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Grokking The Gimp
The Scoop One of the standout userland programs to come from Free Software development, the GIMP offers a powerful range of features for digital imagery. Unfortunately, not everyone's had the privilege of (or inclination for) sitting through 'Principles of Color' or similar classes. Not to fear, the author has - - and he's willing to share his knowledge.
Compounding the complexity challenge, the GIMP has its own way of doing things. Half of the work of editing an image seems to be making a good selection. Again, the author has theory to divulge and tips to present to improve your technique. Though only a few tools and methods are discussed, they are fundamental to all advanced operations. (Note that the book covers the as-yet unreleased 1.2 GIMP -- the 1.1.x betas have been quite usable for months.)
What's to Like? This attractive book is well-printed, with plenty of full-color images and good figures. It's also well-designed and the layout is excellent. The decision to add a few common problems and frequently asked questions at the end of most chapters is commendable. It's not designed as a reference book, but the index and table of contents are detailed enough to locate specific actions later.Banks assumes little prior knowledge of the GIMP. Chapter one is a brief tutorial of the program's features and functions. More experienced users can skip this, though I found a couple of timesaving tidbits. The same may be said of chapter two, on layers, though the material quickly moves beyond what an average user might discover in an afternoon. The selections and masks chapters form the real foundation for most GIMP work -- how do you choose parts of your image to edit? A little theory, a few tools, and some examples later, you'll have multiple answers for that question.
The next two chapters pile on the theory. First, Bunks discusses the theory of color -- running the gamut (so to speak) from additive to subtractive, RGB, HSV, CMYK, and grayscale. There's plenty of math (more than one would need), and the explanations here are quite detailed. It's fundamental knowledge, and most readers can probably pick up just enough to get by. Don't skip ahead and miss the very useful touchup discussions in chapter 6. (The author considers them worth the price of the book -- given the results on some of my images, I'm inclined to agree.)
The final three chapters each cover different tasks one might wish to accomplish. Bunks explores various techniques while creating projects. Screenshots and commentary accompany step-by-step instructions. It's in these sections that the full power of the GIMP comes into play. Rounding things out are a handy keyboard shortcut guide and a detailed index.
What's to Consider? Things do get pretty heady in the theory section. Non-programmers (and people who haven't already worked with professional imaging) will have some slow going trying to absorb the math and colorspace information. It's not essential to use the GIMP, but knowing the differences between the modes and the limitations of each is necessary for most serious work.Readers looking for a guide to the dozens of distributed plugins will be disappointed -- this book is more interested in the general techniques used in nearly every non-simple project. Finally, the book seems a little short. It's 342 pages, but the information is good enough that perhaps more subjects can be covered in a future edition. (That's a good thing.)
The Summary Nearly anyone will benefit from the deep magic behind the menu operations. Move past cheesy banners and poorly-executed lasso operations. Double the size and power of your toolbox, and get to know the GIMP. (If you're not convinced, browse the book online!)
Or buy it at ThinkGeek.
Table of Contents
- GIMP Basics
- Review of Layers
- Selections
- Masks
- Colorspaces and Blending Modes
- Touchup and Enhancement
- Compositing
- Rendering Techniques
- Web-Centric GIMP
- GIMP Resources
- Keyboard Shortcuts
I'm surprised there hasn't been a 'media backlash' aimed at the makers of the GIMP program. I'm sure there would be if a program called the Nig or the Home-o came about somewhere. Why hasn't the special intrest groups tried to cash in yet through a lawsuit?
> Looks like it - has someone cut and paste straight out of Emacs by any chance? Looks like the over-length line indicator.
FYI- Pico uses "$" as the out of space character. Emacs uses "\" and then continues on the next "line".
...these can no doubt be changed, but I'm pretty sure those are the defaults.
Back to GIMP. I've never used it much, but the folks I know who do a lot of image manipulation (web site design, free style art, whatever) are pretty down on GIMP's abilities. I should corner them and ask them why they feel GIMP is so far behind Photoshop. Myself, I don't really know enough to judge.
One thing I *have* heard is that GIMP is poorly equipped for print media. This has to do with the GIMP's limited support for non-RGB color palettes. My understanding is that virtually no one in the print world uses RGB palettes. Also, I expect that GIMP is behind in plugins, atleast in quantity, if not in quality. There are several companies who make their money off of writing plugins for Adobe software. Talk about a niche app, but they're still kicking, so I'm not going to knock it...
Any graphic designers in the audience care to say on what grounds Photoshop or some other proprietary package might still be superior to our beloved GIMP?
--Lenny
...in their bargin books section. Here in Las Vegas anyway. I don't know how much the author gets of that, but its worth it to have handy instead of trying to read the HTML.
Bleh!
...There was a decent Win32 port.
I know that there is a Windows port, but unfortunately it doesn't use native Windows widgets, and as a result it's rather slow and clunky.
