Photography on the free software desktop has come a long way in recent years. All of the major desktop environments support camera import and provide image management and editing applications, including the all-important raw file conversion. But the desktop defaults are really geared towards casual users, optimized for point-and-shoot cameras and sharing photos online. Don’t be fooled by that, though; open source can and does offer the tools to support professional photographers and high-end enthusiasts.

Rather than drop in a long, bulleted list of applications, though, let’s take a look at what the open source alternatives are, task-by-task, to get a better feel for how the pieces fit together into a normal photographic workflow.

by Nathan Willis

Color correction

At the lowest level, the open source community provides several tools useful for calibrating and profiling your displays and printers, which is an essential step in the basic color-correction and adjustment process. You can start by creating an ICC monitor profile using either Argyll or LPROF. Each of these tools supports a range of hardware colorimetry devices, but the lists of supported devices is different (you can see Argyll’s here, and LPROF’s in its documentation).

Argyll provides step-by-step instructions for adjusting your display and creating an ICC profile for your display, creating a scanner profile using an IT8.7/2 target, and creating an output device (either printer or film recorder) profile. Argyll is natively command-line only, but you can use the dispcalGUI for a nicer graphical interface if you so desire. LPROF has a graphical user interface, and can give excellent results, but the online documentation is not quite up-to-date, which can be a problem for new users.

“DispcalGUI and LPROF’s display profiling capabilities.”

The lion’s share of Linux and free software photo editors are already ICC-aware, so once you have your device profiles created, you can simply open up the preferences of the various applications, go to the color management section, and add the necessary profiles. This is true for GIMP, Krita, Digikam, UFRaw, and Raw Therapee.

The popular Rawstudio raw converter is also color-aware, but it takes a different approach with respect to the profiles of raw image files themselves, so you need to be aware of the differences. It uses DNG Color Profiles (DCP), which are specific to camera models, and the application includes more than 200 DCP profiles by default, covering all major brands and models, so it should not be any extra work for you. You can read background information about the color transformation process on the Rawstudio blog.

All of the open source photo editors worth their salt include support for soft proofing and embedding profiles into finished images.

Image and shoot management

The gPhoto2 function library sits underneath almost all desktop Linux environments, providing uniform access to downloading images directly from cameras or from memory cards. GNOME and KDE will usually pop up a window to enable you to offload your images as soon as a USB camera or card is connected — although you can configure both desktops not to do so, and offload the images from your image management application instead.

When it comes to image management application, no two photographers agree. The most popular choice at present is Digikam, which has robust and flexible IPTC/IIM and EXIF metadata management, tagging and categorization, and a flexible search system to help you keep track of your image library. In a multi-user environment, you might also want to check out ResourceSpace, which uses a web-app interface. ResourceSpace can be used to manage a collection remotely, and allows users to set up image collections and request sets based on the available library; it could be useful for interacting with clients.

“Digikam is a powerhouse at image management — shown here is the advanced search interface.”

For more workflow-oriented control, the application Darktable allows you to sort, filter, and batch-edit images by shoot. It also includes plenty of image-editing tools, and is extensible with plugins. The only serious drawback to Darktable is that the current release lacks ICC profile support, but it is schedule to appear in updates soon.

“The newer Darktable application combines workflow tools and raw conversion.”

If disaster strikes, in the form of an accidentally-erased memory card or a lost backup drive, you can install the open source file recovery tool PhotoRec to recover deleted images. Like all data recovery tools, PhotoRec can only recover files that have not been overwritten by newer content, but when possible, it can work wonders — scanning multi-gigabyte drives and cards in mere minutes and pulling out photo content you otherwise would have lost.

Raw editing

Most of the software already mentioned supports raw photo file formats, particularly UFRaw, Rawstudio, RawTherapee, Digikam, and Darktable. Of those, the first three are focused raw conversion tools, and offer the widest range of exposure controls, tone curve and other image adjustments, de-noising, and sharpening controls. You can save your adjusted images in a range of output formats, including 8-bit or 16-bit TIFF, as well as JPEG. Thanks to the LensFun library, most of the raw editors now include optical correction for barrel distortion, color aberration, and other lens artifacts. All are also lossless editors, so you do not have to worry about making destructive changes to your originals.

Choosing between the three raw editors is tricky; each offers its own unique set of features, but ultimately there is no reason not to have all three installed — as free software, the cost to you is the same.

“Editing a photo in UFRaw. The same photo is shown for comparison in Rawstudio and RawTherapee.”

“Editing a photo in Rawstudio. The same photo is shown for comparison in UFRaw and RawTherapee.”

“Editing a photo in RawTherapee. The same photo is shown for comparison in Rawstudio and UFRaw.”

Historically, all of the raw-supporting open source editors relied on a program called DCraw, written and maintained single-handedly by Dave Coffin, for raw decoding support. DCraw is great, and consistently updated as Canon, Nikon, and other manufacturers make changes to their file formats. The problem was that each project incorporated the DCraw code into its own editor independently. A recent change in this area is the development of LibRaw, a shared library that any program can connect to. This should help all of the editors maintain better compatibility, establish a common API, and let the programmers work on other important tasks without duplicating their efforts. LightZone and Bibble. Neither is open source, but if you are used to working with either on Windows or Mac OS X, it can simplify the transition knowing that you can move to Linux for all of your other needs and still have access to the software you are used to (and, in most cases, have already paid a license fee for).

Finally, if you are new to Linux as a platform, you may be surprised to see that there are several commercial raw editors available on Linux, including

Retouching

For retouching images, such as dust and blemish removal, you have several open source options. Krita, mentioned above, is a drawing and painting app that supports many photo editing features — cloning, healing, filters, layers, masking, and much, much more. Krita also has the advantages of letting you work on 16-bit native images, in the RGB, La*b*, or XYZ color spaces.

“Krita, retouching a 16bit-per-pixel depth image.”

GIMP does not fully support as many file type options as of today; support for 16-bit images is being added in the development branch, so you can try it out if you are feeling a little brave. On the other hand, where GIMP excels is in its extensive tools, scripts, and plugins. If you can make your final image adjustments in UFRaw or Rawstudio, you can export the result to GIMP for retouching.

“GIMP, showcasing the configurable Wacom tablet support.”

There are several other apps useful for retouching and general image manipulation, including Fotoxx and Nathive. A special mention belongs to Cinepaint; this application diverged from a much older version of the GIMP, and was re-tooled to support 16-bit and higher images for working with cinematic film effects. Unfortunately, it has not been actively developed for quite some time; the project claims that a rewrite is in development, though, so it could help to keep one eye on the project.

All of the image editors mentioned support pressure-sensitive graphics tablets, from basic USB devices providing only pressure support all the way up to expensive options from Wacom like the Cintiq, which incorporates an LCD display directly into the tablet for on-screen editing, and supports multiple input devices, tilt-sensitivity, and other enhancements.

Effects

The raster image editors Krita and GIMP support endless options for special effects, including duotones, vignetting, and almost any kind of transformation. GIMP’s scriptability and plugin system mean there is an endless supply of effects options. Besides the purely creative, noteworthy are some powerful adjustment tools.

Liquid Rescale, which can “intelligently” re-size an image, preserving important features like people, and compressing background information. SIOX image extraction can pull a foreground element out of a picture by intelligently finding its borders with only a rough outline drawn by hand — far faster than you can trace out the element with selection tools. Resynthesizer and G’MIC can generate realistic-looking image fills to replace edited-out details, drawing automatically on the image’s contents. This makes it easy to remove a stray object without having to paint over the spot in question with the clone tool alone.

Hugin is an app designed to stitch and blend images together seamlessly, creating wide-screen or even 360-degree panoramas (in a variety of projections and file formats). On top of that, it can correct distortion and lens aberration, perform perspective corrections such as those needed for architectural projection, and combing multiple images into focus stacks — where one image with the foreground in focus is seamlessly merged with another where just the background is in focus.

 ”Hugin previewing a stitched-together wide-angle panorama.”

Luminance HDR is a tool you can use for tone mapping multiple exposures, either to capture a high-dynamic-range scene and map it into a regular TIFF or JPEG file, or to perform other exposure tricks. Although Luminance HDR is a stand-alone app, tone-mapping is beginning to make its way into other open source photography tools, and may some day be a common feature.

Publishing

Some of the open source image managers, such as Digikam, support direct export of files to online photo hosting sites like Flickr. For a custom web gallery, there are an array of open source options available, such as Gallery, Plogger, and Zenphoto.

Direct export to one of these packages is not usually available from within image managers or photo editors, but there are a few exceptions, such as Digikam’s Pwigo export, and direct export is sometimes possible through a plugin. Most of the web gallery packages are based on standard Apache packages like PHP and MySQL. They vary considerably in the feature set and ease of configurability, though. Some, like Flash Gallery, can create effects such as slide shows, while others are tuned more for sharing and online discussions.

By and large, they are designed with multi-user galleries in mind, not with creating a portfolio site for a single photographer, and none (at the moment) are written to facilitate photographer-client proofing or print ordering (although this may change). Consequently, features like content tagging and geotagging are widespread, but features like selective access control are not.

Your best bet at developing an online photo hosting site for your work is probably to contract out some customization work to a web developer — one of the nicest things about open source is that the code is available for anyone too work with, including yourself, but including a short-term contractor as well.

If you have your images professionally printed, of course, you have no need to worry about operating systems. You can upload files to online print bureaus via Firefox (or any other open source browser) just like anyone else; these days your only real concern is if your print bureau uses a Flash-based interface, and even that is doable on normal, 32-bit Linux systems, which have good official Flash support.

Direct printing in Linux covers inkjet, laser, dye-sublimation, and exotic printer and ink types, primarily through the Gutenprint project. There are a few special-purpose print tools like Photoprint and Krokus that offer fast multi-image-per-page printing, but for the most part, good printing support comes built-in. The ICC profiling tools mentioned at the beginning cover output devices, too, as long as you put in the work to characterize your device.

Crazy stuff

The preceding paragraphs cover most of the day-to-day photography tasks you are likely to juggle for a typical digital photo job, but open source software rarely stops at playing it safe. There are some hidden gems in the free software photography world that you might not have heard of.

For example, the gPhoto2 utility, mentioned earlier as the library that offloads images from cameras and memory cards, has a few other tricks up its sleeve for cameras attached via USB cable. You can use gPhoto2 as a tethered shooting system for dozens of Canon, Nikon, and Olympus cameras, from point-and-shoot compacts to high-end DSLRs. How much control over exposure configuration, zoom, and other features you have depends on the camera itself, so check the remote controlling cameras page in the gPhoto2 documentation to see what capture options are available. Tethered shooting allows you to more quickly assess images on your computer’s screen, show them to clients, and copy files directly to hard disk, removing flash card size limitations. But it also opens the door to scriptability and other computer-control options, as imagination allows.

Even better than tethering, there are several open source projects to build enhanced firmware for popular digital cameras, adding new features beyond the factory settings. Similar work has gone on for years with Linux-based routers and set-top boxes, with great success, so it should come as no surprise that cameras attract a similar hacker crowd. The two main projects are CHDK, which offers builds for Canon compact cameras using the Digic II and Digic III chips, and Magic Lantern, which targets the EOS 550D and 5D Mark II.

CHDK can enable features from raw file output and full manual exposure to video zooming and motion detection. Nightly builds are available for a wide range of camera models. Not all features are possible on every camera, of course, and some cameras have more stress-tested firmware than others, so it is a good idea to consult the project’s wiki to see what is currently available.

Magic Lantern focuses on enhancing the video shooting capabilities of the high-end Canon DSLRs, including manual gain control, custom focus and bracketing, and improved audio monitoring. Magic Lantern is newer, and thus far does not support as many camera models, but several more are on the way. Best of all, because CHDK and Magic Lantern do not override the camera’s original firmware, they are both safe to use without risk of damage. You load the firmware image onto the camera’s memory card and power-cycle the camera while holding down a special key; to return to the stock firmware, just power-cycle the camera like normal.

Finally, there is an enthusiastic community of open source coders working on extending the features offered by the popular Eye-Fi brand SD cards, which add WiFi connectivity to inexpensive digital cameras. Eye-Fi hacks include direct upload (as opposed to funneling photos to a user account managed by Eye-Fi) and a host of other tricks; there is even work to integrate Eye-Fi usage with CHDK.

Photography is a fast-moving sector in the Linux and open source software world; perhaps because it sits at the nexus of so many left-brained and right-brained tasks it attracts a very enthusiastic user- and developer-base. Adobe and Apple may ingore the open source photographer crowd, but the fact is that the crowd basically doesn’t need them.

BY NATHAN WILLIS

Efforts to ramp up Community Involvement have become a driving force in the development of The Open Clip Art Library. Recent updates to the platform have begun implementing key features to the already robust 2.0 environment.

Most recently, a themed clip art package has begun it’s release, alongside each monthly iteration of OCAL. Past collections have included Seasonally appropriate themes including Spring 2010, Summer 2010, and Sports 2010.

Work for next month’s Open Clip Art Library Release is already underway, and the Librarians are once again asking for new additions to an already massive collection (currently tipping the scales at over 33,600). This latest theme, Fall 2010, is building towards an upcoming Holiday Release. As such, the Community is asked to do double-duty and begin uploading their original and remixed clip arts that are related to the Fall Season, as well as the Halloween Holiday, tagging each with their appropriate key words (“fall2010″ or “halloween2010″ respectively).

Submissions for the Fall 2010 Clip Art Package will be accepted through the month of August, while Halloween themed work will continue building through September. Any contributing artists should take note of the new Activities section that displays, front and center, on Open Clip Art Library’s home page. The links contained here will display the most recent and active contests or events taking place within the Community.

The Librarians look forward to the upcoming Fall 2010 Package and would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to all of the exciting new activity at The Open Clip Art Library!

This Open Clip Art Library Package Announcement is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

User interface prototyping is supposed to be a creative discipline, where the tools don’t get in the way, so you can place your ideas on the screen just like you would draw them freehand on the back of a napkin. Up until recently, however, there was not a high quality open source UI prototyper, so designers were left with the less-than-optimal workflow of creating mockups in Inkscape or the Gimp, or else forced to use proprietary web applications that limited storage or added watermarks. Those days are in the past, though, thanks to Pencil.

By Nathan Willis

Pencil is an easy-to-use mockup editing environment; the user simply drags-and-drops UI widgets from a toolbox onto the canvas, and resizes and rearranges them as necessary. The UI widgets remain editable, and are stacked on the canvas as individual, adjustable elements. The result is more like a “paper prototype” and has advantages over designing in a raster or vector editor, with its concerns over layers, rendering, and other inflexibilities. Pencil provides several collections of widgets, covering generic shapes, specific desktop and mobile computer operating systems, and popular Web site toolkits. The application is also cross-platform because, interestingly enough, it is a Firefox browser extension.

“Pencil can be used to create UI mockups for the web, the desktop, or any other interface.  The ’sketchy’ widgets simulate rough drawings, like in a back-of-the-envelope design. (click on image for large screenshot)”

Installation and setup

You can find Pencil in Mozilla’s add-ons directory, but you should also consider checking the project’s home page to see if there is a newer release. The extension is provided as an .XPI download on the project site; as of press time the link did not initiate Firefox’s automatic XPI installer, but if you choose to save the file locally and open it with File -> Open, the installer will launch.

There is also a stand-alone version of Pencil mentioned on the project’s downloads page. This app uses Mozilla’s XULRunner backend, so that you can run the package as a standard application program if you do not have Firefox installed, or if you simply wish to keep the applications running as separate processes. Presently, however, the packages provided in XULRunner form are not up-to-date. The most recent version of Pencil is 1.2.0, and the XULRunner version provided as a Linux TAR archive is from pre-1.0 builds.

The Pencil project also has links to several extra widget collections that it calls “Stencils.” Currently there are stencil packages for UML flowcharts, business development presentations, the popular Dojo and Ext JavaScript libraries, and icons designed for iPhone mockups and touch-screen gesture display. The Stencil downloads are packaged in .ZIP files; to install them you open it with the “Tools” -> “Install New Collection” menu item in Pencil.

You do not need to install any Stencils to get started however. The 1.2.0 release comes with widgets for essential geometric shapes, basic annotations (such as indicator arrows and text balloons), basic HTML elements, Windows XP and GTK+ GUI elements, a meta-package that picks up the native toolkit widgets of whatever operating system you run Pencil in, and a nice set of free-form “sketch”-like elements that simulate the drawn-loosely-on-paper look. There are even more Stencil collections available from users on the Pencil Users mailing list and its associated wiki.

“In addition to the UI toolkits themselves, the annotation widgets allow you to mark up your designs with notes and bullet points. (click on image for large screenshot)”

 ”Pencil’s ‘Native’ widget set picks up the toolkit from your desktop environment, here, GTK+, but with the correct theme automatically.”

Finally, the project provides several downloadable “export templates” that Pencil uses to create HTML, PDF, or other document formats from your mockups. There are several styles available, depending on the intended usage, so it does not hurt to experiment with several. Unlike Stencils, you do need to download and install export templates separately, or you will be limited to bares-bones output.

Drawing

Once installed, you launch Pencil from Firefox’s “Tools” menu. It opens up a separate window, with basic menus and editing tools across the top, a collapsible list of the installed widget collections on the left, and the canvas on the right. For its overall document structure, Pencil uses the concept of “pages,” each of which is an independent canvas shown in its own tab in the interface. Pages within a document can be different sizes, you can copy and paste elements between them, and even duplicate or delete pages from the right-click context menu in the tab bar.

Within a page, the canvas is shown as a white rectangle with a drop shadow against a non-editable background layer. You can change the size of the canvas only by choosing “Properties” from the right-click context menu on the current tab. There is a grid system, which you can adjust the spacing of and enable or disable snap-to-grid on by opening up Pencil’s “Settings” -> “Options” menu item.

“Every element of a Pencil drawing can be moved around and configured independently, including structures like tables and tab bars. (click on image for large screenshot)”

You place UI elements on the canvas by drag-and-drop with the cursor; this might seem counterintuitive, since you can select elements in the Collections tab as if they were tools — but drag-and-drop is the name of the game. Every element you place has control points at the corners and on the midpoints of each side; when you select an element with the mouse you can resize it by dragging any of these points. The resize is not a scale transformation, however: instead, it resizes the element by lengthening its sides proportionally. In other words, when you resize a text box, you get a larger text box, not a magnified-and-pixelated enlargement of the original text box. Double-clicking on an element allows you to rotate it around any handle.

Many UI elements use text labels, either basic names, or more structure grids and lists, such as you might find in a tree-view or selection widget. You can double-click on any text element and edit its contents directly on the canvas, or open the element’s properties with the right-click menu. There is a very simple syntax for extending the structured text elements; the pipe character | denotes new columns, the hash character # denotes which item in a list is selected, and the asterisk character * denotes which item is highlighted. There is some variation as to the support for # and * if different widgets, but which one works is always easy to determine.

Several of the compound widgets you need for GUI prototyping support more direct adjustment than simple highlighting. For example, you can change the “progress” shown on the progress bar indicator by dragging a special handle that appears when you select the widget. You can create a tab bar with as many tabs as you need (added by editing the tab labels and inserting pipe characters), and even change which one is selected by putting a hash character in the tab name.

The toolbar at the top allows you to manually adjust the settings of any selected element — from its precise X,Y positioning on screen, to foreground and background coloring, to text properties like font and alignment. Of course, the emphasis in Pencil is on quick-and-easy manipulation of objects. To make this easier, whenever you drag an element or a resize handle, horizontal and vertical guide lines appear whenever you drag it to within a few pixels of a nearby element — thus allowing you to place objects into perfect alignment without resorting to worrying about their specific X,Y coordinates.

You can add images (such as icons, photos, or screen content) by dropping in the “Bitmap Image” element from the Common Shapes widget collection. The right-click menu for this element allows you to either import an image, or link to it (in which case the image file must remain in its present location or else the link will break). Some UI widgets, such as buttons, also allow you to attach an image file as one of their properties. Finally, Pencil includes a built-in search interface linked to the Open Clip Art Library. Using this feature, you can search and browse through scores of Creative Commons-licensed art and design elements, and import them directly into your mockup. It is a handy feature that beats trying to maintain a Pencil-specific clip art collection.

Exporting and sharing your designs

The drawing tools essentially give you total freedom to design your mockups as best you see fit. There are a few quirks here and there, such as the automatic truncating of text in tables and list box widgets, but for the most part the sky is the limit. Before you can use your prototypes to change the world, however, you need to export them into a common output document format. This is where Pencil’s export template system comes into play.

If you simply select “Document” -> “Export Document” from the menu, the default export window pops up. From here, you can simply save the mockup as a series of PNG files, one per page. You can also use this dialog to export to HTML, PDF, OpenOffice’s .ODT, or even Microsoft Word .DOC. However, all of these export options require you to install an export template like those provided at the Pencil Web site. Technically, you can still select an output format like HTML without a template installed, and the export wizard will step you through the process, but all it will do in the end is generate unlinked PNG files and drop them in a directory.

