Admin Post: It's poll time

[jana]

I think it's high time to get to know each other a little bit, that is, how you use GIMP and/or Inkscape, how much you know about these tools etc. This makes it also easier for everyone involved to know what you would like to see here. For instance, making a tutorial is always a bit of a shot in the dark if you don't know anything about the people who watch this community. So, don't be shy and talk to us :)

Poll #4107 GiMP Gate - Interests & Experiences

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 46

View Respondents

What do you use GIMP mostly for?

View Answers

I don't use it at all.
1 (2.2%)

Photo edits (cropping, resizing, getting rid of red eyes, etc)
32 (71.1%)

Icon making
33 (73.3%)

Fanart
14 (31.1%)

Digital art
7 (15.6%)

Other (please comment)
3 (6.7%)

What do you use Inkscape mostly for?

View Answers

I don't use it at all.
33 (73.3%)

Fanart
3 (6.7%)

Digital art
3 (6.7%)

Geometric objects
5 (11.1%)

3D objects
2 (4.4%)

Other (please comment)
5 (11.1%)

What do you want to see in this community?

View Answers

Tutorials
40 (90.9%)

Resources such as fonts, scripts and brushes
34 (77.3%)

Photo editing tricks
30 (68.2%)

Tips about icon making
30 (68.2%)

Challenges
4 (9.1%)

Answers to questions I or others might have about GIMP/Inkscape
37 (84.1%)

Other (please comment)
0 (0.0%)

When it comes to GIMP, you consider yourself

View Answers

a beginner
11 (23.9%)

someone who has basic knowledge and skills
27 (58.7%)

someone who has proficient knowledge and skills
8 (17.4%)

an expert
0 (0.0%)

When it comes to Inkscape, you consider yourself

View Answers

a beginner
29 (82.9%)

someone who has basic knowledge and skills
5 (14.3%)

someone who has proficient knowledge and skills
1 (2.9%)

an expert
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[ratcreature]

These days, besides basic photo editing, I mostly use GIMP to make scanned traditional art better for web viewing, but even though I've used GIMP for a while and know what most of the tools do, I still can't figure out how to accomplish some basic things. Like color correcting my scanned pictures so that the scan really looks good and like the colors I painted. I fiddle with the sliders and curves of the color tools but with little success. Also I still don't manage to make pieces I needed to scan in parts merge seamlessly, even though I try overlapping and such. Sometimes the lines don't match and especially with color pictures the colors in the same scanned part in the overlapping area are not the same in the two halves, even though it is the same area of the painting scanned with the same scanner. I don't understand why that is or how to fix those things.

Before my rats chewed through my tablet cable I've tried using Gimp for inking and coloring, but I had trouble to apply most digital fanart tutorials, because the brushes in Gimp are apparently quite different from what Photoshop has.

I also tried to use Inkscape once, thinking it might give me nice sleek lineart (for things like my icons, which I draw), but it was an older version and I didn't really manage to make it work, and the newer versions somehow don't compite on my older Linux version on my laptop so I have given up on that.

[baggyeyes]

Try to save the color correction until after you've pieced everything back together. I know it can be hard piecing a large artwork together, but sometimes re-scanning the offending piece works. Also, don't forget you can temporarily set a layer to transparent until you've placed it correctly. Once you've set all the pieces together, then you can save it as a .xcf, and export it as a flattened .png, and color correct, digitally fix that.

I almost forgot - as of 2.5 (I think!) Gimp has the ability to use Photoshop brushes. Just put them in your .gimp/brushes folder.

[ratcreature]

But how can it work better if I color correct after the merger? I mean, say I have an orange-brownish area in the middle of an A3 paper, that I scan in two bits, and for mysterious reasons (maybe because in the first scan it is on the left side of the scanner while I scan the upper half, and on the right if I scan the lower) in the first scan it appears a bit darker and more reddish brown in the second a bit lighter and more yellowish-brown. If I merge first, and then modify colors to be lighter and yellower so that the first would look like my original orange, the second would look worse, because it was too yellow to begin with?

And I think I need to upgrade my Gimp... I don't really want fancy brushes but from the screenshots it always looked as if in photoshop you could somehow pick different pressure and line characteristics of the brush tool with differnt brushes rather than just form/pattern, so if Gimp can now do that as well, that would be awesome.

[baggyeyes]

Then color correct on the XCF, but using duplicate layers, so you can trash it, if it doesn't work right. I wish Gimp did as Photoshop where you could apply curves to a layer without it actually touching the image. This is the only reason I suggest using duplicate layers as you work through the color correction - but only after you've settled on placement.

