Linux for Designers

Jon Stipe has rewritten his Layer Effects skript in python. Besides more features it gets a much better interface then the normal Script-Fu version and supports now a preview mode (awesome work!). You will find it at the menu "<Image>/Layer/Layer Effects/" and at the context menu of the layers. Check it out it's awesome! I will include this soon in my easyGIMPkit.

After my last post about Gimp plugins that looking for fresh blood and new developers, i tried to compile the Gimp Colorize plugin - with success
Here is an overview about the algorythm "Colorization Using Optimization".

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I wrote some months ago an article "Pimp the Gimp for 3D" and described the problems getting all nesaccery plugins for 3D into Gimp. Many problems could be solved by unpack RPM's, but most times you have to use older versions. The same with the DDS plugin, i have to use 1.0.1 while 2.0.6 is up-to-date. But today found an up-to-date gimp-dds_2.0.6-1_i386.deb package - what a surprise!
For those using Ubuntu Hardy the Normal Map plugin for Gimp is included, just install package "gimp-plugin-registry" or package "gimp-normalmap".

Adobe released a second beta of the Flash Player 10. This version brings a lot of improvements to the Linux platform:
* optimized sound sound API and sound buffer
* windowless overlay mode now working (Firefox 3 required)
* new embedding modes (explained by the developer Tinic Uro)
* support for the Video4Linux 2
Older details about Flash Player 10 can be found in my older post or at the release notes. And of course the beta 2 is available for Linux too.
Download it and copy the binaries as root to "/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree". Shutdown your browswer and restart it, open the url "about:plugins" to make sure it's available.

GREYCstoration is a Gimp plugin for image denoising and interpolation, using state-of-the-art image processing techniques. It offers really cool, denoised and sharp results of noisy and artifacted images (check out the demo images).
Just download the 2.9 zip archive from the website and copy the "GREYCstoration_gimp_pc_linux" file into "~/.gimp-2.4/plug-ins/". The filter can be found at the Gimp Image Window in "Filter > Enhance > GREYCstoration".

I updated my gEdit "Browser Preview" plugin, some bug fixes and feature enhancements:
* the plugin now checks first if IEs4Linux is installed, if not it tries to start the Internet Explorer 6 from the default Wine directory
* for testing webpages on the Webkit browser engine the plugin checks if Midori is installed if not it tries to run Konquerer
* if you opened a HTML document from a FTP server the "ftp://" will replaced by "http://" in the browser

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Deskew, also called auto straighten, is the automatic rotation of an image such that the text is vertically aligned. Now released as version 1.1 - looks great!
A Deb archive for Ubuntu Linux is available too. Deskew will appear in "Filters > Misc > Deskew".

The FX Foundry, a collection of effect scripts for the image editor Gimp, has updated there package (20080323) again. And they have a new website now which gives you an better overview about the package.

Adobe is working on an update for its Flash player 9 that will bring DRM to Flash. Since the popularity of Flash video and the support for H.264 the music and film industry like to get back control of the streamed content. This step could stop the development of Gnash and SWFdec, two alternatives to Adobes Flash player, too.
Read more about the dark side of Adobe at the EFF.org.

The Liquid Rescale plugin for Gimp is updated to version 0.4 and is now just a frontend to the Liquid Rescale Library 0.1.0. Liquid Rescale is a implementation of Seam Carving for Gimp.
Packages for Fedora and Ubuntu are available. Watch this video about Seam Carving: