I mentioned some time ago that I was reading The Artist’s Guide to GIMP Effects, by michael j. hammel, and that over time I’d report on what I thought about it.  Ok, here’s what I think about it. WOW!

I still have a long way to go to absorb everything in here, but in a few weeks I’ve gone from someone who’s messed around with Gimp for a few years but still felt lost, to someone who knows the principles behind using it as a tool.

Many of the questions people ask here seem obvious after reading and working with it for awhile.

He does a great job of teaching you the basic principles that let you solve problems.  You start thinking about what you want, instead of looking at what Gimp can do.

If you need to combine pictures, fix problems, do commercial graphics, web work, original art–this book is for you.  I’m astonished.

I’ll report back some more after spending a few more weeks with it.

It doesn’t cover 2.6, but it hasn’t been an issue using it with 2.6.  If you want to be a GIMP master, check it out!

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So I was interested to hear that Kodak had announced a TWAIN based scanner interface for Linux.  The package is called ScanTWAIN and appears to be a front end to TWAIN drivers for a variety of Kodak scanners. The annoucned product is actually just the front end application which is GPL and which is available in both a generic RPM and source.  The backend drivers, which in TWAIN-speak are known as Data Sources or .ds files, are not GPL.  The backend drivers packages are available for download from each specific models web page.  For example, the i210 Scanner web page offers driver downloads for both Windows and Linux.  You can find links to each supported model in the Kodak press release.

The binary RPM requires libtwaindsm.so which is the library applications need to link to in order to get access to the TWAIN drivers.  Apparently this library is not available yet for Fedora 10 in RPM format.  Instead, the library is installed as part of the Linux drivers package for each specific Kodak scanner model.

There is good write up on how Kodak got it wrong with packaging and, to some extent, adherence to the GPL principles (though I won’t go so far as to say they’ve violated any of the license - at least not as far as I can tell).   Most of the problem, in my opinion, is packaging.  For example, the OpenUSB library is included but there is no README on where a user could acquire the sources from Kodak.  Also, the package appears to install in multiple locations, including /opt, /usr/local and /usr.  At first this seems like the right thing to do:  system packages under /usr/local so they don’t interfere with similar packages installed by the distribution while the Kodak specific applications go under /opt.  But on closer inspection I found that some of the RPMs included with the driver package install some Kodak specifics under /opt while others (like the .ds files and scanner profiles) under /usr/local/lib/twain/kodak.  Why not put them all under /opt?  Hell, they even put a configuration file (.ini) under /var/kodak!

All in all it looks like Kodak is taking a big leap but they still have some work to do with understanding the Linux environment.  I’m not as disappointed as the other reviewer that the drivers are not open source (though I highly encourage them to reconsider) but I’m less interested in installing packages that place files in the wrong directories.

If you’re interested in TWAIN you can check out the main TWAIN.org web site.  It has all the gory details.

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Update: I’ve also rewritten this translation back into OpenOffice and PDF formats and improved upon the format and grammer slightly.

Enjoy!

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Overview of Changes from GIMP 2.6.4 to GIMP 2.6.5
=================================================

* Bugs fixed:

571628 - Scaling image to 25% turn background from white to grey
567840 - GIMP’s GtkScaleButton conflicts with GTK’s
569043 - GEGL tool - missing Operation Settings for all sub-tools
568890 - don’t rely on GtkAction implementation details
568909 - wrong RGB values for color names in libgimpcolor/gimprgb-parse.c
568839 - wrong hex RGB value for the color names slategrey and slategray
559408 - Brushes dragged to the image window look strange
563337 - Rectangle Select Tool does not allow 1:1 fixed ratio
568016 - Black pullout parameter of plug-in-newsprint has no effect
562818 - First image opened in GIMP offset
562213 - Align Tool doesn’t work properly if it is the active tool at startup

* Updated translations:

Spanish (es)
Estonian (et)
Hindi (hi)
Italian (it)
Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR)
Romanian (ro)
Russian (ru)
Serbian (sr)
Tamil (ta)
Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)

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I have attached a patch to Bug 74224 – Add support for 16 bits per channel that makes it possible to use GIMP for opening, color correcting and saving 16-bits-per-channel PNGs using the operations under the Colors menu that are ported to GEGL such as Color Balance or Levels. For a technical description of the patch, refer to the bug report.

…

Welcome to the start of the 16-bit GIMP era

Martin also questioned whether it was time to consider shooting for at least particla 16-bit support in 2.8.  According to his research:

[Martin doesn't] think it will be hard to add support for loading some additional 16-bit image formats, allowing creation of 16-bit images and adding 16-bit capabilities to a set of basic tools.

So the first public step toward 16-bit channels has seen the light of day.  Now it’s not clear if this patch has been accepted into the mainline (I don’t think that decision was made on the mailing list, if its been made at all - the bug report has no additional information on that) but at least a public note of work in this area has surfaced, something beyond just working on getting gegl prepared for use by GIMP developers.  Now it’s actually in use.

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The site also has a tutorials section that is primarily aimed at Photoshop users.  Experienced users should always consider tutorials of this type when trying to come up with techniques in GIMP.  Most of the things you can do in Photoshop you can do in GIMP, though you may have to perform them in a different way.

The texture downloads are limited to 15MB per day per user.  A random sample of the available images showed that most come at least 3 sizes with the largest size usually under 3MB and often under 1MB.  Larger images are available to members of the site, if you’re interested in signing up.