“Export templates allow you to theme and style your final output, for the web or for PDF / ODT / DOC documents. (click on image for larger screenshot)”

Export templates are provided for download in .ZIP archives. To install one, simply save it locally in its Zipped form, then open it from within Pencil’s “Tools” -> “Manage Export Template…” menu item. One important caveat for this process is that Pencil requires you to choose either HTML or “Text Documents” (a category including PDF, DOC, and ODT) when you install each template — you can choose the wrong type, and Pencil will not warn you that the template is incompatible; you’ll only find out that you installed it to the wrong section when you try to export.

The installed templates will be available for use immediately, appearing in the export wizard. For some reason, when exporting to HTML, Pencil chooses the filename “index.html” for you automatically, which can overwrite other exports in the same directory, but requires you to manually specify a filename for other document types.

The templates provided at the Pencil project site are fairly minimalist; if you are interested in HTML output, you will probably need to either perform some heavy CSS theming on the results, or write your own template for further usage. The project site, unfortunately, does not host documentation on producing your own export themes, but it is easy enough to read through the basic themes and get the idea — themes consist of an XSLT style sheet, an XML file containing basic template properties, and external resources (such as images) that will be included in the final output.

All in all, Pencil’s main strengths are its ease-of-use: creating a mockup is drag-and-drop simple, editing even tricky elements like multi-column text is straightforward, and the snap and alignment tools make creating neat, organized images easy. If you have far-out ideas, you may be better off creating prototypes form scratch with a raster editor like the Gimp, but for many cases, the quick turnaround afforded by Pencil makes it a win.

by Nathan Willis

In the previous post in this series, we looked at the basic design tools used to create labels and business cards with gLabels: the drawing tools, text tools, how they compare to raster- or vector-graphics editors, and the object manipulation tools. We also covered how to print your creations, and what formatting options gLabels provides to make life easier. Chances are, though, that at some point you will need to take advantage of some of gLabels’ more advanced features, such as the ability to do “mail merge” printing, to incorporate readable barcodes, or to edit label templates of your own.

by Nathan Willis

MERGING

The term “mail merge” usually means printing a set of documents, labels, or envelopes based on a common template so that the generic information in the template is replaced with a unique set of specifics — typically pulled from an external file, such as a comma-separated-value (CSV) text file. That way, you only set up the document once, but can print out hundreds of uniquely-addressed copies.

Obviously this sort of functionality is not limited to use with mail envelopes, so gLabels refers to it by the more general term “document merge.” The official documentation even gives an example using name tags.

To add a document merge to your label design, you must start with configuring the data source. Click on the “Edit merge properties” button on the toolbar, which will open the configuration window. gLabels supports several data formats, including plain text with either tab, colon, or comma delimiters between the fields, VCard address book files, and direct import of address book entries from GNOME’s Evolution email client. Select the appropriate format from the drop-down box, then select the actual file you will use for the merge.

“gLabels can do a document or “mail merge” from several data sources.”

gLabels then loads the contents of the file into the preview pane, both to help you see whether or not the fields are aligned correctly and so that you can check or uncheck specific records for inclusion in the final merge. Check to make sure that each field is correctly displaying the data you expect — including any blanks. If your export skipped a field without data rather than inserting a properly-delimited blank space, it could throw off every other field for that particular record.

When you are satisfied with the structure of your data, click “OK.” It is time to incorporate your document merge placeholders into the label design. You do this by inserting text objects, then inserting special control codes into the display text. The format for a control code is ${FIELD_NAME}. For a typical CSV or plain text data source, gLabels uses simple numbers for the field name, such as ${1} for the first field, ${42} for the 42nd field, and so on. A VCard or Evolution data source would use ${PHONE}, ${SUFFIX} or other appropriately self-explanatory field names provided by the data source itself.

If you select a text object, gLabels’ object properties pane allows you to insert a field control code with the “Insert merge field” button — the adjacent “Key:” selector is automatically filled with the available field names extracted from the data file, so there is no chance of mis-typing.

When gLabels encounters a blank field in a record, it prints nothing, so (for example) $[FIRSTNAME} ${MIDDLENAME} ${LASTNAME} will not cause an error or an unsightly extra whitespace when printing an entry without a middle name. Nevertheless, you must take an additional precaution to prevent the accidental printing of a blank line in your output. If you are formatting postal addresses of the form:

${FIRSTNAME} ${MIDDLENAME} ${LASTNAME}
${ADDRESS_LINE_1}
${ADDRESS_LINE_2}
${CITY}, ${STATE} ${ZIPCODE}

then you must ensure that ${ADDRESS_LINE_1} and ${ADDRESS_LINE_2} are the only text on their respective lines, including whitespace. If so, gLabels will skip printing the entire line for records missing one of those fields, which is the expected behavior. If, however, there is also a blank space on the same line as ${ADDRESS_LINE_2}, the resulting output will include a blank line.

As long as the control codes remain in place, you can do any other text style manipulation you wish to make your final output appear as desired; there are no limitations on font, color, or other properties. To check the output of your document merge, open the Print dialog and click on the Print Preview button — gLabels will show you the final merged output.

“gLabels shows a preview of its merge data import, to check for accuracy.”

If you try a print preview, you will immediately notice that gLabels automatically detects the number of entries in the file and composes its output with the correct number of labels or cards. The same is true for final printing; you do not need to worry about counting the number of merged records. You can, however, select which label position on the sheet to start printing on. This allows you to re-use partially printed sheets of labels.

BARCODES

Another business-friendly feature supported in gLabels is the ability to incorporate barcodes into your label designs. Barcode objects are among the elements you can insert from the toolbar, and like rectangles, ellipses, or images, you have full control over their size, position, and color. Much like a text object, though, you must specify the contents of the code to be created.

“gLabels supports generating barcodes from data.”

When you insert a barcode, the object properties pane displays a “Data” tab. Here you can manually specify the text contents to be rendered in the label as a barcode, or you can link the contents to a field in a document merge. To do the the latter, just select the “Key” radio button, and choose the field of choice from the drop-down menu. As with text objects, gLabels pre-loads the available keys into the drop-down menu, so there is no danger of choosing the wrong one.

The “Style” tab allows you to specify the barcode format to be rendered, and the color in which it will be drawn. gLabels supports a range of different barcode formats — at present a total of 30, including POSTNET, UPC, ISBN, and the 2-D DataMatrix format. The different formats have different capabilities; for example, you can only encode numeric data in POSTNET, because it was created for encoding ZIP codes. If you try to render incompatible data into a barcode, gLabels will write an error message to that effect when it prints or in print preview. Consequently, if you intend to use barcodes for internal usage rather than compatibility with the post office or some other business, brush up on the available formats before selecting one.

 ”gLabels allows you to choose from numerous barcode formats.”

