Re: [Gimp-user] Website idea and comments on Gimp vrs photoshop
BTW, does anyone know how to make an 'inner glow' on a shape? I posted a tutorial on GIMPtalk which covers shadows and glows. It doesn't cover 'inner glows' specifically (that is left as an exercise for the user) but it might give you a nudge in the right direction. It might not even be the best approach, I was trying to come up with a methodology which was easy to describe and to remember while still being flexible. The easiest solution to shadows and glows is probably Iicci's "Layer Effects" plug-in but I wanted some visual feedback of what I was doing (as opposed to just enterring numbers). Like most of the tutorials (and scripts) that I've written, since writing it I have learned so much that I feel I should rewrite it incorporating what I have learned. Tutorial link: http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/topic/Shadows-And-Glows-3-d-Effects-4624-1.html ___ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
Re: [Gimp-user] Website idea and comments on Gimp vrs photoshop
On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 09:39:57PM -0400, Joey Marshall wrote: > I don't know if this would be better going to a different list... so > sorry if this is going to the wrong place! > eh, the list isn't being used as often as it used to be and this is more like the gimp-user list of the old days that i used to enjoy so much. out of appreciation, for the sweetness of this letter and for the memory of how wonderful it used to be, i am actually glad to respond. > And the "Gimp vrs photoshop" means that I will be comparing two of the > features of the two... not to argue one better than the other. > the success of gimp has been to not compete with Photoshop. when we fail is probably when there is a lot of people pasting things they read or making everyone feel bad because software(TM) doesn't work as well as software(GPL). if you look at how business is run, GIMP doesn't have any to run. on the otherhand, there is a group of people whose life and happiness depend on selling software. that business has actually in the time i have been involved with GIMP congealed into one big group macromedia, adobe and a few others are now all the same. poor gimp has gotten an aqua theme from this merger. dunno how i feel about that. sometimes, i clear my mind of the noise by considering that it is out of politeness that gimp waits for photoshop to get safely into first place again. like, how big is there web design group and what is the smallest computer they use? when you answer questions like this and consider the people who make gimp, you kinda have to laugh. so sure, photoshop does a lot that GIMP doesn't. some of those things might actually be useful > Anyway, I have been a gimp user for quite a while, And I have learned > how to harness a lot of the power underneath it's features. > i suggest that you would be able to work with any pixel manipulating application and probably end up chuckling at the different words they use or some of the "we think you are probably retarded" gui decisions they make. after working with me and linux and then upgrading to windows XP, my friend saw that the windows machine that made that thing were comparing her to a teletubbie with that default desktop image. i remember when i compared gimp-1.2 to photoshop5, i was extremely disappointed with how much photoshop really could not do compared to gimp. the availability of the canned effects only made me chuckle. > BUT, that takes a lot of time! And I'm sure there are a lot of things > I don't know how to do (as far as effects go). > > I was reading on a forum where this guy was posting that his son is an > all out photoshop user, and would often challenge him to do something > in gimp that he did in photoshop. He said that he was always able to > do it. I know I can't... as well as a lot of other people (especially > those just learning it). > personally, i haven't had a human being challenge me, but i have managed to do any tutorial i found. there might be one exception to this -- i cannot remember it specifically. i got bored with a magazine i purchased to try to make the tutorials with. > I had tried out photoshop to see what it was like. And was able to get > the hang of it within a few hours because of it's similarities to the > gimp (Note: I use Gimp for web development... which is what I was > messing around with photoshop with. I did not explore the photo > editing of photoshop). > some of their photo effects work but look silly. i saw one where the time of day was changed by a lighting plug-in. occasionally, when i see this used on television, i chuckle. > There are two main differences that stood out to me. > > The first is the amount of affects and tools available. Photoshop had > far more than the gimp. It's menus are allot longer. I don't like > that. Gimp's tools are more flexible. Like I can make a glow by using > a white scriptfu shadow with a 0 offset (this concerns my idea for the > website). > the developers are trying to keep the menus shorter. i realized when i tried to do something with them a while back that i am too much of a menu nester. logic does not always make the best gui this way. > The second is the way the filters are applied. I like how photoshop > does it better. Instead of applying to the image itself... it acts > more like a filter. You apply it to the layer. > So say you put a shadow on it. When you edit the layer, the shadow > updates as well. > They only had this for the simpler effects it seems though (ones that > didn't take a lot of time to apply). I found that very nice for > designing web designs. > Photoshops snapping was also pretty cool... but not cool enough to > want in the gimp. > layer effects. i have heard and heard about these. since photoshop was not written well enough to run on linux without a helper library i am too much of a linux snob to use, i have not tried or seen this yet. it was explained to me much like you explained it here. i have seen dis
Re: [Gimp-user] Workaround for Styled Text?
