My name is, let me introduce my team, my name is Nilesh Singh, Shailika and Meenat Chilab. Now here we are going to present you something about what exactly Android and what you can do, you can do something with the Android. Now, here basically why we require Android, first of all, everyone, everyone having phones like now in current age, in current age we have 60 percent phones we have with the Android operating system. You can say in any Galaxy mobile, Samsung Galaxy mobile, or now in like in Akash tab there is also some Android based operating system. Now we will see first of all what is Android, this is Android like who is invented and when it is invented first, Android applications, so what is Android, Android is the operating system, Google operating system here based on which language, Java programming language. If you know something about Java, you can easily code, you can easily develop an application in Android, any Android based application you can design, Android is currently primarily developed by Google, Android is software environment built for mobile device and tablet computers. See this mobile devices and tablet computer is what like I can, this is the tablet and all of you having mobile and you are maybe you are the 60 percent student having this Android based mobile, okay. Now in July 2005 Google acquired Android incorporation, a small startup company based on Palo Alto CA, four of the Android people, they went to work at Google, Google company, Android has been available as an open source since October 2008, okay now there is a one very good thing, we can design whatever the application in Android, okay and if you want to search something in Android to copy, take some code or information about Android, that is totally free, you will get from the website. Now here are some updated history of your Android versions, okay first is Android 1.5, which one is first Android version, okay there is beta, okay beta version is there, okay it is developed in 5th November 2007, after that Android 1.0, okay and it is developed in 23rd September 2008 and after that all this Android versions, okay Android 1.5 is code name as you can see that Cupcake and the API level, we have API level in this that is 3, okay and developed in 30 April 2009, Android 6.1, okay do not on that API level is 4, okay so step by step like on that the year by year we have something we have developed something in Android, okay right now here we are using Android 2.3 because maybe it is not clear but in our Akaast update we are going to use 2.3 Android version, okay so that is why I am highlighted this one, after that 3.0 is there 3.1, 3.2 and 4.0 there are lots of versions like after this 4.0.2 there is one more version, okay there is 4.0.3 is also there, okay the 4.0 is Ice Cream Sandwich, the code name is that, okay it is developed in 16th October 2011, obviously this we have in lots of operating system in our current age, you know the windows is there, Linux is there, okay but why Android we are using, why we are using Android, okay there are lots of features but why we require Android, look Android is basically here we are using a DVM, DVM is a, what is DVM, Dalvik Virtual Machine, okay here we will see this later what is exactly Dalvik Virtual Machine, first we will see some something about like features of Android, okay we will cover this topic later after we have one slide one or two slide for the Dalvik Virtual Machine and why we require Android, okay Android operating system to work on Android operating system, we will see later, first we will see this features of Android, okay while using in your tablet or if you are using your tablet or phones, okay why we require, so very first one is application framework, what is that is enabling reuse and development replacement of component, what is reusing, reusing what is what exactly, everyone knows of object oriented concept, reuse means we can reuse that object oriented terms, we can reuse that code also, we have like we can reuse the same thing, we can apply that concept in Android, okay now there is one Dalvik Virtual Machine optimized for mobile device, we will use this VM, virtual machine for mobile operating system and tablet computers, okay so we will see this Dalvik Virtual Machine, so next slide, now integrated browser based on the open source webkit engine, what is webkit engine, webkit is the engine it is enable you to enable your browser, okay to rendering your websites, okay apart from that like the webkit is having the features of Apple, this I can say that Apple the name is Apple Safari and Google Chrome browsers, this webkit have engine supports, Apple Safari and Google Chrome features, okay so that is the webkit engine, so you have to like if you want to know detail about the again Google Chrome and Apple Safari then you have to search everything from the net, okay optimized graphic, another this nine in this, okay in Android we have some graphics things also, we can develop some 3D or 2D things and we have some input like UI, okay in 3D and 2D, so that we can support here that Android is supporting that things, in a SQLite if we want to store something, if you want to use databases at that time we can SQLite we can use, okay for the database purpose. Now again Android is supporting some media framework, yesterday we have some discussion about like media framework, here you can see that almost all kind of media frame like Android is supporting all kind of media framework almost you can see here MP4, MPEG4, S264, MP3, MP3 is for the audio and ACC, AMR what is AMR, all these are we will use for the media and okay that's images is also there, so we can see that JPEG, PNG, GAF, JPEG everything we can use with Android, okay means almost 90% media frame, media like Android can support, okay next one is GSM, telephony, okay in this we have some features to we can make a phone call also in Akash tablet maybe I heard like this I heard something about like in Akash we have some telephony things, we can make a call also then there is a Bluetooth 3G and Wi-Fi, all of you know about what is Bluetooth 3G and Wi-Fi then camera, GPS, compasses and accelerometer the main thing is reach, develop and environment including a device emulator tool okay here for reaching that development environment we have some inbuilt things to run our application on your laptop or any machine we can run and based on that we can watch we can see that the particular result okay so we have emulator so apart from that we have tool bugger, debugger and memory okay there is memory and performance is very important in this Android because because of this DVM also okay DVM again if you are talking about DVM so there is we have something about we have to talk something about memory and performance profile okay and then plugins for the eclipse ID so we have some plugins for the for running Android we have some plugins so we have to install that on plugin that is a step-by-step you have to follow to configure your eclipse this is exactly your architecture of Android so don't see many thing here just see first there is application okay then next which one is that okay third one which one is that then Android runtime then Linux kernel okay so there are some steps okay when we are like when we want to know about the architecture of so we have to follow some step first we have to see that this application then application framework is there lots of things in Android okay so here the main thing in this Android runtime is important because here we are using DVM okay DVM is what Dalvik virtual machine so we'll see now what is exactly Dalvik version I'm focusing on that because it's very important in terms of memory in terms of speed and performance this is the Dalvik virtual machine and runtime if you write application in Java in this layer all your all classes file will converted into DEX file for DVM to execute now in this block okay your all class file will converted into D in which form DEX form what is that DEX form now so in there's the main thing is DVM so what is that DVM Dalvik is the process virtual Dalvik is the process virtual machine that is Dalvik virtual machine like your JVM in Java okay here we have DVM okay now in Google in now DVM is a registered based okay DVM is register basis what have you heard about like have you learned this micro processors something like that assembly label languages register is there accumulator BCDE HL some that those are 8-bit registers they are DBE sorry BCDE HL 16-bit registers SPPC all these are 16-bit registers so like I'm not again like this register base we'll see what is exactly what is use of this register base architecture now program are commonly written in Java as we know that if we want to develop some application in Android so we require we should know about something Java okay and compile to bytecode they are then converted from Java virtual machine compatible dot class file to Dalvik compatible DX file first we have to convert that into dot bytecode sorry dot class bytecode and then the dot class file and then that JVM will convert that into Dalvik compatible file that is dot DX now we'll see some differences between DVM and JVM DVM is what as a register based architecture JVM is what stack based now the assembly language students stack there is a stack and there is register so which one will be fast stack based or register based will be fast okay design to run on low memory okay this our DVM will is designed for the to run on low memory we can run our application on low memory also then here we have we will get the DEX file and in Java we will get jar file now stack based machine must use instructions to load data on the stack and manipulate that data and does require more instruction than register machine okay stack based JVM will require more instruction than more instruction than register based because when we are fetching one instruction okay suppose if I want to copy one instruction means one value to one variable okay at that time what we are doing for how many cycles we require so implement is in the high-level code but the instruction in register machine must encode the source and destination register and therefore tend to be larger we'll see one example based on this what exactly is this now yeah there's one more point the uncompressed dot DX file is typically a few percent smaller in the size than compressed jar okay listen this uncompressed DX file is lesser than compressed jar file so how can happen now here I'm giving some example there is more very small example based on C C program this is register based exactly not stack based so you will come to know how it will work okay there is a int a what I'm doing in this point in a is equal to 8 I'm copying this value 8 to a variable now a is equal to 0 what I'm doing in next statement statement what I'm doing again I'm copying another value to means to a variable now just think when I'm copying suppose let's think about the CPU cycle okay first is there is a one variable equal sorry a is equal to 8 it will take maybe two cycles two CPU cycles okay again for the next statement again it will take two CPU cycles for getting this zero result in a now here I'm shuffling these things I'm using another logic for that your int a is equal to 8 again I'm copying this a to a variable after that let's mean XOR I'm doing I'm XORing this a to a with a so what I'll get so how much CPU cycle to only here I'm using two CPU cycles so it's lesser than that previous one so now the arithmetic operation of XOR versus move is just faster than two three bus cycle okay it's not confirmed because we don't know about exactly the hardware level cycling about cycling okay it could be one also it could be two it could be three but it is like register based architecture is much faster than your much faster than your stack based because of that in our I any android phone or any tablet what are the exactly disadvantageous first is memory second battery okay that is batteries there third processor okay so which one is good stack based or register based so that is why we are using here android in android we have DVM something tell you something about kernel of android so normally in our android for android operating system our kernel based on Linux okay we are using Linux kernel in android okay so here some application components are like my colleague team member Shreka will cover everything about the activity service okay all these are what it's a component only okay so when we will give you the practical example what is use of this all this you will come to know properly this is a theory part obviously basic building android will be have some basic building blocks that will be the functional blocks while be designing or while be doing while be developing applications in android there will be some functional what functional blocks so these three are the these four are the basic functional blocks activities services content provided and broadcast receivers you will be going through detail so first activities activities nothing but what we are seeing on the screen that it will be an user interface so actually what what action or some function what something we have to do in android mean we have to write on activity normally in Java Java program we will be timing us a class we will be writing on class here the class we will be timing us activity so we have to extend that activity from means the class from activity on base class is there we have to extend that our class from that base activity class that android framework itself providing that base activity class then yeah activity will be having five stages it normally all applications will be all application or whatever the things we are taking there will be some stages for that application so here activity also will be have some step starting state is there then running state paused state or stopped state or destroyed state so we will be going through detail actually phone activities present or active in memory then we can tell us that activity is active then if it is paused state means if we are interacting with on activity at the time we have to attend for example in phone we are playing music player or something at the time we have we got on cold at the time now we have to stop that we actually we do not want to stop it just pause it so at the time this past activities is coming so it will automatically get paused because while coding we already said like that if on interrupt anything is coming it should go for pause state and the what the present activities that will execute once the present activity got over the paused activity will come into picture so in pause the activity actually it will be visible on the screen but the current the focus is not to that activity that is the thing but this stopped state is there in stopped state what it means it won't be visible to screen also focus also won't be there it won't be visible also so that is stopped then killing means if you don't want on activity we have to kill it like in memory we will be studying no operating system and all right like that only we will we have to kill the activity that either actually in a stream memory low situations processor itself it will kill the activity otherwise if you want we can manually do it also then we will be going through the activity life cycle so as I explained there will be activity we can start while writing an activity there is some method that on create that we will be we must write that because then only that activity will get create actually this is already available we can override it it will while be creating on activity that Mr. Nainath will be explaining how to create a program and at the time you will come to know while creating an activity this on create a method default by default it will get override then on start state these are the remaining stage stages as I mentioned in previous site in a previous slide so here we can come to know when on pause state I told now the activity comes into when we don't want on activity mean currently the focus we should deviate from that activity at the time it will go to on pause state and at the time see when we need this on pause mean sometimes some activity is running but other activity need that memory at the time only we will be calling that on pause of method but at the time see activity is no longer visible here yeah sorry this is when the activity I told it is the activity will be killing so they either the activity will be killing by the professor in low memory situations or we can kill at that time when it will be getting killed at that time only this this flow is going then again if you want to create an activity it will come to on create a method otherwise one more thing in either if we if we put an activity state is on pause or on stop state we if you want that thing again then on stop method we have to start it on restart but almost it will automatically will get called there is no need to start it by manually but for on stop method we have to give it a restart method we have to call on restart of method so the remaining the flow you can understand right first create it will be if it if you are going to on start state actually this on start method on resume method the central note compulsory for a pro for an activity this on create of method is the compulsory method with the along with self we can execute the activity but this on start of on resume this on pause this all are optional if you want then only we have to use it also on destroy this is at the last all activity will be getting getting into the stage of on destroy if you would on want while creating the activity itself this method will automatically over get overrated he will show that how we can actually create an activity this is on a word screen shot class then our on create of method will be there also actually this all with activity will be having we will be having on view actually in phone or either in August tablet or whatever it we will be seeing activity throne view we will be designing on view also how it should be look how it should look like that so that for a corresponding activity that that layout in layout folder we will be create giving on view also how it should look so that we can call using the second on view of method while writing a program or creating an activity to have some structure android programs have its own structure he will be explaining the structure handle at the time there is an android manifest file is there that is actually we are giving certificate to certificate or it is it is time does a certificate of that android file android program there we will be writing what are the actions or what are the activities we are using in that what are the either we are calling a service or activity or what has to receive or something what are the thing we are using all things we have to give mention