You can also use a field from your data source to set the color of the barcode. On the Color setting in the “Style” tab, just click on the “Key” radio button and select the field to be used from the drop-down menu much like you did for “Data.” Acceptable values for a color key include the standard X named colors from /etc/X11/rgb.txt or an RGB hex value formatted much like HTML colors. gLabels can use more significant digits in its hex values, though, so #RGB, #RRGGBB, #RRRGGGBBB, or even #RRRRGGGGBBBB are acceptable formats.

TEMPLATE EDITING

For the vast majority of the print jobs you create with gLabels, the supplied templates will be exactly what you need. On the other hand, if you have to create a curiously-shaped label (perhaps to be cut out of one of the larger label sizes), or if you need to change the dimensions of the generic business card template to fit your design, gLabels can help.

“The template designer steps you through the process of creating a template.”

gLabels templates are written in XML that defines the shape, spacing, margins and other properties of the label or card in question, and provide some metadata useful to the application. System-wide labels like the ones that come pre-packaged in most distros are stored in /usr/share/glabels/, but the program will also look in ~/.glabels, so you can store your custom designs there.

You can consult gLabels’ help documentation for a tutorial on creating templates with a text editor — the process is not that hard; you must define height, width, round-ness of corners, and other properties. An easier option, however, is gLabels’ “Template Designer,” found under the “File” menu. This is a simple GUI wizard that walks you through the steps of defining the required physical properties and metadata.

 “Designing a template is not hard, but requires making some precise measurements.”

To begin with, you must enter a “Brand” and “Part number” for your template — these correspond to a commercial label product; if you are creating a custom template from scratch, you can use any information you find descriptive. You then select the paper size, and the basic shape of the label or card. Of note, gLabels templates require that all labels on a single sheet be the same size, however, gLabels can accommodate templates that use multiple label sizes (such as CD label sheets that include a CD case label) by creating multiple layouts. You simply design with and print them separately.

When you get to the step defining the actual dimensions of each label you can add the “safe area” lines that appear in the label drawing area, and the amount of overprint that can be tolerated without bleeding into adjacent labels on the sheet. The last page of the template designer allows you to specify the layout of the page — how many rows and columns of labels or cards there are, and the distances between them and from the edges of the page. There is a print button that allows you to print or print-preview a test template before you finalize your design.

CONCLUSION

gLabels undergoes constant development, but over the years it has evolved into an easy to use tool with a deceptively large feature set. Most users may never need to design their own templates, and few will need to incorporate barcodes regularly, but it is nice that the application not only supports these tasks, but makes them simple. On the other hand, almost everyone will have occasion to do a document merge at one time or another, and the robustness of gLabels’ support for this common task shows real code maturity. gLabels manages to make even this potentially complicated task point-and-click simple.

See Part 1 Getting Started with gLabels by Nathan Willis

Following is an excellent two part series on gLabels by Nathan Willis:  Getting started with gLabels and Advanced usage with gLabels.

Labels and Cards with gLabels (Part One)

In the world of label creation software for Linux, gLabels is the long-standing market leader. It offers a convenient graphical interface in which you can design labels with the same tools you are used to finding in image editing software, but it also supports business-friendly advanced features like “mail merge” and barcode generation. In addition to that, its focus on label creation offers some advantages in printing over general office or graphics alternatives, like simple control over printing partial sheets.

You can download source code for gLabels from its SourceForge project page, but most Linux distributions include it in their package management systems — the gLabels site maintains a list of such distros on the download page. gLabels uses GTK and is designed to work with the GNOME desktop environment, but it runs just as well under KDE.

When you first launch gLabels, most of the main window will be grayed-out; to get started you must first create a new label file. Click on the “New” icon on the toolbar. This opens the template selector, from which you can choose the type of media you want to work with — everything from address labels to CD labels to round labels to full-sheets to business cards are supported; gLabels includes hundreds of templates. To simplify selecting the right template, you can sort by brand name, page size, and media category using drop-down boxes at the top of the window.

“gLabels starts off a new session by asking you to choose a template.”

gLabels remembers your choices, so in subsequent sessions you can save some time by selecting often-used templates from the “Recent templates” tab instead of searching through the complete library. Also from this window you can click on the “Rotate” checkbox to open the label designer with the selected label rotated 90%. This is strictly for your convenience in designing the layout; gLabels does not require you to physically rotate the page in the printer when you finish — the program handles that automatically. If you’re not sure which orientation you need, there is a small preview displayed by the checkbox. You’ll notice that gLabels is smart enough to deactivate this checkbox if you choose a round or perfectly square label!

Designing

When you’ve found the right template, click “OK” and gLabels will open a new label in the label design window. This window has a drawing area on the left displaying blank canvas in the shape of the selected label, a properties pane on the right with which you can adjust design elements, and drawing tools above and below.

“The main gLabels window.”

Above the drawing area you will find the selection tool, text tool, rectangle, line, and ellipse tools, and the image and barcode tools. These function much like their equivalents in a vector drawing app like Inkscape or Illustrator — you use the object tools to draw content onto the canvas, and the select tool to manipulate objects already in the drawing. Unlike drawing in a raster editor like the Gimp or Photoshop, objects in gLabels are not rendered into a flat “painting” of pixels; they can be moved, edited, or erased at any time.

“The properties pane, showing properties for an image object.”

To the right of these drawing tools you will find the zoom controls (in, out, one-to-one or “100%”, and zoom-to-fit) and a button labeled “Edit merge properties.” The latter is for use when configuring a mail merge, and is complex enough to warrant a section of its own. The zoom tools, like the drawing tools, work just like those in any image editor.

Below the drawing area are controls for setting additional drawing properties: the font, size, weight, slant, and alignment of text elements, the color of text, line, and object fill, and the line weight. When no object in the drawing area is selected, changing any one of these settings changes its default for future objects. When you select a rectangle, on the other hand, the properties update to show its current line weight and color scheme — that way, you can manipulate all objects’ properties individually. A property that does not apply to the selected object (such as text settings for a rectangle or ellipse) is automatically grayed-out.

“The properties pane, showing options for text editing.”

The drawing area itself shows the outline of the current label, with a red border inside the edge marking a “safe area” into to which all critical content should fit, to account for printer variation and minor differences in label perforation. This border is actually part of the label template itself, so some templates may also include additional markup lines to help with alignment. The canvas also shows a gray grid underneath all drawing objects; this is strictly for visual alignment — gLabels does not “snap” to this grid. You can turn off grid display from the “View” menu.

“Additional controls, such as the z-ordering of objects, are not found in the toolbar.”

Working with objects and object properties

As you draw and manipulate objects in your design, the “properties” panel on the right changes to give you access to some more advanced controls for each object type. When inserting an image, for example, the properties panel is where you select the image file to load, and it allows you to adjust the scale, proportion, and placement of the image on the canvas with a greater degree of accuracy than the mouse can provide. The geometric objects (rectangle, line, and ellipse) have line width, color, and fill color controls in addition to size and position, and an optional “shadow” special effect over which you can control vertical and horizontal offset, shadow color, and opacity.

“The shadow feature is a built-in special effect.”

