Linux for Designers

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.

After a longer development break the image viewer gThumb is back. This time again with bugfixes and translation updates. All details about this release can be found at the "News" page.

Ok, this is not a really new message but the update progress at the Pixel website is really slow - so i visited not often: Pavel Kanzelsberger, the developer of the image editor Pisel (which is a commercial Photoshop clone), had announced that he found an investor and so the final release of Pixel will be at the 30. April 2009. Pixel will be available for Linux too.

A week ago the KOffice project released the 10th alpha of KOffice 2 including the image editor Krita 2 and the vector drawing app Karbon14 2.
Besides a lot of fixes Krita 2 brings now the Sumi-e paintop, which is a very configurable bristle-simulating brush engine (screeny). Karbon 2 brings back the page layout editing (screeny) and new filters.

Pavel Kanzelsberger, the developer behind Pixel, has announced that Beta 8 is coming soon and will be available as a 64bit version too. To make sure Beta8 is stable for daily work it took a little bit more time then expected.
Pixel is a commercial Photoshop-like image editor for Linux, MacOS X and Windows.

Linux Photography published an interview with Kai-Uwe Behrmann, one of the main developers of Cinepaint. Cinepaint is a brunch of Gimp for deep paint manipulation and mate painting.

I created a Gimp theme that is based on the normal Tango look but has big icons at toolbox but small text and small dock icons. So this is not icon eyecandy but improves the workflow and available space much.
You can download it here. Copy the 'area42' folder into '~/.gimp-2.4/themes', start Gimp and select the area42 theme in your preferences.

After canceling Beta 7, Pavel Kanzelsberger has published a new beta 7 pf the image editor pixel. This new beta is merged with new stuff of the upcoming beta 8.

Qtpfsgui, a graphical user interface that enables users to work with HDR images. It is updated to version 1.89 and shipped with new toolbar options and some bugfixes.

With a lot of bug fixes and some improvements a new release of gThumb - the Gnome image viewer - is available.
Some translation were updated too.