there and get the permission we will be calling as permission here also see our previous activity and activity demo that we have written there in application we are this manifest file is for or this program is for I see put in this activity then the intent is nothing but if you are creating on activity we have to mention that for what activity it is created or if you are communicating from one activity to another activity we have to mention that for what thing we have communicated to the next activity or at the time we will be using the indents as the message objects so through that only we will be communicating between activities or services if from one activity if you want to call the service then at the time also we will mention in an indents object we will be mentioned what are for what purpose this activity is calling or what is the use I indents have two part what the action to be performed or what data it is going to operate then yeah for example it can be used with the start activity if you are using start activity there we can use intent then broadcast intent that will be for if you want to give a message to end their components of the device then okay we can use broadcast intent so it will be that through inside that intent we can mention what message we to give and so it will be getting to all components all other components then start service of intent that also an example of intent where how we can use intent this start service of intent means here with that start service will be getting started then bind service means from one service or one activity we want to bind and another service to by get bind into this activity or service at the time we can use this bind service of method at the time see indents there we will be creating service connection object then through that we can bind that particular service to the existing service and service service is nothing but if you want to execute something in background that we when we will be doing something we want something should be executed in the background that should not affect our what we are doing now at that case we can use services service will be mainly categorized window start service and bound service actually there is one more classification local service and remote service is there but local service is nothing but in between what we do in between some two or three service methods that is remote services it you have to look like in computer networks we will be remote communication and all it will be there now like that to some other device or something if you have to interact that the time we will be using remote service here the start service start service nothing but a service is started when an application component started by call it or start service of method we in activity we will be using one creative method but the start service of method also not compulsory here that I will be explain in the life cycle at that time we will get it now then yeah once the operation is done we can start it by itself or by ourselves or our service itself will get close then bound service means I told now we can bind it to another service for that only we are using bound service of method at the central you do not need actually a bound service can be implemented in three ways extending the binder on binder a class is there we can extend that binder class otherwise using messenger object otherwise use using android interface definition language three methods that and all in detail well coding you would not be using in a basic level right then yeah I have already mentioned that whatever the thing if you are creating a service or creating an activity or whatever the files or what we are doing whatever the things we are doing that we have to mention in that android manifest file because that will give the user permission sometimes while executing and all now some we will get some error because we did not put the user permission in that android manifest file so like that only here we created the in previous no no sorry I deleted that slide on update service yeah our service we created that service we are mentioning here previously in activity we mentioned the activity name like that here we are mentioning we created a service in program we I told now we have to call that service we are calling is our dot item star service of that star service method we are using that indent also we are passing what this service is going to do this update service dot will dot class will get affected with that indent then if you have to stop the service also we will be calling the item stop service of method they are also for stopping also we are passing on indent so the indent is actually the message that their action but also their data to which data it is going to act here update service dot class it is going to get affected then this is the service life service life cycle see here we can see the difference of bound service and the normal service in bound okay first we will go through normal service the component called start service of method then on create of this we can create that service then on start command of there we can while while the service is getting started if you want to execute something we can give there then service is running service to upload by itself for a client we can do whatever thing on destroy but in a bound service means there is no need for on start command it will automatically if actually in bind service case it will be calling from some another activity or from some other service at that if when the method bound service of it is getting called by the item itself it will initialize so there is no need to call on start command of method or on start service of method it will automatically there is this method that service or activity which is calling that itself it will get initialized so yeah here bind service of on create of on bind of service is running remaining all here on bind of on bind of method and on unbind of methods are the important thing because we are binding to a service okay so we have to bind it and unbind while unbinding we have to call the unbind of method then on destroy of then the broadcast receiver broadcast receiver is nothing but we know the time broadcast we have to give give or pass some message to every whatever the components are present we have to globally have to give or broadcast something for that we will be using broadcast receiver for example to be a time shown announcement or batteries low suddenly the in our mobile and all we used to get right if the battery is low or something that message will be coming so whatever the activity so services running in that device for all that activity services everybody will get that notice so like that globally if you want to give some a message we can use broadcast receiver while doing some action if you want some another action should get called or something while coding at the time also we either machine can automatically call this broadcast receiver method also it means in low memory situation and all it will not low memory or low battery situations it will automatically announce but in if you want in some particular applications in their case we can we can call also if we want to give some instruction to at a particular stage to all applications at the time we can call on broadcast receiver method otherwise by default if some situations coming machine means device will automatically call broadcast receiver method two or two ways of usage is there see this is one example how it is broadcast receiver in interacting with on activity alarm is on broadcast receiver example then yeah actually android will behave some it is on structure there will be on source folder resource folder actually whatever the resources we are using that we have to arrange it we cannot put it like anywhere normal in java program and all we can put it in normal our local system itself then we can call from there but here we cannot do like that we have to arrange it into specialized the folders so we will be arranging see draw some images or something is there that we can put it in drawable folder that all will be coming under resource folder some layout what I told no activity everything will be we will be using some view we mean how it look like we can create so that that and all will be putting in layout folder then we are use actually we will be in mobile and all we will be getting lots of message means what if one call is coming call is coming that message will come right like that all messages or messages or some words everything will be we will be storing in string dot xml file but from there using only called mapping it is it will get mapped to that files and corresponding where the application is calling or where the where we hate to call that component it is getting mapped and at that time only that strings are getting displayed so xml files whatever the thing that all will be keeping in layout folder so all all kind of resources will be keeping in resource folder yeah this is android manifest file that by now you got yeah every application must be having an android manifest file in its root there it will be there then here also again on service how we will be naming a service yeah indents also see here we are using that indents for communicating between activities or services we can create indents filters also for we can in that indents filter like that normal filter what it means we can filter it for what