As a result, there's a huge chunk of people who would probably rather use it than a demo version of Pain Shop Pro, but it's just not worth it on Windows.
Ah well, I suppose I should look into doing a native widgets port of GTK...
I'd really like to use the Gimp but my LinuxPPC box is a little too slow (a five year old 7200/75 running my personal site.)
My main machine is a well loaded G3 that I will upgrade to OS X when it gets here. (Don't talk to me about this week's fastest PC, they're all built like cheap, ugly, ephemeral crap.)
I'd love to use the Gimp on it. In OS X, it would really rock!
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Try drawing a perfect circle in Gimp, as opposed to Photoshop where they give you a "tool". Of course its possible in Gimp, but you need to know "shift-click" stuff.
To use the Gimp effectively you _have_ to read a manual, while Photoshop, anybody can learn to use it with a little experimentation.
My point is that, to use the Gimp effectively, you _NEED_ to read the manual. There's no point and click figure it out usability.
There's no arguing it.
I'm not saying that the Gimp sucks, because it doesn't. I'm just saying the UI is what limits its marketability.
Hahah. Being the author of another Gimp book from the same publisher (New Riders, my book is 'Gimp Essential Reference'), I was contacted to see if I knew what the word grok means. I thought it was an excellent word to use, it implies understanding.
:)
I felt that most people who use Linux will probably know what it means, and apparently so did the other people they asked
Alex
What about a more Photoshop-esque "select all pixels of color x (with tolerance y) from the current layer" w/ preview?
It's there. Select->By Color from the right click menu. The only thing it doesn't do is change the preview in realtime as you move the tolerance slider -- you have to do an extra mouse click to regenerate the preview.
I used to use photoshop all the time and I can't stand it anymore since I've been using Gimp. Gimp is missing a few features compared to photoshop, but overall, it just works better. I can do my editing twice as fast with Gimp than I can with photoshop.
If you want to see some sweet Gimp action, check out http://www.angryrussell.com
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
--Ben
Your artist friends think Photoshop is intuitive because they learned how to use it in art school! Any commercial art school worth its tuition teaches its students how to use the industry standard commercial tools.
If you put a programmer in front of the tool and he can't use it, that's a deep sign the UI has problems -- programmers give the machine every benefit of the doubt.
but you fuck it up with pure stupidity. adobe doesn't want to 'sell you' a manual? excuse me, photoshop has a manual, and i'm sure its cost is built into that $600-900.
A GIMP expert has to choose between "giving away" improvements that make GIMP better by patching the UI, or writing a book and making a quick buck.
what?!? you are on crack.
i agree, because i have been told from many reliable sources, that photoshop has a much better UI than the GIMP, but this is not the reason.
the reason is, adobe has been working on photoshop for a long, long time. i'm sure they have usability experts, etc. etc. etc.
the people who use the GIMP, obviously like how it works, and probably make changes where they see that they are needed, but obviously, they have no motivation to make it work 'better for the public' because they don't see the problem(s) with the interface.
et cetera, et cetera,..
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
If you're using the current development version (1.1.x), you'll notice an arrow-shaped button in the top left corner of your image window. Click it (with button-1, usually the left button), and a menu drops down. This is the same menu you get when right-clicking the image.
--frank[at]unternet.org
Who marked this as offtopic? Jeez. Do we need an O'Reilly book with a Jackass on the cover? O'Reilly for /. Moderators?
Anyway, you need to give the GIMP a bit more credit. It's more like Photoshop 4.0 without the features one truly needs for prepress, such esoteric stuff like dot gain and custom inking profiles. Good for 72 dpi RGB work, but I wouldn't use it for prepress unless I absolutely had to.
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
You're VERY dependent on the quality of the scanner from the way this reads. I've never expierenced the scanner you mention, but the majority of positive image scanners have a rathar dodgy rep.
To get a REALLY good scan, you generally develop your film, but do NOT make prints. You then use a specialised negative scanner (NOT a positive scanner w/ negative attachment... blegh!) to get a good image into your computer.
Also, your summary doesn't mention how this scheme handles monitor calibration. But I do notice from a quick skim at the web page, that everything outside the "T series" is reliant on a Macintosh of some kind. I suspect therefore that it does use Apple's ColorSync in there somewhere, at least for monitor calibration.
See, the problem with CRTs is that the phosphors decay as they age. But the red, green, and blue phosphors decay at different rates, fscking up your colors. So you measure this decay, and boost the *signal* brightness of a particular phosphor over time, so as to keep the identical ACTUAL brightness.
ColorSync measures the decay of the phosphors with sensors internal to the monitor. This information is sent back to the computer via USB (ADB on older units) and the computer boosts the brightness accordingly. This is why higher end Apple monitors REQUIRE a USB/ADB link back to the box.
