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)

I am in my last days at my school here in Bremen and have to organize a lot of stuff and type pupils reports. So no time for a show just now.

But I’ll have one for you at the end of the week – if we don’t find a promising flat in Berlin just now and have to travel.

If you remember my adventures in LABland, you’ll know that I liked the curves tool in LAB mode of cinepaint very much. It allows a much more intuitive manipulation of the colours in an image than RGB.

GIMP has no LAB mode up to now – but now there is a plugin for that. I haven’t tested it yet (3 more days school and I have to type a lot of reports about kids and clear all my stuff in school) but it looks very promising.

Akkana Peck, author of a very good gimp book (recommended already several times here), held a talk on the recent LGM about writing plug-ins and scripts for GIMP in Python and Script-Fu. She starts with a short introduction into simple scripts but then goes deeper than even Bert did. She shows different ways to detailed documentation (which is there, but hidden in the GIMP sources) and compares the speed of Python pixel manipulating plug-ins with some written in C code. Not bad, really not bad.

In the second part of the lecture she goes into Script-Fu, shows advantages, traps and stuff that has changed at the switch to GIMP 2.4. Now I know that “car” is has been the content of the address register at least 20 years ago and is the first element of a list in Scheme. She gives again a lot of pointers for references – but this part of her speech entrenched me even deeper in the Python camp.

Definitely worth the 26 minutes for all script kiddies tinkerers here around! I will watch it again next week after my grades conference marathon and follow up the leads to the documentation. If you are there ahead of me, please put your links into the comments here.

Oh, before I forget: here is the link to the video and a lot of thanks to devvv from gimpusers.com for blogging about this.

Download the Video! (49.5MB, 26:02)
Download the Torrent! (Broken?)
Download the companion file with the images used

Parts of the old Bremen harbour (the Europahafen and the Überseehafen) have been closed and are rebuilt as a new part of the city, called “Übersseestadt”. I took an image of the border between old and new. In the video I try to make the difference stronger by desaturating and colouring parts of the image. Not much success with the image, but the saturation and colour layer mode get explained.

In the begin I talk a bit about difficulties in the forum and my thoughts about flattr.

The TOC

03:25 Subscribe to the RSS feed
04:35 flattr
06:30 An image from the Europahafen
08:15 Goal: Enhance the contrast between old and new
08:25 Rotation correction
10:15 Saving as XCF
10:45 Cropping
11:25 Fixing the aspect ratio
13:15 Duplicating the layer before tweaking the colours
14:05 Adjusting the curve to get more contrast
15:35 Desaturationg parts of the image with a layer in saturation mode
20:00 Adding sepia colour
22:20 Colour layer mode

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.

Jim sent me a screenshot of GIMP 2.7 in single window mode. Looks good and I am going to try it soon. Click on the image for a 100% view.

I got also a video about this, but haven’t been able to look at it up to now. We had “an unpleasantness” in the forum last week. All the sleuthing around in the log files and communicating has cost me at least 8 hours last week (I could/would have made a full blown show in that time) and this week I have to finish grades. So you will have to wait for the Weekend.

I now know in which school I will be working after the summer. It is in Berlin Neukölln-Britz. I want to live a bit more north, in Kreuzberg or “Kreuzkölln”. And now I am really starting to look for a flat there to rent.

I now have found a way to encode the video that is supposed to run on Apple products and other mobile devices. Please tell me which version to use in the future.

Version 1

Version 2

Version 3

Version 4

Please use the comments and vote in the poll on the sidebar if you are interested in a version for mobile devices.

Developers and users of Free, Libre and Open Source graphics software will meet May 27-30 in Brussels at the fifth annual Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM). The meeting space is truly unique — an historic piano factory, freshly renovated into a lively exhibition and workspace. LGM 2010 gives software developers, artists, designers and other graphics professionals the opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other. LGM emphasizes the sharing of collective creativity, innovation and ideas and is free for everyone to attend.

The above text and the headline are simply stolen from the website of the LGM. These meetings have given a big boost to the development of Open Source graphics software in the past. Up to now face to face conversation in a group of like minded persons has no equivalent in the net.

I will not be able to attend, but I ask you to give some money to them. (I did, BTW and brought the counter just below the 3000 mark. Seems to work….)

Michael J. Hammel is a well known author (not only) about GIMP. I have one of his books about GIMP (already in a box for moving), he is just in the process of writing a new one.

He had a column running in Linux Format magazine (never heard before….) and now the magazine has set free the original, high resolution PDFs used for printing the magazine on TuxRadar. 

Go and get them!

Download the Video! (18.2 MB, 9:35)
Download the Torrent! (Broken?)

This is the first Microsode of Meet the GIMP. This are short(er) videos that are produced ahead of publication and cover one topic – and no chit chat about my life, the site, the forum and so on.

In this Microsode I talk about the fourth value of a pixel, the opacity or transparency. It turns up in layers, tool settings and in the concept of layer masks. The erase tool can erase to the background colour or to transparency. You can even lock the alpha channel of a layer and so keep the transparent parts while painting in the image. BTW, I think I forgot to mention the proper name of the fourth “colour” – alpha. (Edit: I did at 5:00! )

TOC

00:27 Microsodes
01:25 3 nubers for red, green, blue – and one for opacity / transparency
02:40 opacity in the layer dialogue
02:50 the checkerboard
03:10 opacity in paint tools
04:30 two modes of the erase tool – alpha channel of a layer
05:40 lock opacity
06:20 making straight lines
07:40 layer masks

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.