[ratcreature]

Ah, yes. That's sort of how I do it. I first arrange the two parts as layers and line up the shapes/lines, and then try to fiddle with the color. I usually don't use duplicate layers though. I still have never managed to make things match so well that I couldn't spot the merge in the hires version. Like for example in this picture (rather large file) you can see a vertical seam in the middle. It looked decent enough once I reduced it to screen display size, but not in high quality.

[baggyeyes]

I can't see your image - that's a pretty hefty file, and I'm on dialup. I'll try again at a library.

[ratcreature]

Yeah it is really big as it's A3 at 300dpi, sorry about that, but it's in the nature of the problem that I only have the issue with large originals. You can still see the seam and what the basic problem was in the screen-resized version, it's just slightly less blatant (that is here and about 244kb so still not small and dialup friendly, but not a giant file).

[melannen]

Gimp (at least the more recent versions, and in slightly different ways in the older versions) can do all sorts of things with pressure and line type with brushes, but unless you're using a tablet with pressure/angle sensitivity, they're mostly invisible and unusable, afaik. You can set them to work based on speed or a random variation instead of pressure if you don't have a tablet, but I've never gotten very good results with that.

The tool they work best and most fluidly with is the ink tool (which in newer versions is the icon of the ink pot, before that was a pen nib); with other tools, pressing the + next to "brush dynamics" gets you the menus.


...as for color correction, as far as I can tell, that's just not as good on gimp as photoshop. I spent ages trying to find a way to erase blueline that worked as well as the photoshop methods do, and finally decided there just wasn't one.

[ratcreature]

I do have a cheap tablet (pressure but not angle sensitivity), though it worked better before my rats chewed through the usb cable had I had to fix it with tape... (it tends to loose contact now)

I really need to upgrade my GIMP apparently, because I don't see "brush dynamics" anywhere.

[melannen]

huh, I don't remember when that capability came in, but I didn't really notice until until I got my tablet, so I can say it's at least a few years old, but not sure how much older. (the "brush dynamics" option is on each tool's options menu, not under the brushes menu, if I was unclear about that.)

...I have just checked and I thought I was up-to-date, but my version's two years old already actually. Um. So maybe I should fix that too before I start giving advice.

[ratcreature]

I'm still using Gimp 2.2.something (and I think they are up to 2.6 now?) because my laptop is ancient and I haven't updated the linux for ages, because my DVD has been broken (the lack of funding is unfortunately a recurring problem for my technology use, see chewed on tablet above, lol).

[melannen]

I understand completely! I keep meaning to do backups, but my external hard drive is broken and I can't back up to dvd because my computer doesn't recognize my DVD drive anymore, so I can't update my OS. :D

(My tablet also has electrical tape on the cord, but it hasn't interfered with functioning yet - as opposed to the power cord of the laptop, which is a horrid macgyvered thing that loses connection if you breathe wrong and requires re-taping every two days as it burns through the most recent layer of tape. It makes strong men cry.)

If you're that far behind, I will warn you that around the first 2.6 version, there were some pretty major changes, both in feel and in stuff like the way free select works, so it takes some getting used to.

[alitalf]

What is blueline?

[melannen]

Blueline is used in various kinds of graphics meant for duplication, when you do your pencils/drafts in blue or cyan and then ink over them in black. (Most art stores sell blue pencils just for this, though these days someone doing that is more likely to scan black pencils, computer manipulate them to blue, and then print a blueline copy to ink on.)

This is traditional because some kinds of early duplication processes made it easy to filter out the blueline and only get the black inks, kind of like greenscreen in film - if you've ever seen original art of old comics, for example, you can usually see the blue pencil lines under the ink, which wouldn't get picked up when they were converted for printing.

In Photoshop there's a method that works pretty well to filter out the blue pencils if you scan in an inked graphic; but there's something about GIMP's equivalents of those filters that just never worked nearly as well, no matter how much I fine-tuned them - it would either leave in too much of the blueline pencils or erase too many of the bluish pixels in the inks, and I never found a good tutorial on it for GIMP. But it's possible that there's a GIMP tool that does it better than PS that I just never found.

[alitalf]

Thanks, that makes sense. Sort of like chroma-key in video (in my youth I designed video equipment).

Without a special tool for it, I think it would be tricky, but gimp may be able to do it in a reasonable way. The first thing I would do is to look at the range of colour values in the line, and take it from there.

Maybe this would be a worthwhile challenge to offer people? You can't be the only person needing this.

Meanwhile, if by some remote chance you are near the same bit of planet that I am, I could repair/replace the dodgy cables so that they stay repaired. I live in Bedfordshire, UK.