Linux Beginners SIG, June 2012, GIMP
| June 12, 2012 | ||
| 6:00 pm | to | 9:00 pm |
The subject this month will be the Gimp photo editing program. Those of you who attended the General Meeting last week were probably impressed with the gee-whiz photo effects the speaker presented. You might have been less impressed with the fact that those effects required approximately $2,000 in software.
The underpinning of all editing is a full-function (layering) editor. Traditionally this has been Photoshop, which costs over $600, but 95% of its features are available in Gimp, which is free on both Linux and Windows platforms. As I mentioned in my previous note, the new Gimp 2.8 was released one week after Ubuntu 12.04, so that neither Ubuntu nor Mint 13 have it by default. I’ll talk about how to install it and how to install add-ons (just like for Photoshop, there are thousands. Unlike Photoshop, they don’t cost thousands.)
I’ll also, of course, show how to use it for some typical “problem” photos — cropping and rotating, fixing an old cracked picture, dealing with teenage acne, and so on. Note that all full-function photo editors — Gimp, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc. — have many, many features and therefore have a ferocious learning curve. The stuff I’ll be showing is pretty simple, though.
Speaking of Mint 13 (aka Maya), I have DVDs available for two of its three desktop variants: MATE (which is a fork of Gnome 2) and CINNAMON, a brand-new desktop based on Gnome 3 but developed by the Mint folks. The third desktop, KDE, won’t be out for another couple of weeks. (Ubuntu’s UNITY desktop is also derived from Gnome 3 — are you seeing a trend here, that NOBODY likes Gnome 3 itself?) As I mentioned in my other message, Ubuntu’s UNITY assumes you want your 24″ display to look like a phone or tablet, while MATE, CINNAMON, KDE, XFCE, etc. assume you want to use the “old-fashioned” keyboard/mouse.
See you Tuesday.
See the Linux Beginners SIG page for location, contacts, etc