specific thing it is using like that if you if you want to give some some activity or some service something for some special purpose at that time we can give this give it in inside of this indents filter when now machine nine earth will give you demo how the android program will and now so our theory part is over so finally over and now we are looking at the practical part so we will be looking at how to create an android project and then folder structure of android and we will I will then I will show one demo so first how to create an android project go in a file inside that new and then android project okay you will see one in that you should write on project name whatever you want and then let me try image next okay then it's a which platform you want to select you can select any one of them so for Akhasta we mostly used android 2.3.3 so in this case we also use android 2.3 and then package name and click on finish we will see here project image slider there right there so now we will look at the folder structure so for that I have a image this is a folder structure so first folder is SRC it consists of all the source file means any source file activity inshallah to be exact it consists of activity file so whatever source code we write we store in that source file a source folder and then there is a generated java file gen folder inside it you can find r.java file so it is automatically generated file I will tell you about it later and you can see that there is a bin folder in there inside that bin folder you will find .apk file .apk file the apk file you should copy from here in your pen drive and then you can install that apk file in your tablet so your application will run on your tablet with that .apk file and there is a rs folder rs folder consists of all the resources like images videos audios whatever you want you should store in that rs folder if you see there are three drawables why are there three drawables one is for hide if there are for example if there are for yeah if you are small mobile for android mobile its screen size is small for tablet the screen size is large so for that you can copy and paste in every folder your images so for hide your data dot per pixel there is a drawable hdpi for small screen you can paste your images in ldpi and for extra large images you can paste in in that folder so better you can you should paste all your images in all the three folders and then there is a layout folder it consider main dot xml you can give any name you want so standard name is main dot xml so what that does is that whenever you execute your program this is what this is what you can see on your and tablet for example this if you see this this is what xml graphical layout and then there is a android manifest it consists of all the permissions or you can say a intent activity which we need to execute and all now we look at one demo I have I have one code executed so I will just show you that code directly this is that java file will look like which is stored in a src folder it consists of on create method I should tell you that on create method is executed first when you when you open your application this is the method which is first executed so all your main things we need to do in your android in your project you should do it in this on create method so this is a this is all the code and before some sometime before I told you that I will show you r dot java here it is it is a it it is an auto generated auto generated file so in this it it points to the indexes in the resources directly whatever resource we put like in my project I have I have copy pasted my images like attitude course critical engineering this all images are copy and pasted in drawable folder so that is why you can see there that is why you can see your attitude course critical engineering with they are also you can see that they are given an indexes so they are so in this way it is also done with id button I have introduced one button that is why another class called id is there and inside it you can find button similarly it is automatically generated whenever you drag drag or anything into your main dot xml or type anything in your main dot xml it is automatically generated in r dot java so now let us execute the project run as application this is a small image slide show it will take time to it takes similar time as we if you are our android mobile is switched off and we switch it on it takes similar amount of time exactly and now in background we will just buy that time we will copy and paste our apk file from our laptop to a tablet ok now here is your application we will see that it will change after 5 seconds every 5 seconds now he is going to copy that apk file from from the from the pen drive to the tablet for that we have apk installer now it will ask for installing we need to open it ok see that is an image which is changing after every 5 seconds ok see it changes after every 5 seconds so this is any program we made with this


Hey guys, welcome back to our channel. My name is Andrea with Food and Mentory Adventures in Food. Our channel is all about the food. We do taste tests, grocery hauls, recipes, and what's for dinner. And I am here today with a very quick 99 cents only store haul. Now, as you guys know, I have been trying to use what's in my pantry and freezer over the last couple of months because we are expecting a baby and I have stuff stored in our cabinets because we really don't have a big pantry. So I've been trying not to go crazy buying groceries since I'm already trying to use up what we have in the cabinets in order to make room for the baby stuff like food and bottles and all that. So I just ran into the 99 cent store, like I said, just to pick up a couple of things but I still wanted to show you what I picked up. So I'll start out right here with the Taco Bell hot sauce and they had the hot, they had the fire, they had the mild and the medium and I thought this was a really good deal. We eat a lot of tacos around here and this doesn't expire until February. Now I did forget to mention if you're not familiar with the 99 cent store, most items there are 99 cents. I do prefer it to the Dollar Tree. I feel like the 99 cent store, they have more name brand products and groceries and the Dollar Tree and everything that I picked up today was 99 cents or less. So okay, so got that. I also picked up some salad dressing as well. I've never heard of this brand. I think it's, I think it's HT Traders. I guess that's what it is and it is a vinaigrette and I love vinaigrettes. It's a Greek vinaigrette with feta cheese and it looked pretty good to me and it doesn't expire until February as well. So I got that. Then I got a packet of taco seasoning mix and I think this may have been 50 cents but I don't think I've tried, I don't think I've tried the taco bell seasoning mix and I wanted to try that. I got two bags of granola. I do love granola, especially over yogurt and this is Nature Grove. This is vanilla and then I also picked up another one by Nature Grove and it is a strawberry and raspberry granola and that sounded good to me. It has, let me show you back here, it has freeze dried as you can see right there, raspberries and strawberries. So I got that. I think the absolute best bill that I picked up there was this microwaveable jasmine rice product of Thailand. Now you know if you get uncle Ben's, you know like this ready rice, if you get uncle Ben's it's usually pretty expensive. Definitely more than 99 cents. This is microwaveable heated up for 90 seconds. It's a product of Thailand. Flip it over on the back for you. Doesn't expire until November and there it is. Here are the ingredients. All it has in there is water, the rice and rice brand oil. Now I like to cook jasmine rice myself but since I've been pregnant I haven't really been up to cooking or feeling like cooking much and so Howard will cook and when he cooks he makes this microwave rice. So he hasn't mastered making rice on the stove and I don't use a rice cooker. I just prefer to make it on the stove top. So when he's cooking and he's making something quick for us, this microwaveable rice is perfect and like I said it was 99 cents which is a steal. I should have picked up some more but I didn't. I just got three bags. Excuse me the other thing I picked up was some dull pineapple juice. I got two cans on my last 99 cent store hall. I mentioned that these were 50 cents a can and I don't know what I was thinking why I didn't get more. So I went back and I grabbed a couple of more cans of dull pineapple juice at 50 cents each which is a great deal. Another thing that I picked up they didn't have this last time was this Del Monte Four Seasons and it has pineapple mango and guava juice. Now I've mentioned to you guys before Howard is from Jamaica and he enjoys tropical fruits like that and so I got him four cans.  So I love sparkling water especially strawberry flavored and I don't often see a Perrier in the can. I normally see it you know in the bottle and so I like this because I can stick it in my lunchbox and to me it's just more portable than having the bottle. So this is all that I picked up from the 99 cent store.  So this is all that I picked up. Hope you guys enjoyed this short and sweet and simple haul. If you did please make sure to give us a thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed to our channel we hope you do so and we'll see you guys next time.