Text objects have their own set of properties, naturally — on top of color, size, position, and shadow effect. The “Style” tab allows you to select the font, size, weight and slant, alignment, and line spacing. You type the actual text to be rendered in the “Text” tab, which allows for more accuracy than trying to type directly in the drawing area, particularly when there are multiple layers and objects. Although it is probably clear, it bears mentioning that you control the properties of every text object you create individually — this gives you a lot of freedom, but it also limits you to a single text style for each object. If you need to italicize just one word, you will have to create it in a text object of its own.

You can place text, graphics, and other objects anywhere on the drawing area, including partially or completely off of the label itself. As you add elements to the design, the newest element is always placed on top of the older elements. You can change this “z-ordering” with the “Bring to front” and “Send to back” commands found in the “Objects” menu.

There you will find other object-manipulation commands as well; you can also rotate any object by 90 degrees in either direction, or flip it vertically or horizontally. Finally, you can select multiple objects (by holding down the Control key as you click on them) and align them vertically or horizontally, measuring from either edge or the center. You can also center any object on the label.

Printing your work

When you are ready to print your final product, choose “Print” from the File menu. You will notice that gLabels adds a “Labels” tab to the standard GNOME print dialog, with which you can better control printer output in some label-specific ways.

“gLabels adds a tab to the GNOME print dialog with special options, like partial-page-printing.”

For example, you can choose the “print outlines” option, and print test output on a standard sheet of paper. This way you can check the alignment of your printer by comparing the test page against an actual sheet of labels, without sacrificing a sheet.

You can also choose the “print crop marks” option, which will print light lines aligned to the outside of the template’s labels. Using these you can cut your sheets up, even with a paper cutter, without fear of slicing through your output. There are always occasions where you might want to cut up a sheet of labels, but this option is primarily of value when designing business cards. The crop marks let you create clean, perfectly-aligned cards without resorting to outlines or other tricks, and best of all: you don’t have to worry about aligning the crop marks; gLabels does it for you.

“gLabels allows you to view a preview of your printout to check for accuracy.”

The third option is “print in reverse,” which prints a mirror-image of the design. This option is for use with labels that will be affixed to glass, such as inside a window, but need to be read from the outside. Here again, you could manually achieve the same affect — gLabels lets you flip any object in the drawing area, remember — but by providing a one-click print-time option instead, gLabels allows you to worry about creating the design you want, not technical issues.

The last option gLabels gives you at the print stage is whether to print an entire page of labels, or just a few. The print dialog includes a preview image of the chosen template, with the labels to be printed highlighted. You can choose to print the entire sheet if necessary, or you can print as few or as many as you want. Just click on the template preview, or use the numeric spin-boxes to select which subset of the full sheet you wish to print, preserving the rest of the page for a different job, perhaps with a completely different design.

Up next: advanced topics

That covers basic gLabels usage: designing labels, using the built-in tools, and printing. Next time we will look into advanced topics that require more space: setting up your label designs for a “mail merge,” working with gLabels’ support for automatic barcode creation, and using the template designed to edit and create your own label templates. Until then, happy labeling!

Read Part 2:  Advanced usage with glabels - this covers mail merge, barcode generating and more!

By Nathan Willis

Are you ever overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of open source software projects produced by the community? Even when looking at just a subset — such as graphics applications — if you are not already familiar with the options, the volume can make it hard to track down the application that fits your needs. The major categories tend to break down the same way, however — just a few major players; the large projects often catering to slightly different design goals, and a second set of smaller projects each of which has a smaller team and a more narrow focus.

Let’s examine each design field in turn. We’ll start by describing the leading program or programs in each, followed by the smaller or younger projects, and end with the special-purpose tools.

by Nathan Willis 

Drawing, Painting, and Illustration

Vector-based editors

• Inkscape is the dominant player here, a full-featured SVG editor with wide support for object manipulation, styling, text rendering, scriptability and SVG image filters. Inkscape supports the largest set of drawing primitives and effects.
• sK1 is an up-and-coming vector editor also aiming to be a complete illustration program. It is a fork of an older vector editor called Skencil that is no longer in development. One of sK1’s biggest claims to fame is import support for a large set of third-party file formats.
• Xara LX was a commercial vector editor that was released in a mostly-open source version for Linux in 2006. The company did not continue to develop it, though, so it may be a risky choice.
• OpenOffice Draw is part of the OpenOffice.org office suite, geared more towards crafting business-style illustrations suitable for embedding in other office documents than it is towards providing a complete suite of drawing tools.
• Even more limited in scope are the Dia and Kivio editors, both of which are designed for the purpose of building structured diagrams, from flowcharts to business diagrams. Dia is a GNOME application, and Kivio is a KDE application.
• Finally, the Ipe editor is a specialty tool designed for creating figures to be embedded in PDF or PostScript documents. Alchemy is an experimental vector editor that focuses on out-of-the-box drawing techniques including voice control and randomization. Neither are general-purpose editors, but may be useful if you fit their particular niche.

Raster-based editors

• Gimp is the long-dominant FOSS raster image editor. It supports multi-layered documents, with multiple color models, a full set of adjustable image-editing tools for photo and painting work, filters, channel operations, text and path tools, masks, editable brushes and palettes. It is fully scriptable, and has a large selection of third-party plugins that extend its functionality.
• Krita is another powerful raster image editor. Like Gimp, it supports tools and operations for both photo-adjustment and painting, layered documents, and filters. Krita, however, puts more emphasis on painting and drawing, by supporting multiple “brush engines” that simulate different media, some natural-media-simulation tools, and color models designed to better model painting. There is less emphasis on scriptability and plugins.
• MyPaint is a newer project that focuses exclusively on painting with pressure-sensitive pen drawing tablets. It boasts a massive array of brush options, all of which have completely adjustable behavior. However, it intentionally does not incorporate selection and image manipulation tools, preferring to leave that task for other editors.
• Nathive is a newer image editor designed for ease-of-use and extensibility with Python. It does not have a feature-set as complete as Gimp or Krita, but it is supposed to score high marks on usability with a smooth learning curve.
• Other general-purpose raster editors include Gogh, which is designed to simulate natural-media sketching and painting, Pinta, which is designed to be simple-to-use, and Tux Paint, which is designed for easy use by kids.
• A full list of the special-purpose raster editors would be prohibitively long, but there are actively-developed tools for creating all sorts of raster-based images, such as photomosaics (e.g., Pixelize), fractals (e.g., Mandelbulber or Fractal Miner) or 3-D stereoscopic pictures (StereoPhoto Maker). Many more special-purpose image tools have been adapted from stand-alone programs into Gimp plugins for ease-of-use, such as the G’MIC image manipulator, Resynthesizer texture simulator, or Liquid Rescale “content-aware resizer.”

Photography

Photo editing

• Although you can edit TIFF or JPEG photos in Gimp or Krita, for direct-from-the-camera professional quality work, you need a raw image converter. The most well-known raw converter in the open source suite is UFRaw, which is available as a stand-alone app or as a Gimp importer for the supported raw image formats (.CR2, .NEF, etc.). it supports multiple demosaicing algorithms, exposure and white balance control, denoising, and batch processing.
• Rawstudio is a virtually equally-capable raw converter, also with support for demosaicing, denoising, sharpening, exposure- and color-correction. The differences are that UFRaw typically includes more options for functions such as demosaicing, where there are multiple mathematical methods available. Rawstudio, however, includes more image browsing and cataloging features.
• RawTherapee is a newer entrant into the open source raw conversion world. It used to be a closed-source program, but was released as open source last year. It offers most of the same feature set as UFRaw and Rawstudio.

