wp.jochen.hayek.name/blog-en

Category: GIMP

  • perspective distortion (photography)

  • last night’s online e-book purchases through o’Reilly Media

    • PacktPub–Instant_Nokogiri.20130826122153.pdf (ruby xml)
    • TidBITS–Take_Control_of_Your_Online_Privacy.20130827161623.pdf
    • nostarch–Book_of_GIMP.20130128094115.pdf
    • nostarch–Perl_One_Liners.20131101112448.pdf (perl)
    • rockynook–Testing_Cloud_Services.20130826101828.pdf (testing)

  • No Starch Press book: Book of GIMP

    Whether you’re just getting started with GIMP or working to master GIMP’s more complex features, you’ll find the answers you’re looking for in The Book of GIMP.

  • O’Reilly Media book: GIMP 2.8 for Photographers

    GIMP 2.8 for Photographers:
    Image editing is a crucial element in the photographic workflow. Image editing tools, most notably Photoshop, are usually sophisticated and deep applications, and are fairly expensive. The only open source tool in this market is the GIMP, which has developed into a powerful, multiplatform system running on Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

    GIMP 2.8 for Photographers is a beginner’s guide to the only open source image editing tool that provides a no-cost alternative to expensive programs such as Photoshop. Topics include the new user interface and tools, the basics of image editing and simple adjustments, advanced techniques using layers and masks, developing RAW images, working with the improved text tool, and preparing high-quality black-and-white images. The most important editing functions are presented in individual, easy-to-follow workshops. A bonus section on the included DVD describes special techniques for web graphics.

  • GTK+ 3.2 with support for Wayland and HTML5 – The H Open Source: News and Features

    GTK+ 3.2 with support for Wayland and HTML5 – The H Open Source: News and Features: GTK+ 3.2’s experimental backends allow gimp and gedit to run in HTML5 browsers and Wayland. More immediate updates include renewed file and font choosers

  • GIMP 2.7.3 arrives with single-window mode – The H Open Source: News and Features

    GIMP 2.7.3 arrives with single-window mode – The H Open Source: News and Features: The latest development branch release of GIMP includes a number of updates to the image editor, such as a fully functional single-window mode and working session management

  • how to copy a rectangle region from an image file? (“cropping”)

    My original source files are PDF files, but I already converted them to PNG using Ghostscript.

    I was thinking of ImageMagick …

    I came across phatch, I read of it here. It’s a GUI, that helps running ImageMagick with certain operations in a batch. It came with a lot of dependencies on other packages. I tried to fullfil some of of them, eventually I gave up. If I very sure, that phatch was the way to go, that dependency hell wouldn’t be a dead end. Spending time on getting phatch to run was a dead end for me.

    There is a book on ImageMagick at PackPub, there is also one at Apress. I bought both of them as PDFs. That was the key to the success. I found nice examples, and I was able to apply some easy recipe to my task.

    $ convert orig.png -crop geometry new.png

    Actually the recommendation says to use “+repage“, in order to not confuse certain software:
    $ convert orig.png -crop geometry +repage new.png
    Without “+repage” the file stores the displacement of the segment wrt. the original image, which comes in quite handy, but … certain software gets confused, eg. when I loaded one such new image into GIMP, GIMP displayed the displacement and presented me rubbish.

    There is a fork of ImageMagick called GraphicsMagick. Pretty fast, but you may come across features of ImageMagick, that GraphicsMagick doesn’t know.

    …

  • how to convert a rectangular image into a square one using a command line utility?

    Most of the images I download from LinkedIn or Xing are not square ones. But I want to make use of them in my Google Mail address book, which allows me to select a square sub-section of those rectangular images. I know how to transform rectangular images into square ones using Gimp, but that takes far too many manual steps. I would actually prefer a command line utility. Can anybody help?

  • how to make a rectangle image a square image using GIMP

    I like reusing profile pictures from the web in my Google Mail Contacts aka address book.

    On Xing or LinkedIn these pictures not necessarily are square, but on Google Mail Contacts you have to choose a sub-square. So maybe you want to resize the picture appropriately, so you don’t cut it, where you don’t want to cut it. Here is, how to proceed:

    • Image / Canvas Size: disconnect the coupling between width and height,
    • then make both the same, preferredly the larger one,
    • then center
    • and resize!
    • Last not least: save the file with the highest quality!

    BTW my designer mate doesn’t like GIMP, he prefers Photoshop. I gave GIMP a try for this purpose, and it did, what I expected it to do, in a perfect way, every try a perfect hit!

  • using SVG for graphics within HTML generated from DocBook Website

    I learned the hard way, that SVG graphics must get referenced via EMBED, not via IMG. I do that now.
    But still…
    I created a “generic logo”. It’s white on a transparent background, the real background determined by the context. That’s the idea. But I found this on the web – now I am confused:

    How do I set the background color of an SVG image?

    Sadly, SVG does not support directly specifying an image background color. With aiSee, however, you can easily work around this drawback by artificially enlarging the layout plane as follows: Open the SVG file with a text editor and manually adjust the four values of the viewBox attribute. This attribute is to be found in the third line of the SVG file.

    The idea is to share this logo with the DocBook community. So far all new DocBook Websites are branded NM like Norman Walsh, that’s because he started that software. I asked him for the sources of the logos a couple of days ago, but he couldn’t find them, and they were GIMP XFC anyway, and not scalable as SVG. SVG is the hit IMO. I thought I should mention this: I am using O’Reilly’s SVG Essentials, that’s IMO a great book, and you can read and print it for free on their O’Reilly Commons wiki.