Marcin keeps all this running smoothly and is always thinking about making things better.

We will be unloading a van (IVECO Daily) with small furniture and stuff in Friedrichshain on Tuesday evening (27.07.2010). The nastiest book crates are already in the new flat. No washing machines, stoves, fridges, no Polstermöbel. And no stairs, there is a lift. Two or three people would be great.

I know there are some of you around in Berlin!

If you want to help or have a tip where I can get some hands, please mail me at info@meetthegimp.org.

Steve Czajka blogs about calligraphy in GIMP. Once a week he shows his newest work (like the one here) and writes a tutorial about what he has done. I have just skimmed this site – and I am impressed. The combination of manual skill with pen and paper and the processing with GIMP and Inkscape give really impressive results.

The image on the right has another important quality. Several elements in it come from different artists who have licensed their work under Creative Commons. By sharing their work they enable others to use it further and in new combinations.

Next week I’ll post another little bit here. It will be a challenge for you and you will need a tie.

Download the Video! (110.2MB, 57:59)
Download the companion file with the images used

This is the first episode made by Philipp (note the missing “e”) and he has done an entire hour with two topics.

First he develops a script in Python for applying a vignette effect to your images. It shows that he is a much better programmer than me.

In the second part he has a shot of a “For Sale” poster (the self made ones with the phone number at the bottom for tearing off) in Greek and shows, how to make a version with your own believable text out of it.

You can get his original image and the script in the companion file. The XCF is lost, sorry.

My only contribution is slapping the music and bumpers on and the image on the right which has a vignette and Python written in Greek. If you like Phillip’s show, shower him with nice comments here. Perhaps he will make more shows then.

Meet the GIMP will make a video publication break until the first week in September. I’ll use the time to move and settle, clear up the blog and server, work out the feed and torrent problems, get the mobile version running again and hopefully produce some shows in advance for filling weeks suffering of time theft. Then I’ll be back on a regular one week schedule – it is better for me and you.

Up to now there is no TOC for this show.

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

Pascal de Bruijn has made his first Video about Darktable, the free virtual lighttable and darkroom for digital photographers. I gave a short intro here some episodes ago, but didn’t go beyond “Oh – I can click here too!”. Pascal has been actively involved in making Darktable and so I assume he really knows what he is talking about.

Edit: Darktable is available for Linux and other *nixes and Mac (which is a *nix too now…). Sorry, no Windows up to now. Nobody wants to do the work of porting it.

2.6.10 is out and fixes the nasty bug with the scrollbars and some minor stuff.

I have found a very nice flat in Berlin (Rigaer Straße 27, Berlin-Friedrichshain, that is in East Berlin), have the signed lease documents in my filing cabinet and will get the keys on Tuesday.  Some cleaning is to be done – and hauling all our stuff to Berlin. A show is in the works – not by me but by a surprise guest host.

Download the Video! (59.9MB, 31:30)(link fixed)

This show covers the single window mode of GIMP 2.7.1 with a video (which sat some weeks here) from nachbarnebenan. I just installed the new version on my machine and I like it.
Then I scratch an itch I had – Printing DVDs with GIMP.
The sound in this episode in not as good as usual. Sorry.

00:20 Berlin and you
01:45 Single window mode demo
06:00 Printing on CD/DVDs
06:50 Defining the media size in Turbo Print
08:20 Defining a new image template
11:30 Starting a new image from the template
12:20 A layer with guide lines
16:15 New layer(s) for content
16:50 Inserting a source image
17:40 Scaling down of the new layer
20:00 A gradient background
21:00 Blending the layers with a mask
24:20 Adding text
25:50 Printing
28:50 Recap and more background about units

Meet the GIMP Video Podcast by Rolf Steinort and Philippe Demartin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://meetthegimp.org.

Shortly after the release of the latest stable version 2.6.9 a new development version 2.7.1 is announced. It’s another step to the next major release 2.8. Good to have a look but be careful since it might be unstable

You can get it from: ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.7/

EDIT: You can even configure the Ubuntu package manager to automatically update GIMP with the latest development version. Just visit the forum http://forum.meetthegimp.org/index.php/topic,1060.html or go directly to http://ubuntu-tweak.com/source/gimp-testing/ for further instructions.

Official release notes:

Changes in GIMP 2.7.1
=====================

UI:

 - Add "lock content" button to the layers, channels and paths dialogs,
   make the lock buttons more compact
 - Refuse to edit locked items
 - Add support for layer groups
 - Improve internals and GUI of the save/export functionality
 - Move the shortcut dialog's "clear" button into the entry
 - Clean up UI code by introducing GimpDockWindow and GimpImageWindow
   classes
 - Support multi-column dock windows
 - Get rid of docking bars, use highlights in existing widget hierarchy instead
 - Remove toolbox-window-hint gimprc setting and use dock-window-hint
   for both toolbox and docks instead
 - Move GimpDock::default-height style property to GimpDockWindow
 - Polish save+export path-part precedence rules
 - Merge the GSoC 2009 Advanced GUI for Brush Dynamics project
 - Default to non-fixed-aspect in Canvas Size dialog
 - Add a still incomplete and Single-window mode
 - Have an Export button, not Save, in export dialogs
 - Improve Free Select Tool handle highlightning
 - Support changing user interface language from preferences
 - Update ps-menurc with PS CS4 keyboard shortcuts
 - Reduce spacing around canvas and use it for the canvas itself
 - Put name of active dockables in dock window titles
 - Don't have Toolbox in list of Recently Closed Docks, handle that
   directly in the Windows menu
 - Support selecting and tagging multiple objects in resource lists
 - Improve on-canvas text editing and text attribute setting
 - Add GimpContainerTreeStore and use it in all GtkTreeStore based views
 - Add a new default "automatic" tab style that makes sure dockable tabs
   always show as much detail as possible
 - Remove the dockable title bar and add the menu arrow button next to the
   notebook tabs
 - Add an icon for the desaturate tool
 - Add 'Rule of fifths' crop guide overlay
 - Make Alt+Click on layers not affecting active layer

Core:

 - Make all GimpItems lockable so their contents can't be changed
 - Make more sense when naming imported layers
 - Make group layers work except for layer masks and save them in
   the XCF
 - Change GimpProjectable::update to GimpProjectable:invalidate
 - Make sure we don't mix font backends (and crash) by explicitely
   asking for FT/Fontconfig backends
 - Move members of GimpObject to a private struct
 - gimp_object_get_name() takes a gconstpointer now, remove casts
   from all callers
 - Let drawables connect to their floating selection's "update" signal
   instead of letting the image do this job
 - Fix brush rotation artifacts at even 90 degree rotation
 - Don't leak shared tile memory on Solaris
 - Add a PDB procedure to access a text layer's markup
 - Remove legacy cruft from pdbgen and make sure number ranges are correct
 - Move all image creation functions to a common file
 - Add translation context to all undo descriptions

GEGL:

 - Make sure all nodes are added to their resp. graphs
 - Use GEGL for layer scaling if use-gegl is TRUE

Plug-ins:

 - Updated script-fu's scheme to latest upstream fixes
 - Don't store image-specific print settings globally
 - Add fundamental OpenRaster (.ora) import and export support
 - Add RGB565 support to the csource plug-in

Data:

 - Add texture/grunge brushes made by Johannes Engelhardt

Developer documentation:

 - Explain GimpContext
 - Add SVG graphic with GIMP application core module dependencies
 - Add a schedule for 2.8 development

Source and build system:

 - Add more code documentation
 - Clean up subsystem linking dependencies in app/
 - Add unit testing framework in app/tests/ and some basic tests,
   including basic UI tests and XCF tests
 - Tentatively introduce usage of using Glade + GtkBuilder
 - Depend on GLib 2.24.0 and GTK+ 2.20.0
 - Add git commit hash in --verbose --version output
 - Don't version control gtk-doc.m4, get it from gtkdocize
 - Add GimpObject tracking code
 - Plug memory leaks
 - Lots of bug fixes and cleanup
 - Lots of translation updates

This is already 2 days old news, but perhaps it hasn’t made it’s way to you already. A lot of bug fixes, nothing terribly new. And a translation to Plattdeutsch, the dialect (formerly) spoken here in northern Germany.

                   ------------------------------
                   GNU Image Manipulation Program
                          2.6 Stable Branch
                   ------------------------------

This is the stable branch of GIMP. No new features are being added
here, just bug-fixes.

Overview of Changes from GIMP 2.6.8 to GIMP 2.6.9
=================================================

* Bugs fixed:

 612618 - Font selection remains visible
 622234 - gimp.desktop: image/x-psd in MimeTypes twice
 622196 - Unportable test(1) construct in configure script
 620604 - Description of "histogram" procedure is slightly inaccurate
 541586 - Tool options not saved/loaded correctly?
 614153 - Importing PDF files with long titles
 600112 - blur-gauss-selective.exe crashes
 599233 - Dialog of "Save as BMP" ignores changes which are not made
          with a mous
 565001 - Text-Tool crashes when edit a 2.4.2 version XCF file
 610478 - Layer preview suddenly stops getting updated
 609026 - leaks shared memory
 609056 - Exporting to Alias PIX format fails
 608188 - a few strings in Save as... > Raw image data dialog are always
          in English
 604820 - GEGL Operation "path" crashes GIMP
 603711 - Crashes when using path tool
 607242 - GIMP 2.7.0 fails to build against libpng 1.4.0
 606372 - Saving to .ppm fails on indexed colorspace
 605237 - the "Antialiasing..." message in the progress bar does not show
          translated
 604508 - gimp-layer-new-from-visible should work from updated projection

* Updated and new translations:

 Asturian (ast)
 Basque (eu)
 Burmese (my)
 Catalan (ca)
 Chinese (Hong Kong) (zh_HK)
 Chinese (Taiwan) (zh_HK)
 German (de)
 Italian (it)
 Latvian (lv)
 Low German (nds)
 Romanian (ro)
 Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)
 Slovenian (sl)
 Ukrainian (uk)
 Valencian (ca@valencia)