Workflow

• Free software does not have a dominant player in the photo-workflow application space. Many users prefer Digikam for photo management tasks; it supports EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata, geotagging, and is fully searchable. It also handles importing images from digital cameras.
• Two newer projects making big strides in this area are Darktable and Bluemarine. They have similar aims, enabling photographers to manage assignments and jobs, particularly to speed up processing of photos from a single shoot. Both are worth looking at, although at the moment Darktable is the more actively-developed.

Specialty

• Hugin is an important photography correction tool. Although it is often classified as a “panorama creator,” that is just one of its features. It can indeed align, stitch, and blend multiple photos into a seamless extremely-wide-angle or even 360-degree panorama, but it can also perform perspective correction, correct chromatic aberration and lens distortion, perform architectural projections, and combine multiple images in a “focus stack.”
• Luminance HDR (which was formerly named Qtpfsgui) is a tool designed to perform “tone-mapping” — compositing multiple exposures of one high-dynamic-range (HDR) scene into a seamless single image. Luminance HDR permits the user to select from multiple tone-mapping algorithms as adjust all of the algorithmic parameters for a variety of effects.
• Phatch is a rapid photo-manipulation batch processor. With Phatch, you create formulas by dragging and dropping operations (resize, perspective, shadow, rotate, etc.) into a stack, then execute it on a folder full of images all at once. The result is a much faster technique for performing multiple editing tasks than any interactive editor.

Design and Typography

Desktop publishing (DTP)

• Scribus is far and away the leader in open source DTP. It produces print-ready output, including the pre-press PDF/X standards, color management, font embedding and subsetting, and supports almost every type of image content imaginable. The page-layout system supports master pages, scripting, plugins, and embedding of content rendered by other programs, such as TeX or EPS.
• LyX is often referred to as a DTP application, but it is perhaps better described as a document preparation system. It uses the TeX typesetting system, but with an interactive GUI front-end more familiar to word processor users. Still, it enables the creation of complex documents like only Tex, LaTeX, and BibTeX can.
• PDFedit is a tool designed for editing what would normally be a read-only file type, finished PDFs. PDFedit has a considerable learning curve, but can be very useful for working with legacy documents when nothing else will do.
• gLabels is a specialty application built specifically for laying out and printing sheets of labels, business cards, and other small-sized designs that typically rely on multiple-copies-per-page templates. It can be used to generate sheets of identical content, or to “mail merge” content from external documents.
• Laidout is a design tool created by an independent comic book publisher to handle placing and rearranging multiple pages on to large sheets of printer paper, even reordering pages and with support for folding-and-cutting requirements. The interface can be hard to learn, however, as the project tends to reflect the individual developer’s needs.

Web design

• Bluefish is the most common web design tool in the free software community, but even it offers less in the way of WYSIWYG visual layout tools than commercial products like Dreamweaver. However, if coding straight HTML is not for you, Bluefish can make the process easier, and keep better track of CSS and JavaScript functions than a web-based content management system can.
• Kompozer is an older web design tool with its roots in the Mozilla project — the code originated as an HTML editor in the Mozilla Suite before Firefox and Thunderbird were split off into separate projects. Like Bluefish, it is a mixed bag of design tools and code editing, and it does not receive as frequent updates as Bluefish.
• More and more web design tools are migrating into Firefox extensions. Web Developer marks up browser content (including HTML entities and CSS) and allows manipulating elements “live” in the page. Firebug helps edit and debug CSS and JavaScript. Pencil is a rapid prototyping tool for creating designs in the browser. There are many more; searching for lists compiled by developer site is the best way to find current information.

Typography

• Fontmatrix is the leading font inspector and manager. It allows you to activate and deactivate fonts from your running system, search for specific glyphs, render sample text, and manage your font collection by type and by user-defined tags.
• FontForge is the leading font design and editing program. It can create TrueType, OpenType, and Type 1 fonts, with full control over features like kerning, hinting, and diacritics. You can edit existing fonts with FontForge, or create new fonts from scratch.
• Fonty Python is an older font manager than Fontmatrix, and although it does not seem to be as actively maintained, it is still a good tool, particularly if you have trouble with some of Fontmatrix’s bleeding-edge features.
• There are several special-purpose tools to assist the font designer, such as Glyphtracer, which simplifies converting raster images to the outline curves needed by FontForge, and Xgridfit, which helps create TrueType hints. Specimen is a lightweight tool for inspecting fonts with user-defined sample text.
• Finally, although it is not an app itself, the Open Font Library deserves mention in this category, because it is a large resource of fonts available under open licenses — meaning you have the legal right to alter and extend them, which is not the case with most commercially-purchased fonts.

Modeling and Animation

3-D modeling

• Blender is the dominant 3-D modeling tool in open source, consisting of a full toolchain for producing professional-quality photo-realistic scenes. On the modeling side, it permits meshes, subdivision surface modelings, Bezier and NURBS, and 3-D sculpting and texturing (including UV unwrapping). It scriptable with Python, and for output can use a variety of shaders and renderers, complete with ray-tracing, ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering, and radiosity.
• FreeCAD is the most well-known 3-D computer-aided design (CAD) app in open source. It is designed with mechanical engineering in mind.
• Archimedes is a simpler CAD program that specializes in architectural modeling. The QCad program does not directly do 3-D, but its 2-D design tools can be used to create blueprints useful in other, 3-D capable CAD tools.
• Several other open source 3-D modeling programs are under active development, including Art of Illusion and Wings3D. Neither has as large of a development team or user community as Blender, but since they do not try to incorporate Blender’s animation tools (see below) and video editing workflow, they may be easier to learn.
• There are also several special-purpose tools that come from the Blender community designed to assist with specific tasks, such as MakeHuman, which is optimized for the tricky task of creating realistic models of human beings.

Animation

• In addition to its static modeling and scene rendering, Blender is also a 3-D animation program, supporting rigging, skinning, armature deformation, forward and inverse kinematics, motion curve and key-frame editing, and more. Recent versions also support particle and fluid physics, soft body solvers, hair and cloth, and other special effects. A timeline based video editor and compositor are built-in.
• Synfig is a vector-based 2-D animation studio that supports many of the same features Blender does, but for 2-D animation. Characters, backgrounds, and other scene elements are composed of vector graphic primitives which are drawn or adjusted in key frames, and automatically “tweened” to create smooth animation frames.
• Pencil (not to be confused with the Firefox add-on mentioned above) is a more traditional “cell-based” animation tool; each individual frame is drawn on the canvas, which can be overlayed with translucency (called onion-skinning) to assist the artist.