Welcome back to the average. I'm Steph. I'm the average artist and today. I mean, yeah, you've read correctly We're gonna do a book tag because I've never done one before and as you guys know, I'm really into books I'm a writer. I mean is that can I just say I'm a writer without doing that? You know what I mean? No, I can't apparently I'm a writer Artist etc and if you're new here welcome. Hi, please watch what's with my videos It helps the little baby channel grow and I'm really happy that you're here because I'm gonna do a book tag today. What is a book tag? May you ask a book tag is when people of the book community answer questions about books they like or For instance, like there's a few more of the type of questions that are asked so this week I'm gonna be doing a reading habits book tag This video I'm gonna do a reading habits book tag and yes, I have my notebook here. It's holographic, which is I Know it's not 2017 anymore, but I still like holographic. Okay, so roll the Roll the bad drawings No, people told me they don't like it when I'm self-deprecating about my drawings So roll the good drawings go. Okay. So the first question is do you have a certain place at home for reading? And yes, I do I mean sometimes I read on the sofa if I'm really desperate to finish a book I read in the day But always I usually read at night. I've just realized that sometimes I read in the bath as well Which is a good place but usually the main place is in my bed when everyone else is going to sleep and I Just alone and have quiet time. You know what I mean? Just quiet time when there's no cat meowing or Anything like that. I was about to be harsh about Chris, but then I was like, he's not really that annoying. So Yeah, mm-hmm. And yeah, I think that's a great time to just wind down and I don't always do this sometimes I you know, I have a bad habit of watching YouTube a lot when I'm in bed as A winding down method to sleep that just wakes me up So I think it's good to read before bed and also there's been this study where it said it's really good to read Every day like make a habit of it. It's good for your brain. Okay guys. It's good for your brain I'm only helping you out here. The next question is do you use a bookmark or Random piece of paper now, please don't pay on me because a bookmark is great in everything but You lose them. Mm-hmm. That's my reason and around a piece of paper What am I a peasant?  I'm on I know shock horror But actually I prefer it and I prefer books having a little bit of wear and tear because it means it's been loved It's been read. I like that about books. I don't want no trade-off the shelf It never been read book. I like a little bit of character to books So that's the reason why let me know if you do this as well Let me know if you're also a heathen. The next question is can you stop reading or do you have to stop? Like can you just stop reading whenever or can you do you have to wait for like the next chapter to come up? And my answer is yes I have to wait for the next chapter usually if it's a book that I'm Hating and just getting through to just read it just finish it then I'll stop whenever But if it's a book that I really like I have to get to the end of the chapter because I know The way that chapters are structured is that their little stories within themselves So like each chapter should be like beginning middle end and leave you wanting to be the next chapter So I always try to leave it at the end of a chapter because then I know I'll pick the book up again The next day does that make any sense to anyone? These just book nerd things. I don't know. I hope not. I hope you understand me people internet Okay, guys, I'm in a halfway through how you doing there. You're good. Okay. Do you eat or drink? whilst reading No, no because as I explained before I usually read a night when I've done all my eating Unless, you know, there's a midnight craving, but no that doesn't really happen to me Or if you know if it's daytime Then I might be drinking a coffee or something, but usually no or water Nothing special. I think no not really. I mean that was a really convoluted way of answering that question What's in it? I'm I don't know. The answer is no. Yeah, okay. Good the answers Next question is multitasking. Do you listen to music and it says here TV, but why would you I can understand music Why would you have the TV on if you're reading? It doesn't make any sense at all What is that? I mean this question has made me unreasonably angry, hasn't it music? I can listen to I don't put it on to listen to Whilst I'm reading but I can block it out I think does that question mean that like can you block out noise around you? Sometimes there's been a time when I've been on a reading binge and Chris has been playing games But we both wanted to be in the same room So I've sat with him and listened to the game in the background, but it wasn't distracting me or anything But it's just so you know, we we're close together even though we're completely doing completely different things That was a little insight into Chris and Steph's lives The next question is reading at home or everywhere And I'm gonna let booklets down because they would usually answer everywhere because if you're a reader and you like reading Of course, you're gonna be reading walking like Belle does in Beauty and the Beast, but no No, I don't like that. I like reading in my spot when I'm outside, which is I'm gonna be outside and be looking at stuff. No, I can't read Everywhere, maybe I read on a plane or I can't read in a bus or any transport other than like a plane Because I'll get exceedingly carsick So I guess the answer is no. I'm feeling like there's a lot of negativity around these questions I'm just unreasonably angry at some of them like no, you can't read everywhere I know my sister she reads and walks at the same time. It's like what is that? Why? Why are you doing that? Hello, hi, I forgot to ask one of the questions because I'm a complete idiot and that question was Whether you read one book at a time or you can read several at a time This one's quite tricky because I don't think I read several books at a time But I do mark down like if I start a book I will put it on good reads I'm reading it and then if I get distracted because I think the book isn't what I thought it was Going to be or I'm not enjoying it Then I'll start another book and then I also list that on my good reads. I'm reading that as well So these books kind of stack and sometimes they finish Ones I'm bored of I go back to them and I just finish them because I go back to them Just because I want to finish them like sometimes I don't want a book to defeat me So that's the answer in the short term. Yes I can read a few books at the same time But technically not because I'm not actually Spending you know one day reading one book the next day reading another Unless one of them is like a graphic novel and then the other is just a novel Normal novel then yes, I can do that. I don't know. I don't know if that is the correct answer What is the correct answer? What is life? I'm a professional It's kind of my answer. That's it. I sometimes read lots of books Sometimes no, but technically I don't either great answer, right brilliant job Really explain myself so well there The next and final question because I skipped one which was repeat Read out loud or silently it's like well depends on if you need to read out loud Then why would you I don't know so the next question is do you read ahead or skip pages? Here's the thing I've heard people say that they like Spoilers like they like flipping to the end and finding out what is gonna happen and here's my answer to that what Fresh hell is that? No, don't do that. What's the point of that? You might as well just be told the whole story plan out in your face Like what cool? I'm sorry. I can't I Just I can't even explain Why that annoys me because I guess it's not spoiling it for me people like their own stuff But I would definitely not enjoy knowing what happens at the end and I will not flick through I always I do flick through to the end to flip to see how many pages are in a book to kind of To estimate how much time it's gonna take me to finish reading it, but no, I'm always like hey What is it don't look at the page don't look at the what's happening because what's the point? I mean unless it's a really a really friller book where you think something awful is gonna happen You don't know if you can take it because that's just not your thing Then don't read the book I guess Okay guys that has been my first ever book tag a video Let me know if you like this style of video because I kind of like doing it I like book tags, and I like not a booktuber the holy grail that is booktube. I wish that I could be I guess I don't know. I don't read enough books. I think I'm sort of an average reader. Oh Oh guys. Oh, there's no one here. It's no one here. So Sad and alone Anyway, let me know if you want to see more of these types of videos some more exciting news that happened this week I mean it's exciting for me It's probably not that exciting for you is that I opened my red bubble store I finally got round to it. So if you want to see you want to get prints of my work I don't know then let me know which kind of prints you'd like and then I can set it up on there No pressure anything just to know what kind of things might sell Faces sorry Yeah, so I've got that and also because this was book related if you want to read my book. Oh Then you can and it's just an Amazon. It's 90p. I think I'm keep lying about the price I think it's like a dollar something or 99p if you're in England Quite sure it's the first of the trilogy. So I'm working on the other two books at the moment So it'd be really cool if you guys check that out Also, I have a good reads because this video is book related You might want to go check out my good reads and see what I'm reading Maybe we can be friends on good reads You want to be my friend? No one wants to be my friend. Let's be real Okay, thanks for watching guys, please like and subscribe to this and I will see you next time. Bye


Yeah, so the question is, do I have any suggestion for somebody who has been in the role of the oppressed, maybe personally or through their bloodline? What suggestion do I have for real healing to happen? I think maybe a starting point is to be clear on what you actually want. Do you want a world that is fair and just for all? Or maybe you need to take a turn as the person on top.  Sometimes these unconscious motivations need to play out until we realize that that isn't actually what I want, where that deeper part of oneself that yearns for justice in the world can express. So I think maybe just to be clear about what you really want and what your motives are, that clarity, that attention to your own motives causes a shift to happen. Because otherwise you're confusing one thing with another, serving one thing in the guise of serving something else. And that will bring contradictory results. So yeah, a little bit of self honesty I think is a good start.


