Inkscape - A noteworthy open source vector graphics software

Inkscape is an open source, feature-full vector graphics environment with capabilities similar to Adobe Illustrator. Inkscape uses the W3C standard SVG file format. It supports many advanced SVG features like markers, clones, alpha blending and so on.

What is more, Inkscape is cross platform and is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms.

Handy Tips To Be More Productive Using GIMP

GIMP - also known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program - is well known as an excellent graphics editor. Many people even consider it as useful as Adobe Photoshop for creating images for the web. I have been using GIMP for a long time now and have used it for such tasks as screen capturing, optimizing images, retouching photos, scaling images, special effects and so on. GIMP is available for multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Why, GIMP is even available as a portable application  which allows you to run it directly from a USB pen drive.

The following are a few handy tips which will help you be more productive in GIMP.

GIMP 2.7.0 has been released

GIMP version 2.7.0 has been released. GIMP 2.7 is the first step towards GIMP 2.8 which will be a stable release. GIMP follows the Linux kernel approach to version numbering in that all odd numbered versions are unstable and even numbered versions are considered stable.

Some of the notable features in GIMP 2.7.0 are as follows :

1. Text editing with text tool is done in the canvas like you do in Adobe Photoshop and not in a separate window.
   

Announcing the winners of the Oxygen Wallpaper Contest

In August this year, the Oxygen team which are behind the famed Oxygen icons unveiled the Oxygen wallpaper contest. And the formal results are out. The response of the contest was supposedly overwhelming with over 2000 stunning photographs submitted by numerous KDE enthusiasts.

In an earlier post, I had talked about the work of Vlad Gerasimov and his stunning wallpapers. Well two of his entries (EOS and Emotion) have been selected to be included in the default set of wallpapers to be shipped with KDE 4.0. And of the two he submitted, one of them (EOS) has been chosen as the winning wallpaper. Um... I like the other one (Emotion) better, though I am happy the color is blue because blue is pleasing to the human eyes.

Fig: Winning wallpaper which will be the default in KDE 4.0

Many wallpapers in the final selection are stunning photographs of nature, flowers and animals. Do check out the complete selection of wallpapers destined to be shipped with KDE 4.0. Boy, I am brimming with anticipation of the treat that is in store for Open Source enthusiasts when KDE 4.0 is finally released.

Sexy Wallpapers for your Linux desktop

Any time you want to spruce up your mind while you are shackled to your computer, try changing the desktop background image to something pleasing to you. It will make a visible difference to your mental setup. It works every time for me. Some of the themes which lifts my mind when it is bogged down with work are nature themes, abstract art and beautiful cute looking wild animals.

A good wallpaper should work in making your computing experience a tad lighter without being a distraction.

Vlad Gerasimov runs his own design company called Vladstudio which specialize in web design and development, database-driven sites, skins, icons, logotypes and collateral graphics. In his spare time, he is in the habit of creating beautiful looking wallpapers which he then makes available to all in different screen sizes to adorn your desktop including for dual monitors.

He is also purported to be a contestant in the Oxygen Wallpaper contest.

Of his diverse set of wallpapers, I do like the ones shown below. They are quite pleasing without being an eyesore.

AMD / ATI release Linux drivers for their popular graphics cards

It is a common perception among Free software enthusiasts that AMD's acquisition of ATI bodes really good for Linux and Free software. This perception is bang on target because AMD has promised that it will be eventually providing open source drivers for all its graphics cards. Just yet, AMD/ATI has released Linux drivers for its popular range of graphics cards namely ATI Catalyst 7.10 graphics drivers.

So what is so unique about the ATI Catalyst ? Well, ATI Catalyst is a unified software suite which delivers a full software solution for supported Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems. And AMD/ATI claims that all ATI products use the same Catalyst driver ensuring all products take advantage of the incredible performance, stability, innovative features, and visual quality that the Catalyst software suite have to offer. The latest version of ATI Catalyst is 7.10. It has support for AIGLX and ATI GPUs which translates to enhanced performance in playing 3D games such as Quake and Doom.

Fig: ATI Catalyst driver architecture

If you own a ATI graphics card, you may download the driver suite for Linux from AMD's official website. Of course, this driver has not yet been released as open source and is as proprietary as the Nvidia drivers. But with AMD in charge, one can say with certainty that ATI has become a lot more Linux friendly than it was before its acquisition.

Liquid Rescale GIMP Plugin

Liquid rescale is a GIMP plugin that intelligently resizes an image without losing those parts that are important.

It uses a technology called image re-targeting - algorithmically determine which areas of the image are important and then delete other areas retaining those which are important.

Liquid rescale GIMP plugin is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. However it is not included in the default set of plugins shipped with GIMP. So to start using the Liquid rescale plugin, you have to first install it separately.

Liquid rescale plugin can be installed in most Linux distributions using their respective package management tools.

If you are using Fedora Linux, you can install the Liquid rescale plugin using Yum as follows.

$ su -c 'yum install gimp-lqr-plugin'

After you have installed the plugin, you can access it via GIMP menu - Layer > "Liquid rescale..." as shown in the image below.

For further details on how to use the plugin, please visit the Liquid Rescale Plugin home page.

Image Retargeting - A new technology to display images on the web

Displaying images on the web is always a case of walking the fine line between optimizing the image for the web and making sure the image doesn't lose its clarity or its intended purpose. There are two ways of resizing an image which is popularly used by web masters and lay persons alike. They are cropping an image and scaling an image to the desired size. The former method will most possibly end with the image losing its fine details where as using the latter method will reduce the image's clarity.