Ok, let me try again. Suppose I want to put a bit of text into a GIMP document. I click on the text tool, then click on my document. I get a little window I can type my text into: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. I can choose a font, a size, a color, and some other attributes. Great! Now suppose I want to type: The *quick* brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Same as before, but this time, I want the word "quick" in bold. My first thought: look for an icon with a little B on it in the text editing box. There isn't one. Okay, try ctrl-b? Alt-b? Nope, no such luck. Check the documentation... hmm, the text tool *is* documented (yay!), but there's no mention of using two or more styles in the same piece of text. Check the bug, database... http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122706 Hmm, rotten luck... apparently it's not supported right now. Ok, I'll have to find a workaround. Well, the simple solution, use multiple chunks of text. "The" as one layer, "quick" as a layer using a bold font, and "brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" as another layer. Ok, great, that gives me what I want... ... oh, wait. I want to change "quick" to "flatulent". Easy, just change the layer... oh, but now the words don't line up, because the word "flatulent" is wider than the word "quick"... Ok, tweak the layers a little bit to make the words line up... that's better. Ok, all is well, the text is there... and now suppose we go on to create a large image, with a hundred layers (!), six of which contain little stories about our poor fox and his various difficulties. Now we want to add another little chunk of text: The *flatulent* brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, and into a fire, causing quite a large explosion. --- Goethe, "Treatise on Typewriter Testing", 1831 [1] [1] Disclaimer: Goethe did not actually write this. Hmm, ok, we can do this, except we want the word flatulent in bold, "Treatise on Typewriter Testing" needs to be in italic, and we'd really prefer [1] to be a superscript... ok, let's see, how many layers will that be... ok... click, click, click lots of layers. Whew, ok, but at least it's done. ... oh, wait. We want to change Goethe to Mark Twain, and we want to turn our *flatulent* brown fox into a *flatulent* fuscia ferret... and there are six different chunks of text mentioning the fox in different ways, each containing many layers, and we have to change them all... Sigh... guess I'm not going home early today, huh? This workaround doesn't scale very well, does it? Hmm, maybe I can use something else. The first thing I tried was Inkscape... but I quickly discovered that it's text manipulation tools are about the same... sure I can do all sorts of fancy things with the text, turn it into a path and wrap it around a tree and whatnot, but I can't seem to put multiple styles of text into a single chunk. Workflow-wise, the problems are pretty much the same. Another workaround would be to type the text into OpenOffice, or into an HTML document, and then take a screenshot, and open the screenshot, select the text, and paste it into a new layer in my document, but now, when I need to make changes, I have to repeat the whole process... very labor intensive. This workaround doesn't scale either. Now, you could make the argument that what I *really* should do is use a different program, like Scribus, that's designed for page layout... the problem is, I'm *not* trying to do page layout, I'm trying to put just a couple of little chunks of text into a small, screen resolution bitmap image, and I only need bold, italic, and *maybe* subscript and superscript. I shouldn't need to use a sledgehammer to swat this fly... besides, I don't want to use another program, I want to use GIMP! It already does 99% of what I need, and I hate to have to change tools for that last 1%. What I really want is to have the feature requested in bug 122706 to magically be implemented... but since the first request was back in 2003, I'm guessing that I shouldn't hold my breath. My second choice would be some amazingly clever workaround that can not only generate multiple styles of text, but make it no more than moderately painful to change many small chunks of text multiple times. Maybe some command-line utility that can render an rtf or html document into an x-by-y pixel bitmap image...or maybe TeX? And then maybe some script-fu or python-fu to automate the updates? In the absence of a clever workaround, I'll probably just write a chunk of Java code that can generate an image containing some text with simple styles in it, simply because I already have a chunk of code from another project that can do this, including alpha channel support, and it probably wouldn't take long to cobble something together. But if there's a better way to do it, I'd love to hear! Thanks for your time! Sarah ___
Re: [Gimp-user] Workaround for Styled Text?
Hi, On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 14:28 -0700, Sarah wrote: > Is there an existing gimp feature I've missed that makes this easier > to cope with? Use the right tool for the job. Which would be a vector drawing application, such as Inkscape. Sven ___ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