Okay, today I'm gonna be using Cyril on my Mac to do the stacking and some of the pre-processing tasks and then probably finish off with GIMP. This is the second part of my Lagoon No Tracker series, so if you haven't watched the first part where I show how I captured and planned for this shot, I recommend watching that first. The link will be in the description. And Cyril is a free open source program that's really cool for, as it says here, astronomical image processing. The website is s-i-r-i-l dot org. And today I'm... I think last time I showed Cyril, I went to the download tab here and just used the latest release. That wasn't a beta release, but the full release that they do. Today though, I just I'm really interested in their beta release that they talked about here in the news tab. It's also available here on the download tab under beta testing. And the reason I'm so interested in this one is it's basically an early release of their 1.0 version where they've updated the user interface and done a bunch of other cool things, including 32-bit and all kinds of things. So I am gonna try this. We'll see if we run into any bugs since it is a beta. If you're not comfortable with it with running beta software, then you can always watch my earlier Cyril video to see the .9 release. Okay, anyways, I've gone to the news tab here, clicked on this 1.0 beta testing article. And then if you scroll down to the bottom of the article, there are prepackage downloads for Windows, Mac OS, and Debian. So I'm gonna click on Mac OS because that's what I'm running here. And then just go ahead and open the DMG file. It's a package file for installing Mac software. And just drag this to my applications folder and replace the existing version. Okay, I can eject this temporary drive now, close out of Chrome.  And if you get this when you first install Cyril that it can't be open because it's from an unidentified developer, this is a new Mac security setting. One way to get around it is you can just right-click on the application and click open from the right-click menu. And then instead of just saying cancel, you now have this open button right here. And that will let you open that application. Once you do that once, it will remember that setting and will open it every time like that without giving you the security warning. Okay, there's a little thing here saying that if you, that they're gonna show us an introduction. That's pretty cool. I'll say okay. Okay, we've gone through the little tutorial. I'm gonna go ahead and make Cyril full screen here. And the first thing that I'm gonna do is change my working directory, which you do by just clicking this little home icon right up here. And I'm gonna change my working directory to the desktop and then this Lagoon folder that I created. And if you're new to Cyril, let me show you this folder. This has my biases, my darks, my flats, and my lights, just like I showed you in the part one of this video how I sorted those. We did all that by looking at what was on the camera and then sorting the raw files. So we are all ready to use a script inside Cyril because we have a working directory. And then inside that working directory, we have these four working directories that have to be named just like this biases, darks, flats, and lights. Okay, I'll open back up Cyril here. And I'm going to go to scripts. And I'm going to do one shot color pre processing. Alright, and it starts. You can read about what it's doing over here in the console.  So you can of course do all of this manually right here just by following along with pre processing, meaning calibration, registration, stacking, so forth. But we're going to do it the easy way today. Just to make this video a little shorter and use the script OSC for one shot color pre processing. Okay, I'll let it do its thing here and it'll probably take quite a while because we're dealing with hundreds of frames. And then when it's all done, we'll see what it produces. Okay, it's done with pre processing. So now I'm just going to open up the result, which is right here in my lagoon folder result dot fit. And when I open it, it's not going to look like much. That's because I'm in the linear view mode. So if you've used other programs that do stacking a lot of times when it's done, it'll just look sort of black like this with maybe a few little white dots that are star cores. But this is completely normal result. What we want to do is turn on the image preview that will give us a stretched view, but only as a preview, it's not actually going to apply the stretch yet. And so we can do some work like background extraction and color calibration, when the image is still in this linear state, and then those processes will work better. So to turn on that preview, if you look down here at the bottom of the window, there's this little display mode option. And it says linear. And I'm just going to change that to auto stretch. Okay, and I guess I had the red channel selected up here. So this is the red channel. There's the green channel. There's the blue channel. So you can see, for some reason, the green channel came out quite a bit brighter than the red and the blue. So if we look at the RGB image, it's very green. But that's fine because we're going to do the first thing we're going to do is a photometric color calibration, which is going to correct that color balance issue. And so to bring up that process, we go to the image processing menu up here at the top and go down to color calibration and then photometric color calibration. And what we want to do in here is just type in the relevant details right here. So well, actually, so starting at the top, you're first going to search for an object that is in the picture. So that's as close to center as possible. So I'm going to do m20, which is the Trifid nebula, because that's in the picture. And it's a little bit closer to center than the lagoon, which is m eight. And click find. Then you just can click on it and it will put in the the RA and deck of that object, telling you that's where this picture is pointed. That's good. And then we're going to put in the focal distance, which was 50 millimeters, and the pixel size in microns. So if you are if you don't know what your pixel size is, what you can do is just type in the name of your camera. So I was using Canon 60d and pixel size. And if it doesn't pop up right here, like in this case, it did 4.3 microns. If you don't see it there, like as a featured snippet from Wikipedia, if you usually can find it in this website, digicam database. And so pixel pitch is the same thing as pixel size. So it's saying 4.2 microns are rounded up 4.3, either is going to work. So I'll just type that in here, I'll use the more accurate one of 4.29. Okay, and then that tells me that I have a resolution of 17.6 pixels per arc second, which is very, very what we call under sampled, meaning if we really zoomed in on our stars, they would look sort of blocky, but that's okay, because this is a wide field image. Okay, and then I'm just going to leave everything else automatic and click Okay. Okay, that failed because it said it couldn't plate solve. So I have this hunch that the reason is is because of this black border over here. So I'm going to try this again. But first, I'm going to crop the image. And the way to crop in serial is you just draw out a box of where you want to crop. So I'm going to try to get as much of this in here as possible. But cropping out this black part of the edge. And then you just right click and choose crop. Okay, then I'm going to try running that photometric color calibration again, and just see if this works any better. Okay, and my hunch was correct. It was able to plate solve that time after I did the crop. And it did seem to apply the correction. So I'm going to go ahead and close this and go back to my RGB. And you can see now it's much better color balance. Okay, so next up, what we want to do is do a little bit of background gradient removal. We'll at least try it. I'm not sure if it's going to work on an image that has so much is filled with the Milky Way so much. But I'm just interested to see if it can improve the image a little bit. So let's go up to image processing and go down to background extraction. And I don't want to click generate because that automatically applies the samples and it's not very intelligent about placing images places them in a grid basically. And since there's so much Milky Way and Nebulae and stuff in this image. I want to place them myself and I'm going to place them more strategically. So I'm going to do it just by left clicking over here in the image I'm going to do. Oops, it says you can't place them on the RGB. So I'm gonna have to place them here on the red. That's fine. So I'm going to place them sort of on the dark Nebulae, rather than in this place that's really in the places which are really bright. If you can in your image, you want to actually place it on the background sky. But I've