My GIMP-fu improves marginally.

[elfs]

Experiment #5

Recently, I did some experiments with the GIMP, attempting to reproduce some of the “how to do it in photoshop” experiments that come across on the Internet from time to time.   To the left is my latest experiment: an attempt to reproduce the Apple™ glowly mark used in some of their advertising by using the new Layer Effects toolkit available for Gimp 2.6.

The experiment was not a complete success.  I managed to figure out how to do the inner glow (hint: it’s not the Layer Effect “inner glow”; it’s an ordinary gradient fill), and I almost got the drop shadow, although obviously the professional version is much more crisp and clean.  There are four copies of the peach: one for the glow, one for the inner shadow, one for the outer glow (again, I suspect that a straight up gaussian blur would have gotten me the effect I wanted much better than using the Outer Glow layer effect), and one for the grey background, all again on a gently gradient background square.  Five layers all told.

I spent an hour on this experiment.  When I do nail it, I’ll put up a tutorial with screenshots of GIMP 2.6 in various stages as I work my way through the example.  But before I do, I’ll have to figure out for myself how it works.  I suspect that the first step is to work very large and shrink it down to the scale I want when I’m ready to publish.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

Comments

[icebluenothing.livejournal.com]

I really, really like the peach logo. Is that from something? Or are you planning on using it for something, or was it just a throwaway design for practice, here?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It was just a throwaway. I took an image of a peach, subtracted the background, set the match threshold high (like, 75% or so), painted the foreground black and viola', I had a simple peach template.

[mg4h.livejournal.com]

Be cautious with scaling, I've been bitten enough by working to get some lovely image just perfect at a high resolution/size, just to have it pixalate horribly when I shrunk it down. Also, GIMP seems to interpolate better if you scale it slowly - I took a 1200dpi image down to ~200 dpi in very small increments, and it ended up looking much better than when I did it directly. I think I started with a few 50's, then ran it down through 30, 20, and 10 for the last few.

It's a fun program, isn't it?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I've discovered that the scaling algorithm in netpbm is much better than the one in GIMP. When I process photos, I always save them as PAM images and use pamscale to cut them down to a flickr-friendly size.

[mg4h.livejournal.com]

Most of what I'm working with now are black-and-white images, either in xcf or gif format. It's all heraldry, so it's clip art type. Photos are a different matter, what with color and shading, so I wonder how netpbm works with such absolutes?

I have to build up my new work machine, I guess it's time to install more fun programs on it :)