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> Tonight, I simply want to create a text and then outline it as a text.
> Then I googled.  But the thing is, I cannot follow any of the
> tutorials I dug out.  Not because I didn’t follow closely, but because
> not all of the menu items the tutorials talk about are available to
> me

First, there shouldn’t be much in the way of menu issues for this task.  If you need to outline text, try this:

1. Open a new window (File->New, any size should be fine to experiment on).
2. Choose the Text tool from the Toolbox.
3. Click in the canvas window (also referred to as an image window).  This will open the Text Editor dialog window.
4. Type some text in the Text Editor, then click on the Close button.  The text will be visible in the canvas window and has been added as a new layer in the Layers dialog.
5. Choose Layer->Transparency->Alpha to Selection.  This will create a selection around your text.
6. Choose Layer->New to create a new layer (you want to outline the text in a new layer so it doesn’t modify the original text).  The new layer should be transparent, which should be the default setting in the New Layer dialog that pops up.
7. Choose Edit->Stroke Selection.  This will open a dialog window where you can select the way you will stroke (re: outline) the text.  The first time you can just choose the defaults and click on Stroke.  Later you can experiment with different settings to change the way the outline is drawn.
8. In the Layers dialog turn off the visibility of the text layer.  Do that by clicking on the eyeball to the left of the layer name and preview image.

Now you can see the outlined text.  Things that you’ll want to adjust in your next attempt:

• The location of the text before you outline it.  You may want to use the move tool to place the text properly in the center of the canvas window.
• The font, size, color, etc. of the text.  This is handled in the Tool Options dialog before you click on the canvas but after you’ve selected the Text tool from the Toolbox.
• The style of the stroke in the Stroke Selection dialog.
• The foreground color from the Toolbox.  The foreground color will be used for the color of the outline when you stroke the selection.

This may sound like a lot of work but it’s really pretty easy once you try it a few times.

The bigger problem is just as he’s pointed out:  online tutorials for the GIMP are of questionable quality.  Some people are good writers but poor instructors, others are the reverse.  In either case, if the tutorial uses filters, especially Script-Fu or Python-Fu (or even GIMP Perl) then that should be made clear in the tutorial and the version of GIMP specified.  Filters come from many places and if they aren’t in the stock distribution (or have been replaced or removed in later versions) it will make it hard for new users to follow the tutorial.

My online tutorials need cleanup in this area too.  I’m going to go through the few I have online and add a note as to which version or versions the tutorial applies.  In some cases, because I use only core utilities and not filters, the tutorial will apply to any version since 2.0 even if the menu locations have changed.  Where possible I’ll make notes of menu changes.

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It’s interesting to note that the list consists of tools that were most favored the last time the poll was taken, so GIMP must have been a fan favorite then too.  Nice to see we’re keeping pace!

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Also included in this collection are new sessionrc and toolrc files which, when used with the collection of tool-option presets, will change the default configuration of your GIMP session.  The new configurations make navigating GIMP easier while showing the power of our favorite editor.   Topping off this release is an extremely useful PDF document explaining the details and how to make the most out of the new brushes and palettes.

There are some minor downsides to this collection.  First, the PDF document is in Spanish and there are currently no translations available.  However this is a minor issue and doesn’t affect actual use of GPS. If the source to the document is released I suspect that the translations will follow in short order.

More importantly the updated configuration files will present a layout that will not fit on most desktops smaller than 1280×1024.   While the width of the windows fit on my 1280×800 laptop, the height of the windows did not and I was unable to get the window manager controls to resize the dock windows.  This, too, should not be a huge problem as you can drag the docks off from those windows and rearrange them to fit your needs, or simply don’t install the sessionrc or the toolrc.

Finally, the documentation refers to a number of brushes which I suspect are to be used with specific tools.  However, the brush names in the document do not match the brush names in the Brush dialog nor do they match the names of the brush files.

No license file accompanied the release though if my spanish is good enough it appears the page does refer to free software.

The collection is packaged in the 7z format, a zip like format available on Windows but which is not commonly used on Linux or Unix systems.  Fortunately a Linux port of an unpacking tool is available.  On Fedora systems look for the p7zip package and install with yum.  If you can’t find the package for your Linux distribution you can try grabbing the source code from its sourceforge page.  To unpack the package use the following command:

7za x gps_v1.0.7z

One of the features you won’t notice without deciphering the documentation is that most of the Tools now have a number of tool option presets.  To use these, click on the “Reset options from…” button at the bottom of the Tool Options dialog and select one of the new presets installed with GPS.  The presets for the Smudge tool are particularly interesting.

GPS adds additional presets to most Tool Options.

Examples of Ramón’s work with GPS can be found on his blog.

Update: 2009-03-07

I was browsing Ramon Miranda’s blog and found that someone has translated the PDF documentation into English.  The package is the complete GPS including all the original files (sans PDF) and the translation is in HTML. It uses the images from the original PDF so they don’t display well, though this could probably be fixed up a little with some CSS.  Anyway, You can at least get some idea of what the PDF is saying now.

It shouldn’t be hard to convert the PDF to english now, using the same format as the original.  I may try this if I can find a night to do all the cut/paste work.

Update: 2009-03-08

I’ve rewritten the english translation that was in HTML format into both OpenOffice and PDF formats using the same basic layout as Ramon’s original PDF documentation.  I’ve also cleaned up the grammer and made the document (IMHO) a bit easier to read.  I also added a small section on using the palettes, a title page and a table of contents.  Hopefully this will help those english readers who would like to understand how to use this very well done improvement to GIMP.

Update: 2009-03-10

I’ve noticed that I missed cleaning up the grammer in the sections describing each preset.  I’llupdate those after I finish my (currently due)  column for Linux Format later this week.

Update: 2009-06-08

Ramon pointed out I’ve been calling this by the wrong name:  it’s GIMP Paint Studio, not GIMP Paint Shop.  Mea culpa.

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The slides aren’t not visually exciting.  It was only for a short 15-20 minute presentation at a local open source users meeting.

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