Many others, such as SGI/Radius/etc. use a more accurate, but much less convinent, external light meter to generate the monitor profile.
The truely crappy schemes require you to hold colored cards to the monitor, and GUESS how much your phosphors have decayed... sad, very sad.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
Um... "FreePaint" and "Photo4Free" sound mind-bogglingly stupid. They sound, respectively, like the name of one of those misguided open source projects that posted version 0.0.0 to Freshmeat and never got off the ground, and the name of a piece of Visual Basic shareware written by a teenager. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Incidentally, I believe that the GIMP was the program that started the whole trend of G* programs, so you can hardly blame it for that.
I think you're right that only geeks are going to buy the book, though. But the vast majority of the people using the GIMP are geeks in the first place. The title appeals to geeks, so it's doing a good job focusing on its target market.
--
No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
I find it amusing that you think accusing someone of homosexuality is an insult. How very parochial. I bet you're getting a lot of mileage out of that one in high school right now, but a real insult either takes knowledge of a shameful truth or true creativity. You have displayed neither.
A wise geek once said, "It is better to be silent and be thought a lamer, than to post and remove all doubt." But coming across it probably would have had no effect; if you'd stumbled across that wisdom in your short time on this earth, I suspect that you'd have picked yourself up and gone on. Something like the other six thousand times you've been offered a clue. At the very least, do something about your minuscule vocabulary before you try insulting anyone in the future. Yours shows the poverty of a fourth-rate mind.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Fifty-seven years old and you've been able to tackle new media like the Web, but you haven't outgrown your grade-school outlook. I didn't think anyone was trying to prove that you could ignore age and remain immature indefinitely, but here you are.
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
> from the such-a-cute-logo dept.
;-)
Why do I feel I'm being watched?
- Also Sprach Doktor Merkwurdigliebe
Not to fear, the author has -- and$
Compounding the complexity challenge, the GIMP has its own way of doing things. Half of the work of editing an image seems to be making a good selection. Again, th$
Broken HTML ??? Looks like it - has someone cut and paste straight out of Emacs by any chance? Looks like the over-length line indicator.
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Ever since Tor Lillqvist (sp?) ported GIMP to Windows, I've never used Paint Shop Pro.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Huh? Last I checked, to draw a perfect circle in Photoshop (at least the Mac version), you simply hold down the shift key while drawing it.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
or...
In the Gimp, you make a circular selection (with the circular selection tool, right there on the main palette), right click to get to the edit menu, and select stroke.
Gimp uses the current brush, too, instead of throwing up a dialog.
Me, I was a die-hard Gimp hater until sometime between this January and May. I tried it in January, it sucked. I tried it in May, it rocked. Kudos to the really cool guy that joined the team and fixed the godawful interface annoyances (although I still hate having to right click all the time - menu bar, people!).
They changed the layout of the gimp with the latest beta. His screen shots are all wrong. Oh well, this is why documenting software is not such a popular activity.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
To understand profoundly through intuition or empathy.
It has been used for quite a few years now exclusively by developers. If you had a problem, but didn't know what exactly it was, it was best to go to someone who *grokked* the entire system. I defy you to find an olde english word which means the same thing. Language evolves. New words are added all the time, as soon as they gain mass public use/understanding.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
when linux gets marked in the history books, the gimp will probably be the stand out application for the platform. Considering how well it has faired against its biggest contender, I think the gimp is a remarkable symbol of what open source and cooperation can provide to the community.
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
RAH was my favorite author (and is still one of the top 3). Hack!? He wrote more good sci fi than you've had hot meals! Hack!? He was a GRANDMASTER! Hack!? He invented at least one sub-genre of sci fi! Hack!? He invented at least three commonly used words/devices! Hack!?? Why, I'll.....ooooooohhhhhhhh
--
An abstained vote is a vote for Bush and Gore.
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Grokking The Gimp sounds like a good book, though I like using O'Reilly's Gimp Pocket Reference. It covers the basics, just what I need.
A GIMP expert has to choose between "giving away" improvements that make GIMP better by patching the UI, or writing a book and making a quick buck.
This is an interesting viewpoint, but I disagree.
I code a little, mostly PostScript, though I can do a little C. I've also written two books in Samba.
My choice was, practice coding and networks and NetBUIE for a few years to make a meaningful contribution to Samba, or spend six months writing a book on Samba. If I had chosen the first route, I'd still be coding and practicing, and hoping someone on the Samba team would notice my patches.
Also, not every good coder is a good writer, and not every good writer is a good coder. To be a good writer, you need to write to the level that other people can understand, especially if they don't have your level of knowledge. To be a good coder, you just have to code so that your software works, and other coders can work to understand it. My coauthor helped me out immensely in making my second book readable, precisely because she is not a Linux guru, once she could understand a concept, your average person looking to implement a Samba server should be able to understand it.
