Linux for Designers

At familie redlich :systeme we work with Photoshop on Mac and GIMP 2.8 on Ubuntu Linux. One detail i love on Photoshop is they greyscale icons at the toolbox that get colored on mouse over or when you activat a tool.
So i figured out how to bring this to GIMP and create a theme called ProGimp:


Download the GIMP icon theme it and extract it to GIMP user directory at ~/.gimp-2.8/themes/ . The theme gives GIMP a much more professional look and is space optimized too

BTW: The nice splash screen that is included is made by Deburger

UPDATE 120630
I fixed the greyscale icon problem in dialogues (now they appear in color again) and i minimized the ruler space. You can download the updated theme here.

Martin Owens created an interesting plugin that allows you to publish your artwork directly to deviantArt within GIMP or Inksape. A PPA for Ubuntu Lucid and above is available too.

Seperate+ for Gimp, a plugin that sepeartes color channels to layers and allows you to attach color profiles, is now available as version 0.5.5. This release adds again interesting color features:

* separate
  - Change Embedded profile priority configuration in Separate and Proof functions to the default
  - Support file export of JPEG and Photoshop PSD formats
  - Allow to specify whether the file is compressed or not when the file is exported
  - Allow to designate a profile of the destination color space as null
    when a devicelink profile is used in Separate dialog
  - Fix a rendering bug when color separation under the condition that Preserve pure black
    is enabled for layers containing alpha channel
  - Fix crash when an image whose height is less than 64 pixels is exported in TIFF format
* IccButton
  - Change priorities of locations from which profiles are searched (Windows, Mac OS X)
  - Enable to acquire the path of the system profile folder using API of ICM (Windows)
  - Fix a bug which characters contained a path of a selected profile make a record of
    history occasionally unsuccessful
* Update message catalogs in Japanese and Russian

To complete my workflow using Seperate+ that generates CMYK Tiff images inside of Gimp i wrote a small Python plugin for Gimp that allows you to convert the saved CMYK Tiff image into a PDF for prepress.

Over GetDeb.net i explored various interesting image utilies (most of them i'd like to see as a GIMP plugin):

Seam Carving GUI
...a utility for content aware image resizing very simliar to the Liquid Rescale plugin for GIMP (inluded in the package GIMP-plugin-registry). Seam Carving GUI is available for MacOS X and Windows too.

Tintii
...is a coloring utility - available for Photoshop too but not for GIMP

Smilla Enlarger
...raster image enlarger that uses smart curves algorithms to avoid pixelization and blurring artifacts. Smilla Enlarger is available for MacOS X and Windows too.

The first development snapshot of Gimp 2.8 is available: Gimp 2.7.0. There are a lot of nice, new upcoming features:
* a reworked, much more flexible text tool
* new saving/ export option
* export plugin for X11 mouse cursors and JPEG2000 file format
* rotation of brushes and additional enhancements to the brush dynamics engine
* tagging for resources
...and much more.
Check out the release notes too.

But there are much more interesting things we can await in Gimp 2.8:
* Finish merging of the GSoC 2006 vector layer stuff
* Merge the GSoC 2009 projects for brush dynamics and improved SIOX.
* Add a better set of default resoures
* Provide default tags for the default resources

[/IMGRIGHT]Ok, i'm getting not really famous but as i read my CMYK Tiff 2 PDF for Gimp script is now in Debian SID and Ubuntu Karmic. That means many, many, many people can enjoy my work
BTW : You can enjoy that and a lot of other stuff now too, just download the liblqr-1-0_0.4.1-1_i386.deb and the gimp-plugin-registry_2.1-1_i386.deb package and install them. This will update the packages of Jaunty.

Surfing around at Planet Gnome brings me to Gloobus, a nice and handy preview addon inspired by the preview of Mac OS X and Coverflow. For me the most interesting part is the Coverflow effect integration into Nautilus.
The bad news is that witout rebuilding Nautilus only the normal Gloobus 0.4 is available as a Deb archive. A really nice goody is that is install GTK PixBuf Loader for support of Photoshop PSD and GIMP XCF files to the entire Gnome desktop. So any Gnome graphics viewer (like EOG, F-Spot or gThumb) can preview these formats too.

If you like these features don't forget to support the project by a donation!

Again a the Google Summer of Code is started. Here is an overview of interesting and accepted graphic applications, web development apps and multimedia tools:
* Aqsis Renderer http://wiki.aqsis.org/dev/soc_2009
* Audacity http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=GSoC_Ideas
* Blender http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GSoC/2009/Ideas
* FFmpeg http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=FFmpeg_Summer_Of_Code_2009
* GIMP http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/SummerOfCode2009ideas
* Gnome Desktop http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas
* Hugin/ Panotools http://wiki.panotools.org/SoC_2009_idea
* Inkscape http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Googles_Summer_Of_Code_2009
* OSM http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/GSoC_Applications_2009
* Python http://wiki.python.org/moin/SummerOfCode/2009
* Scribus http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/GSoC_2009_Ideas
* TYPO3 CMS http://typo3.org/development/gsoc2009/ideas/

Hopefully a lot of ideas become reality and all these projects will get a lot of new, strong, powerful developers!

You'd like to have cool looking screenshots without spending hours in creating them? Then you have to try Screenie. A realy nice tool for compositing multiple screenshots in a very easy way. On Ubuntu just install the package "screenie-qt".
If you are a GIMP lover then check out the 3D Screenshot script.

For image conversion and an easy way keeping the content of our lastest Flash project up to date i wrote today an Flash SWF Export Script for Gimp.

Read more...