Meet the GIMP!

The new Focus Ring is out!

On today’s panel:

* Benoit Marchal - Declencheur
* Boris Nienke - nSonic
* Chris Marquardt - Tips from the Top Floor

Topics: How to become a professional photographer in minutes, how to get an all-access pass to the 24 hours of Le Mans car race and how to learn about proportion

I got this mail:

Hi Rolf Steinort,

First congratulations for your shows… I just met them.. they are great.

I am Daniel from Brazil.

I would like to ask you one thing.

I am new in webdesign and till now, I have being used to make my layouts, Inkscape. But I talk with some and see that a lot of people use photoshop to make a web layout. So, I am with vector program and a lot of people use a bitmap editor…

Searching … I found that some people use Gimp to make layout too.. and I found some tutorial.. but they are very weak. Could be possible you cover this in some of your shows ?

Just a classic layout would be already enough to me.. I just need some base to start.

Thanks and keep this great work.

Best,
Daniel

I have no idea what to answer. My gut feeling is to stay with vector based programs. For what do you need raster images in web design except for photo manipulation?

Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Yes, there is one around - a special keyboard for GIMP. (The site is in German, but the Fish will help you.) Uwe Mayer has made one out of an old cash register keyboard bought from eBay. He got his informations from an other German site from Markus Dollinger.

Here you see 50GB going through the pipes. That would be a line to have at home…..

 Podcast Video (62.1 MB): [40:03m]: Download (5763)

Download via BitTorrent!

This 50th episode is 40 minutes long. I am not sure if this  “Double Length” is caused by the complexity of the work or simply a bit of laziness. But I declare “celebrating the 50th” as the official reason for this.

The log files of my blog show from where clicks are coming in. One of the most successful linkers is Jeff (jeffegg2) on flickr. He drops a comment with a link to this site whenever appropriate.

There is a GIMP users group on flickr that I found out about on this way. And there I found a tutorial from Shelly and Roy about making a comic like drawing out of a photography.

I was looking for such an effect for a while. My final goal is to do something like Roy Lichtenstein did - replacing every colour gradient with solid colour or a dot pattern. I think this is a step on that way.

I am not very happy with my result. It still has too much “non-comic” in it. If you compare my work with this image from Shelly and Roy, you see that I am not really there.

One thing that I found out after I made the video: these images are very ugly to scale down. So work in your final resolution.

You can find the file used in this episode at the usual place.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

The next show will be released from the new server and not from the reliable podzilla.de machine. Marcin has implemented some safeguards - but who knows.
For you it’s business as usual. If the load is to high for this server I’ll switch the load back to podzilla. Everything is prepared for the worst case this time…..
Just a number to get an impression of the load: on the two days following the show release about 160 Gigabytes are pumped into the net. Let’s see how well the new pump works.

EDIT: 1:15h and 240 downloads after publication: Made a test download and got 800kB/s! WHOW!

…. 107.67€ and I had to pay 107.10€ to rescue the domain. 

Everything that lands in the hat from now on will be used for running the servers.

Thank you to the 8 who have contributed up to now!

Edit: On June 30th there are 166.24€ in the hat from 15 donors. That means electricity for the server up to September 15th.

 Podcast Video (32.6 MB): [26:00m]: Download (6312)

Get this show via  BitTorrent!

As nothing catastrophic has happened this week I’ll continue trying to make simple graphics with GIMP. You see one of them on the left.

This is done with the selection tools, working with paths and gradient fills.

If you need something more complicated, go to inkscape and the tutorials from Richard and heathenx. You know the proverb about screws and hammers….

One tip: Always use layers. If in doubt, add a new layer and work on that. It gives you some of the flexibilty of a vector based program, you can move, rotate and scale parts of the image without much effort.

This hat is here with a purpose. I had to shell out more money for this project as planned. And a lot of you have offered assistance. So here I am putting the hat on the street.

My account at PayPal is under the ID “rs@gorfnet.de”. I tried to make a button here, but the thing always bombs out with some decryption errors. Perhaps Wordpress messing with the code?

Does somebody know a different micro payment system? Perhaps a better one? A GeekBank would be a nice thing….

If you want to give me some money via the European bank system, ask me for the IBAN/BIC number per mail. I don’t want to put them up here. And as I said in the video, I like stuff from ThinkGeek.com and Amazon.DE.

More about lowering the running costs by sharing the server will follw in time.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

All the torrent stuff is working again. The last episodes are uploaded.

Get the BitTorrent for the last show! (Does this work? Please comment - I have no idea if I did this right. If this works out, there will be a torrent link in each episode.)

David gowers wrote here about the new polygon select tool. The UI expert working on that tool read that and then wrote about how he came to the solution David had written about. I read that blog posting and am writing this here…..

(Hope I have got all the grammar right…. )

Have a look, interesting read!