found that at least with pics insight that placing samples on the dark Nebulae can work to at least for an image like this one. So and we just want to try to get as much coverage as possible, you don't have to place that many samples usually something like eight to 10 is enough. This this corner might be an issue because there's not really anything super dark down here, but I'm just going to place it there. I'll place one down here. Okay, so again, this is an experiment, we'll see how it works. If it looks really wonky, then we can undo it. Go ahead and apply. Okay, it's telling me not enough samples. So okay, I'll do some more. And again, when I'm when I'm placing these samples, I'm just trying to at this point, just basically trying to pick darker parts of the image and avoid big stars. Okay, we'll try that. Okay, it did it. I'm going to go ahead and click close. And here's before and here's after. And it's a mixed bag. You know, I don't think it I think it hurt more than it helped. Because it's just it's just changed the the color balance and but there's it created different problems, but didn't really work how I wanted it to. So if someone has better suggestions for for how to do that, please let me know in the comments, but I'm gonna I'm gonna not apply that background extraction with this milky way shot because it's just it's not working. And that's pretty common. Even in pics inside I would have trouble probably extracting a clean background out of a shot that's this filled with milky way. And honestly, there wasn't too much light pollution. So I don't know if it really even needs that. I'll probably just crop some of this side and this side a little bit anyways. Okay, let's keep moving here. There's not much else to do in zero before we move on to the new image manipulation program for some final touch ups. There's probably actually a lot more you could do in here but I just still am learning the program. So sometimes what I like to apply a little bit of color saturation in this linear state. And so I'm just gonna apply something like 0.2. Let's see if that made any difference at the preview. Maybe we'll do a little more. Let's try 0.4. Okay, yeah, I think that looks better. So applying a little bit of saturation to the linear image, I think sometimes helps later on in the processing. So I'm going to apply that. Okay, and if we go back to linear, you can see this picture is still in its linear state, we just have this auto stretch turned on, which is why we're seeing it like this. Okay, before I save this to move into GIMP, let's change it to 16 bits. Converting, it says may lose some precision. That's okay. Just click okay there. There we go. Save the image in a different name. So right next to the save command is that and I want to save it as a TIFF file. There we go. So just pick TIFF from this list and click save. Oh, and I guess we didn't have to switch from 32 to 16 up there, we could have just done it right here in the saving command. So you can ignore that earlier when I changed from 32 to 16 there, you can always just do it, I guess, when you save the TIFF. So this is what we want 16 bit integer, click save. Okay, and now we're done with serial, we're going to move on to GIMP. Okay, I'm using GIMP 2.10. That's what I recommend. I think it's the latest major release. You can always just download it straight from their website. And we're going to do file open and pick this serial result.tif. It says it contains orientation metadata. I'm saying I'm going to say keep original. I'm not sure what that's about. Okay, so here is GIMP. The first thing I'm going to do is I want to fit the whole image into the window here. So I'm going to go to view, zoom and do fit image and window. Okay, and then the next thing I want you to do is if you see brushes over here, see if you have a tab for histogram, if you do go ahead and switch to that. And make sure that your histogram is in RGB mode. If you don't see the histogram, just go to dockable dialogues and pick it from this list right here and it should come up. I'm just going to go up here to the colors menu and go down to levels. Grab my mid tone sliders this little triangle right here in the middle and drag it over to the left to start stretching the image and click okay. And you should see this this histogram peak come out here. And what we want to start doing, we're just going to keep going back to that colors levels command is stretch the image. So basically, we're taking something where the dynamic range is very compressed, all the information is compressed into this little peak right here. And we want to stretch it out make it wider. And we're going to do that by taking the shadow slider and moving it to the right and taking the mid tone slider and moving it to the left. And each time we do that, it should it should make the the width of this histogram information wider, meaning that we're having we're getting more shadows mid tones and highlights bit by stretching it out and adding contrast. So I'm just going to do that a few more times. And when you take this shadow slider, you can move it pretty far over here to the right, you never want to pass the peak though. So I always bring it to just up to the left side of the peak of the information but never passed. Alright, that's a good enough stretch for now. Next thing I'm going to do is the image somehow I guess that was what that message was about is that it somehow got rotated 180 degrees. So let's go ahead and rotate it back to how we had it before. So I think that's just under view, flip and rotate, and we're just going to rotate 180. Okay, there we go. And then there's still a little bit of issues on the edges here of the image this this corner this corner this corner, I'll have little black edges. And there's a little bit of a color shift from green to magenta across the image this way. So I'm just going to crop away a little bit of the image here. Just with the crop tool. And I'm just going to start up here in this corner. And bring it down like this. And just crop away. And you can take these corners and adjust it. And I'm just trying to adjust it so that I have the omega, the eagle, the triphid and lagoon all still in the image. And that I can just get as much of the images I can without getting sort of the weird stuff in the corners. Okay, that looks good. I'm going to go ahead and press Enter to accept that crop. Okay. Next, what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some saturation to the image. I'm going to go back to the colors menu and go down to saturation. And just take this scale slider here and move it over to the right. I'm going to move it to about 1.5. Okay, I'm just going to zoom in on the image now a little bit. Just doing a shift equals or plus my keyboard to zoom in. Just check out a few of the details here. Oh, this is weird. It got also got flipped horizontal. This is the triphid should be on this side of the lagoon. Okay, so let's let's fix that. That's under view, flip and rotate. Let's flip horizontal horizontally, I think. Yes. Okay, sorry, I don't know what all these flips and rotations are about. But now it's now it's right. So this is looking really nice. I can see a lot of detail in here. I think we can add even a bit more saturation though. So I'm going to go back to colors, saturation, and add some more. Yeah, that looks good. So I added another 1.3 to the scale. And I think this is the is the right amount of saturation now. Okay, I'm really impressed by this I think it actually is looking better than our results in deep sky stacker and gimp or deep sky stacker and Photoshop. It's a little bit more subtle, but also not as noisy and I think more polished looking. Okay, next, we're going to remove the stars from the image and then add them back in. And so this is where for this, we're going to use a another piece of software. So we've started in serial, we've moved into gimp, we're now going to bring it out of gimp, use another piece of free software called star net plus plus, and then we'll finish back in gimp. So to use star net plus plus, we want to save this as a tip file again. And so I'm going to do file, export as, and I'm just going to save to the desktop and call it lagoon for star net dot tiff. Okay, so from Google, I'm just going to search for star net plus plus like that. And the first search result here is this source forge net download site. And that's what you want to go to.  