause the sky to be properly exposed.
  

Related wikiHows

• How to Install GIMP
  
• How to De-Haze a Photo with GIMP
  
• How to Take Better Photographs
  

Sources and Citations

• The idea of underexposing a shot on digital cameras and fixing the lighting later came from Ken Rockwell's Adding Dynamic Range to Any Digital Camera.
  
• The idea of using a soft light layer with a layer mask on skies came from Sam Knox's brief Photoshop tutorial.
  

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Make Skies Beautiful with GIMP. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Mainwaring Coat of Arms 

Dave Mainwaring's Blog launched 2004.10.23

Web Sites published by David L. Mainwaring

Nix's Mate Dogs, Books,Forums

ListenZone,
A hub for the hearing impaired
MainZoneCafe, Resources, Books, modelships, forums


TangoXray , Landscape & Garden Resources