Utilities and system support

Scanning

• Xsane is the leading scanning tool for open source systems. It fully supports flatbed, transparency, and film strip scanners, offering complete image controls and previewing, automatic or manual calibration, and color management complete with ICC input profiles.
• Kooka is a scanning utility written for the KDE desktop environment. It uses the same driver backend as Xsane, but attempts to put a more easily-understood front end on the tools, and integrates with other KDE-based applications.
• Due to the complexity of Xsane and Kooka, several “simple” scan tool projects exist as well, notably Scan Tailor and Simple Scan. None of them add functionality over the more complex offerings; they focus instead on a quick-use interface.

Printing

• CUPS is the printer management project used by almost all open source graphics systems, supporting inkjet, laser, and other less-common printer types. CUPS handles scheduling jobs, spooling and network-printer sharing. Support is usually provided by the operating system, so you do not need to worry about installing or configuring it separately.
• Gutenprint is a high-quality printer driver project; it provides the printer control layer directly below CUPS, and provides drivers for a vast array of printers. Normally you would never need to update or configure Gutenprint directly, but if you have trouble with a specific printer, it is the project to look towards for updates.
• Though CUPS and Gutenprint provide a solid printing system, there are several specialized projects that target specific tasks. Photoprint is designed to create professional-looking photo layouts, complete with borderless multiple-image-per-page layout options. CMYKTool from the same developers allows greater control over CMYK color separations than most individual printer drivers provide. The aforementioned Laidout can be used to create complex print layouts, including splitting large images up into arbitrarily-arranged multipage mosaics.

System calibration and profiling

• LPROF is the most widely-known ICC profile creation tool in open source, largely because it is currently the only tool with a graphical user interface. It was written by the creator of LittleCMS, the color management library used by most of the graphics applications mentioned above. LRPOF can create profiles for monitors, scanners, and digital cameras. Several hardware devices like X-Rite’s DP92 are supported.
• Argyll is a color management system (CMS) that includes several command-line tools. Included are utilities to create device profiles, calibrate displays, link profiles, and transform raster images to different color spaces. A GUI project called dispcalGUI also exists, maintained by different developers.
• Oyranos is another CMS, one that notably includes tools to configure and assign ICC color profiles to X displays. The ICC Examin tool is an offshoot of this project; it is the only dedicated color profile previewer for open source graphics pros.

Other tools

• Apart from the main applications, there are several important utility programs that act more as functional assistants than as content creation tools. Leading the charge is Agave, a color scheme chooser. The interface is lightweight, but the program lets users build color schemes based on complements, split-complements, triads, and other scheme types, with adjustable palettes and brightness/saturation controls.
• Swatchbooker is a newer “swatch” tool, which can read color swatches from a wide variety of programs, including the Adobe creative suite, all major open source programs, web sites, and many proprietary products. You can then convert and save swatch files for use with other applications.
• Open source support for pressure-sensitive graphics tablets is robust, but the historic need to edit the configuration of the devices in text files led to the creation of Wacom Control Panel. It is a graphical tool that lets the user tweak and adjust the settings and sensitivity of these devices on-the-fly.

BY NATHAN WILLIS

The Open Clip Art Library has spent much of 2010 actively pursuing higher ground and greater methods of user contribution, beginning with the March Release of Version 2.0. Since that landmark release, the OCAL team has been on a regular iteration schedule, geared toward simplifying the user experience and fixing bugs.

More recent openclipart.org releases have begun adding incentives for content creation, in the form of themed package releases. To date, said releases have resulted in a wide array of content that forms a spectrum of seasonal work.

For the next release, scheduled on August 2nd, the Librarians are changing things up a bit, by calling for Sports-themed content from the Community. These new works will be included in the coming release and featured, as the latest downloadable package. Artists wishing to step up to the plate and contribute their original works are encouraged to register (if not already a member) and upload the SVG(s), tagging them with the keyword “sports2010“. Deadline for user submissions is Sunday, August 1st.

This Open Clip Art Library Package Announcement is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

The Open Clip Art Library enjoys yet another of it’s scheduled monthly updates, with revision 2.3. With over 32,000 vector graphics currently calling it home, OCAL has grown into one of the largest and most prevalent sources for freely available graphics on the web. Version 2.3 aims to begin building on this solid foundation, by increasing user interaction and content submissions.

The Spring 2010 Clip Art Package brought together a diverse group of artists and pointed them in a similar thematic direction. Over 11,900 individual downloads have proven the themed package format an effective way of presenting similarly-grouped work to the Community. As in the June Release, Open Clip Art 2.3 brings along with it, a compact, user-generated, themed package of clipart.

Familiar ground is tread, in the latest Themed Package Release, as Community artists, like laobc, rg1024, and pianoBrad have focused their attentions on the Summer Season. Summer2010 is packed with useful scenery elements, like rg1024’s beach ball (below),

along with the abstract, seasonal imagery of laobc’s “Sunshine in the Country” (the header for this article).

Any wishing to utilize this smoldering collection can do so individually (by searching for the key term or tag “summer2010″) or by downloading the entire package.

Also continuing this month is a logo design contest, initiated by the organizers of the Free Culture Research Conference. Artists still planning on submitting an entry should mark this Friday (July 9th) as the deadline for that submission. Three more judges, Jonathan Zittrain, Leonhard Dobusch, and Michelle Thorne, have been added to the esteemed panel that will judge and announce the winner on July 11.

For more information on all things related to this Summer 2010 Release, have a look at the official press release.

This Open Clip Art Library Release Announcement is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

The “Free Culture” Movement, instantiated in a 2004 publication by Creative Commons founding member Lawrence Lessig, is a reaction to content ownership in a digital age. Because The Open Clip Art Library is, at it’s core, a platform to freely share and collaborate created content, it will be forever intertwined with the Movement.

The Free Culture Research Conference was born of a need from academics, in various disciplines, to analyze and discuss the implications of the Free Culture Movement.

The FCRC Organizers are seeking to establish an identity for these annual Conferences, and they are asking for the help of the Open Clip Art Community!

From now, until the submission deadline of 11:59p on July 9th, The Open Clip Art Library will be accepting user-created and remixed entries, as a part of the Free Culture Research Conference Logo Design Contest.

Robert Martinez, the designer of The Open Clip Art Library’s awesome 2.0 logo, has generously offered up a unique design of his own (pictured above), that can serve as a starting point or a remix for any looking for inspiration, while designing for this contest!

The winning design will be announced on July 11th (Sunday). For additional details and more-specific examples, please have a look at the Open Clip Art Announcement Page, as well as the press release.

This release is unique to previous iterations, as members of the OCAL Community have begun contributing to a new Themed Clip Art Package. Each subsequent Open Clip Art Library Release will now include a batch of unique work, created by some of the Community’s amazing graphic artists!

This month’s package called for Spring flavored clip art, and our Community answered with some dynamic and elegant work that can be downloaded in it’s entirety or individually, using the key term spring2010.

As always, The Open Clip Art Library is reaching for higher ground with a new release targeted in one month. Any artists interested in contributing to a summer package release should register and upload their work tagged with “summer2010.” The Librarians send out a special thanks to all involved in this incredible Spring 2010 Release and look forward to the fun and creative new work underway for the next one!

For more information, please have a look at the official press release.

Clip Art of the month is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.