One of the funnest features of digital image editing is taking pieces of different images and blending them together in a single image, like putting a funny hat on your mom or putting your dog on a jet ski. Or even something serious, like improving a photo of a landscape by adding an element from a different photo. Today we are going to learn how to do this in GIMP, the excellent open source image editing program.
A couple of weeks ago we looked at the best Web-based resources for Inkscape users — documentation and tutorials, sites and forums to follow, plus how to find brushes, palettes, scripts and extensions. It only seems fair to do the same thing for the non-vector-artists out there as well. GIMP is every bit as powerful and multi-faceted as Inkscape, of course, and getting the most out of it involves many of the same questions.
In spite of Silicon Valley’s best efforts, it is still not a paperless world. On a free software desktop, this is rarely a problem, because significant work has gone into making CUPS, Foomatic, and other parts of the printing tool chain work well and integrate seamlessly into the application suite — at least, for the typical “office” document. There are still a few things the average user can do to enhance the quality of prints from graphics applications like GIMP. Some are common to all raster image editors but which you might need a refresher course on, and some of which are more specialized. Given the price of high-quality inks and photo paper, though, a little preparation can save both time and money.
By Nathan Willis
Akkana Peck’s Gimplabels is a set of scripts for the Gimp image editor that make creating labels and business cards a snap. A .tar package is available on the Web site, but the contents are simply a Gimp script named labels.scm and the utilities needed to rebuild labels.scm. Gimplabels was originally written for an older version of the Gimp, so if you are using the current revision (2.6) and it doesn’t work, try the rebuilding instructions inside the package. You should be able to install the script by copying it to the /scripts/ directory inside your Gimp configuration folder (i.e., /home/username/.gimp-2.6/).
Web designers, photographers and graphic designers loving the Adobe Photoshop Product family – a collection of graphics editing programs developed by Adobe Systems to create and edit images – should have a look at its open source alternative, GIMP.
GIMP – GNU Image Manipulation Program – is the most well-known open source graphics editing application, born in 1995 as reported in the GNU free software directory, is a freely distributed program for tasks like photo retouching, image composition and authoring. Last but not least the so-called batch mode that allows you to do image processing from the command line.
GIMP is not only an expert quality photo retouching program, it is also a simple drawing program and an image format converter (it’s worth mentioning that it manages psd, Photoshop’s file format as well as scalable vector graphics (svg) file format).
GIMP is extensible, its functionalities can be augmented with plug-ins and there are extensions that allow you to configure GIMP to replace Photoshop to do just about anything.
If you really want a GIMP version as close as possible to Photoshop, I recommend that you also take a look at GimPhoto, a GIMP modification with a different menu layout, selection of plugins, and additional resources. GIMPhoto, used in combination with GimPad, formerly known as GimPhoto Desktop, gives its best, and you don’t need to spend time searching all over the internet to find plug-ins to extend GIMP capabilities.
GIMPshop also use GIMP as the backend, adding an extra interface to make its look&feel more like Photoshop. GIMPshop addresses some common criticisms regarding GIMP’s interface, modifying the menu structure to adjust the program’s terminology to match Photoshop.
GIMP comes with documentation for both users and programmers, including tutorials.
By Roberto Galoppini of Commercial Open Source Software
Want to choose just the right color for your labels? Design a logo on the fly? How about simply making the corners of your images round so they look great with round-edged labels? There’s no need to spend money and time on a complex graphic design program when there are so many free tools available to make label design a snap.
In this post, I’ll stick to the many cool tools to choose from if you’re using a Windows-compatible PC. Stay tuned for future posts about Mac and Linux-compatible tools.