Now it seems a new method of resizing an image has been demonstrated by two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir which ensures that the image retains both its functionality as well as its clarity. This method is called re-targeting. The idea is to algorithmically determine which areas of the image are important and then delete other areas retaining those which are important.

Re-targeted vs cropped vs scaled image.

At present none of the graphics suites including Photoshop and Gimp provide tools to re-target an image. Perhaps if this new algorithm (or method) is released under an open license, we could see this functionality being incorporated in Gimp in the future. It is popularly known as 'Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing'.

For now watch this Youtube video which explains this interesting process in more detail.

Image manipulation using Image Magick

In an earlier post, I had reviewed Gimp - a robust image manipulation software which is installed by default in most Linux distributions. Gimp can no doubt be held at par with the industry leader Adobe Photoshop at least in creating images for the web. But sometimes a situation arises where it is not feasible to use a GUI based software to modify images; perhaps because the machine does not have a running X server or you need a tool which allows you to do batch conversions of 100s of images to the required size.

Fortunately, there is a very powerful suite in Imagemagick. I call it a suite because it is actually a collection of tools (11 to be exact), each of which accomplishes a particular task. These tools are as follows:

• animate - This tool can be used to create animated Gifs.
• compare - This is used to mathematically and visually show the difference between two images.
• composite - Used to overlap one image over another.
• conjure - This tool is used to execute scripts written with the special scripting language called Magick Scripting Language.
• convert - This is a versatile tool in that apart from using to convert between a variety of image formats, it can also used to do many image manipulations like crop,blur, join two images and so on.
• display - Shows an image on any X server.
• identify - displays the properties of an image including its size, dimentions and type of image.
• import - This is an interesting tool to capture screenshots of the desktop or even the console if one is working in the console. The output can be saved even in postscript format.
• mogrify - The use of this tool is similar to the convert tool but with one difference in that mogrify will overwrite the current image where as convert will write the result into a different image.
• montage - create a composite image such as providing a border to the image, placing text and so on.
• stream - a lightweight tool to stream one or more pixel components of the image or portion of the image to your choice of storage formats.
  

I usually use Gimp for all my image editing needs and so am not so fluent in using Image Magick suite. Carson McDonald has put together a very interesting tutorial in using two of the tools (convert and montage) in the Image Magick suite to illustrate some of the special effects.

Gimp - The graphics suite par excellence on Linux

Gimp is a GPLed cross platform graphics suite which rivals many commercial graphics packages available in the market. I have been using Gimp for all my graphics needs for the past two years. And believe me, this is a winner not only in terms of price (which it is) but also in quality and features. You can do everything and almost anything using Gimp that you can achieve in Adobe's Photoshop. All the screenshots and images used on this site have been created or modified using Gimp.

Fig: Main interface of Gimp

Gimp is an ideal tool for optimizing the images meant to be hosted on the web. The most endearing aspect of Gimp for me is the plethora of scripts and plugins that are installed with it. Gimp uses a scripting language called Script-fu which can be used to create beautiful banners and buttons meant for use on websites.
You should not mistake a script with a plugin. A plugin requires a image to work on, where as a script will create an image from scratch. There are over a hundred plugins and script-fu's available for gimp. Want to create a ripple effect on your image? No problem! you can create it with the click of a button. The area where Gimp outshines Photoshop is in creating images optimized for the web.

As a first time user, you will find the user interface of Gimp a bit clumsy because each function has its own window unlike Photoshop which has a single main window which encloses all the features. But after working in gimp for some time, you will realize that it is really a great advantage to have multiple independent windows. Let me elaborate on what I just said. Usually, you will be doing graphics manipulation using a monitor having atleast 1024x768 or higher resolution. In this resolution, you can neatly arrange the multiple windows in gimp in such a way that they don't overlap each other (See Fig below). This makes working in gimp easier and enjoyable. Gimp is available for multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, Unices ).

Fig: Gimp windows arranged for efficient use.

Fig: You get a good set of brushes in Gimp

Some of the powerful features in Gimp are as follows:

1. Support for creation of Layers, Channels and Paths.
2. Excellent collection of plugins and scripts (Script-Fu)
3. Creating Alfa channels and Layer Masks.
4. Good set of tools equivalent to those found in Photoshop like crop tool, gradient tool, Magic wand, Clone tool, paint brush and so on which will make a Photoshop user feel right at home.
5. Save images in over 34 formats including in Photoshop file formats, not to mention TIFF, GIF, JPEG, PNG and Postscript.
6. Gimp maintains a history of your actions which helps you to go back to any previous point if you have made a mistake.
7. Can easily automate a function by writing your own scripts to do a particular task using script-fu.
   

Shortcomings of Gimp

• One of the biggest short comings of Gimp is lack of good CMYK support.
  For those in the dark, CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) refers to the color of inks used in the printing process. So if you are readying a graphics (maybe a brochure) to be send to your neighborhood commercial printers, then you have to convert it to CMYK mode before sending it to them. CMYK support is very important for any graphics package to make it big in this profession. And Photoshop is where it is because it has better CMYK support. But that is bound to change as Gimp developers have promised better CMYK support in the next major release of Gimp.

Fig: Gimp has an Inbuilt Unit Editor

Fig: A well designed 'preferences' dialog

Fig: Create special effects on images with ease

Bottom Line

• Home users need not look at any other software when Gimp is around. You get all the power that you need - be it photo retouching, red-eye removal, creating borders for your photos and more - in Gimp.
• If you are a web developer creating images to be used on a website or to be viewed on a PC, you will be working in RGB (Red,Green,Blue) mode. I strongly recommend using Gimp as your graphics software.
  
• But if you create graphics meant for printing, then it is better you stick to Photoshop for the time being because of poor support for CMYK mode in Gimp.