Thanks,
George
I know about LinuxArtist.org and CreativeLinux.com. Are there any other good sites that specialize in news about Linux tools for creative types? Things like GIMP, Broadcast 2000, HTML editors, etc...
Webmaster www.streetrodstuff.com
> I can do my editing twice as fast with Gimp than I can with photoshop.
I pieced together a 6200x6200 pixel grayscale aerial photo of Berkeley, CA with images from Terraserver. There were brightness/contrast differences between tiles I wanted to manually tweak.
Editing that image sounds like a big job. But, representing each pixel with a byte (because it's grayscale), the image is 38.4MB. Since I have 128MB of RAM, I thought editing it in Gimp would be feasible. Nope, it just thrashed my swap space. Note, I had to go to a machine with 256MB of RAM just to merge the tiles using ImageMagick.
For the same file, Photoshop performed exceptionally well. For instance, it quickly loaded the image and allowed real-time arbitrary zooming and panning. Of course, I also fixed my brightness/contrast issues. If I took the time to figure out how to batch-append those tiles using Photoshop, I assume it would have been significantly faster than ImageMagick.
Kudos to the Gimp team for building something that is both usable and something people enjoy using. But, I'm getting tired of people proclaiming various open source projects as being superior applications than their commercial counterparts just because they're looking at them through Open Source Beer Goggles. Evaluate the application on its merits, not on its religion.
I suppose I'm peeing into the wind asserting something like this on Slashdot... c'est la vie.
>on what grounds Photoshop or some other
>proprietary package might still be superior to
>our beloved GIMP?
Sppeaking as a Linux/Mac/Vider/Graphics geek who worked on the newspaper whilst in college; and who made the mistake of mentioning this at my previous job, and wound up getting loaned to the design dept as the resident Mac guru as a result...
The GIMP is a fine little tool. I use it a lot...
... for WEB graphics!!!
>One thing I *have* heard is that GIMP is poorly
>equipped for print media. This has to do with the
>GIMP's limited support for non-RGB color
>palettes.
You have heard 100% correct sir. If you're ever going to commit to hard copy, the GIMP (as well as paint shop pro and the like) is absolutely WORTHLESS.
If you ever plan to PRINT your work to PAPER (and not have it look like crap) you MUST have a tool with support for: CMYK, Pantone colors, and COLOR CALIBRATION!!!
And I can't emphesize enough the importance of color calibration. Without it, you can be pretty much assured that the work you get printed will in no way resemble the work you submitted; your colors will be off not only between monitor and printer, but from computer to computer as well. And forget color calibration that involves "hold this card up to this square on your monitor and enter the number of the closest match". If you're going to print your work, you *MUST* have HARDWARE calibration!!! I've only seen a total of TWO calibration schemes that are worth more than a cup of warm piss. Those schemes are those of Apple Computer, and Silicon Graphics (big suprise, eh?).
>My understanding is that virtually no one in
>the print world uses RGB palettes.
Correct again. RGB are your component LIGHT colors; fine for web work where you can be sure that most ppl are viewing it on a shitty, non calibrated monitor. If you commit your work to PAPER, you use CMYK or Pantones. CMYK are the component colors of PIGMENTS... used if you're printing something like a photo, with MANY colors. Pantones are custom colors mixed in large batches... used if you're doing a large run of a product with FEW colors, like corperate letterhead w/ logos, etc.
Hope this helps.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
This page has a link to several Gimp books:
http://www.xach.com/gimp/books/
I've got the "Gimp Essential Reference" myself, and find that it's by and large an excellent book. Before this book, I didn't really understand layers.... My one complaint is that the chapter on writing scripts and plugins is sketchy enough that it should be presented as more of an introduction. Additionally, with the intorudction of Gimp-Perl, I expect more people will want to use that than the Scheme language which is the default described in the book.
-RobTexts on open source projects are great; they are a way for some people to generate revenue, and support the wider user base who doesn't want to have to work on the project to understand how to use it.
There is a tension that is not (as) present in commerical software, however: selling support and manuals vs. improving the interface to the product. Adobe sells PhotoShop for $600-$900. They'd rather keep the software ideal and not sell you a manual.
A GIMP expert has to choose between "giving away" improvements that make GIMP better by patching the UI, or writing a book and making a quick buck.
-m
Also groovy was when she tried random Photoshop commands such as CMD+click to do things with the bezier curve (I'm not a real gimp gear-head so ymmv) and other tools, and they worked!
Within minutes she was totally at home w/ the GIMP. Most keystrokes are the same, or a substitution of ALT for that "apple" key. The other factor on the learning curve was geting used to having 3 buttons instead of 1 on the mouse.
In short, people who are reluctant to switch from 'safe' mac to 'tecchie' linux should take some heart from the near total portability of knowledge between photoshop and the GIMP.