bash

You want a contact sheet with that?

Written by  on June 3, 2015

Slogan is like always: “If you are not ashamed of the first release of XYZ, then you waited too long or have no self-reflection.”

It would be nice to have a preview shaped like the original contact sheets of a HDR-film scan. So you could screenshot the thumbnails and print this.

Or you try the following script:

  • it takes all TIF from one directory (assuming they are HDR-scans from SilverFast)
  • creates thumbnails with a longer side of 400px into a separate directory
  • appends six thumbnails for each row and the combines all rows to a single picture. If the number of pictures does not fit, the last picture is repeatedly appended (this is necessary due to the negative conversion)
  • ‘negfixes’ them (negative conversion done by the great original script of negfix8 from JaZ99!)
  • spreads the contrast in two diffent approaches (check yourself which is your most liked version)

As a result you get something like this:

combinedSheet_negfix8_stretched1.00_scaled

As you can see: the black strips at the left and right side of the pictures still exist. But since I scan always the HDR-files with top and bottom cropped, the black borders don’t show up there. Time to change my workflow?

Download:

 HowTo:

  • download & extract the two scripts
  • open a bash-terminal an navigate INTO the directory with the HDR-scans
  • run “/PATHTOSCRIPT/createContactSheet.sh” and wait for 2 to 3 minutes

Future plans:

  • improve the structure of the code and add some more comments and make it less error-prone
  • full clean-up after the creation (by default; suppresable by param)
  • suppress the negfixing by param so also E6 (slide)-scans can be ‘contact sheeted’
  • make the script use the general temp-folder and put just the final two contact sheets into the target folder (so the data stays clean)
  • add the filename in the bottom-right as transparent overlay so you know which thumbnail belongs to which picture

 

edit 20150603: Just uploaded version 0.2 which improves performance a lot and cleans everything up and has a nicer structure!