And if you do have PIX insight, you can get the PIX insight module. But assuming you don't have PIX insight, we're going to just get the standalone version. And so you would just go into version 1.1 here and then pick your operating system. So if you're on Windows, pick Windows or Win. If you're on Mac, pick this Mac OS and if you're on Linux, pick the Linux one. And I'll just click on that. And then it will start downloading here. Okay, it's finished downloading. So I'm just going to open up those open up the zip folder and put it on my desktop. And if you look at the read me, this is where it's going to give us instructions on how to use it. Okay, and basically, we just have to look at this little shell file here. This is just a little command that's given. And if we open that up, I'm just going to open it with a text editor, but you can open it with any kind of text editor, it doesn't matter. All we're going to do is just change this right here to the name of our file. So I'm going to choose, I'm going to say, Lagoon for star net tiff. And then I want the output to just be Lagoon starless. And then the last thing here is I'm just going to change the stride number to 32. What that means is that it will take a little bit longer to process than with a stride of 64, but it will give us a better result for removing the stars, especially with wide field images like this one. I'm going to go ahead and save that script. Close out of that. Okay, with that done, we've edited the script. 32 bits stride has the right file name. We can go ahead and run the script. The way we do that is through a command line program. So I'm just going to use the built in command line program on Mac, which is terminal. And to run it, we have to do two things. We first have to move to this directory. So I'm just going to type in CD space to do change directory command and then drag this folder over. So CD space, and then go to the folder, hit Enter, we're now inside the folder. And from there, I can run this command just by dragging it over and hit Enter again. Okay, and then it starts its thing. It reads the file. It tells me, yep, it's a 16 bit file with three channels. Here's the height and the width. Here's the CPU I'm using with TensorFlow. And then this is the number of tiles that it's going to break the file up into and then it's going to look at each one and remove stars from those tiles and then recombine the image. And then down here, it tells me how long it's going to take for that to happen, a percentage as it's going. And you can see it just went from zero to 1%. So it does take quite a while, probably at least an hour, maybe two, on an image of this size. Okay, back in Gimp here, I'm going to do file open and open our new starless image. And we're just going to apply a few tweaks to it, make it pop a little bit more. So I'm going to go to colors curves, which curves is basically just like a more advanced version of levels where you have your whole range of shadows to highlights based on this line right here, and you can place points wherever you want, and bring things up and down.  This is called creating an S curve, because it makes sort of like an S. Okay, and right now I'm in the value mode, I noticed that in the shadows, there's a little bit too much green. So I'm just going to bring down the green just a tad, like that just by eye, it's a pretty subtle adjustment. And I think there's a little bit too much blue to so I'm just going to bring that down just a tad. That's good. I'm just going to go back to value and now just bring up the whole image just a little bit perfect. Okay, I click Okay. And then I'm going to go back here and increase the saturation just a bit. Let's just do 1.15. Okay. And now that this image is boosted, let's add back in our stars, we can do that by just doing edit, copy visible, and edit paste. Why did it come in flipped and flipped again? I'm gonna have to figure that one out is something that I did when I opened this image for the in the first place out of Cyril, it was like flipped and then I guess I chose the wrong thing. Sorry about that. Anyways, we can rotate this layer. Okay, we want the tools transform tools. And I want to flip that layer. There we go. And I want to rotate it 180 degrees. Alright, so now we're back on where we should be. I can just call this pasted layer stars. And to this stars layer, what we want to do is change the mode from normal to screen. So right up here in the layers panel, you'll see the word mode and then it says normal, just click on that word normal and change it to screen. And the first thing you'll see is the image will get a lot brighter, but you'll see a lot more detail in the image. And that's perfectly normal. Basically, what it's doing is it's it's it's applying a sort of multiplication of the two images but but making the dark parts of this top layer transparent so that you're seeing into the image below.  And we can do that with curves. But to do that, we first want to just basically create a copy of what we see here. So to do that, we're going to go to layer new from visible. So now we have this new visible layer on top. And on that visible layer, I'm going to do colors curves.  And then I'm just going to bring down the shadows just a little bit and bring up. No, actually, I think just the whole image should just get a little bit darker. Looks better. We still have this sort of green cast in the middle of the image here. So let me just see here if I can fix that with a green curves. You know, that looks pretty good. That definitely helped a lot. It maybe is making the top part of the image a little bit too blue by removing the green from the middle. If I really go for it, you can really see the top part of the image goes blue. So let's do this. Let's click OK. And let's make a copy of this visible layer or duplicate it. So I'm just going to do right click duplicate layer. So now we have visible copy. I'm going to go into this visible copy layer and basically bring down the blues in the top part of the image here. So it looks right. There we go. But of course, now that just now we have the same problem in the middle of the middle getting too green. But what we can do is with this visible copy layer, we're going to add a layer mask. So I'm just going to right click and choose add layer mask. And you can leave it on this default initialize layer mask to white. That's fine. And then we're going to add a gradient to this layer mask. So let me grab my gradient tool here. And in the default mode, it goes from white to black. That's exactly what we want. And we want the top part of the image for this visible copy to apply. But down here in the middle, we don't want it to. So I'm just going to drag a gradient from the top to the middle of the image and hit enter to accept that gradient. So you can now see there's a gradient drawn onto the the layer mask on this visible copy. If I turn that layer off and on, you can see what it's doing is it's correcting that really strong blue cast on the top of the image. Okay, there's definitely more that we could do with this, but I'm going to call this good. I really think it looks pretty neat. A lot of detail in the Milky Way and the Lagoon and Trifid. Let's go ahead and save it. So of course, to save in GIMP, we can just do file, save and save in GIMP's default format of XCF. And this way we could return to this and keep messing around with the layers here in GIMP. So I'll just call that lagoon.xcf save that to the desktop. And then to save in other formats, you do file export. And you can just put in whatever ending you want. So if you wanted to save it as a 16 bit TIF, you just leave there. That is TIF.  So I'm just going to do .jpeg. jpeg is good for sharing on social media or online because it's compressed so you can send it more places and it loads faster. I'm going to go ahead and export that. I always export at 100% quality. So as little as compression as GIMP will do. Go ahead and export. And let's go ahead and take a look at our final result here. Okay, it's maybe a little bit over saturated for some people's taste. Maybe I could dial that down a little bit. And then we still have some color cast issues like a little bit too red in this corner, too red magenta in this corner, a little bit too green in the middle and some other stuff up here. So we could continue working on those. I'm using that same tactic I showed you where if you apply a new layer and then apply a gradient mask, you can fix some of these color casts. But for a first start, this is definitely pretty cool looking. This is under 10 minutes, not tracked just on a tripod with my Canon 60D, which is a stock Canon 60D camera and my 50 millimeter Canon lens. Let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit here just to show you some of the details. Another thing we didn't do is any noise reduction. So it is a little bit noisy because it's only under 10 minutes of data, but it looks pretty good. I think some nice detail here in the core of the lagoon, we even have that sort of extension of the lagoon over here. The triphid looks nice. This star cloud looks nice. We have a little cluster over here. I don't remember. I think that's a messy cluster of I can't remember what it called.  And then of course, really, it's meant to be seen in full like this with the whole extent of these brilliant Milky Way stars, because this is right into the core of the Milky Way. Okay, till next time, this has been Nico Carver from nebulaphotos.com and clear skies, everyone.