Difference between revisions of "GIMP/C2/Questions-And-Answers/English-timed"

|Welcome to Meet the GIMP. My name is Rolf Steinort and I am recording this in Bremen, Northern Germany.

|For today’s tutorial I promised you with a question and answer edition so let’s start with some news. I have already informed you about gimpusers.com and they have a great news about a video podcast of the GIMP but I think you know that podcast already.

|So let’s go to the download page and here you see that gimp 2.4.0 release candidate and is available for windows and I think for apple Macintosh and insource for most linux systems except for mine because Ubuntu is not able to cope with some libraries that are needed so gimp 2.4.0 is on the way and when you are on gimpusers.com, look at this area on the screen. It’s a mirror of two mailing list that gives lot of information about the gimp. First the gimp user mailing list and I recommend you to read that.

|And here is a discussion which answers a question and I didn’t knew about that. Let’s see it here.

|The 1st question here is asked by Alex Burs and he asks what the sample point tab did? And I didn’t understand the question. But I knew Alex because he tried to help me with providing the files for you and set up google site for me.

|The answer here is from Tim Jedlicka & I know TIM too because Tim has big server in the internet and a big pipe through the internet and we are just now in the process of setting up possibility for you to download the files that I use here. I’ll keep you informing about it & just look into the block at meetthegimp.org and look if you find a download icon there.

|Here Tim answers the question of Alex. And I thank both of you for this question and answer conversation here.

|I never had heard about that and I have to try it. To do that I started the gimp and load the image into it which is prepared to know as My Ship in the Fog. Now I shall go to the ruler on the left side, press the ctrl key and pull the ruler out and you can see here that the mouse cursor changes to an eye dropper and I get two lines instead of one. Just leave the mouse button and ctrl key and you get a point with number one on it. And when I pull out the ruler with the mouse button pressed and without pressing the ctrl key, I get only one line here which is used for adjusting things on it.

|Let’s try to do the same procedure from the ruler on the top. I press the ctrl key and mouse button and pull down the ruler and release it here. So here I have number two and number one is already there but I can’t see no dialog here.

|So click on the tool options and select the color picker from the tool box but I don’t see anything here. But remember there was a dialog mentioned in the files, so I click on file, go to dialogs and here’s a dialog called sample points.

|When you click on it, you have got here sample points from 1 and 2. And this is one method of getting color information about different points in the image. And now I know a better way for getting the color information. I can change here pixel to RGB and I get the values for red, green, blue and alpha is displayed in terms of percentage. Here with pixel you see the actual numerical value of colors and when RGB selected you see here the Hex code for HTML and I can change RGB in HSV color model or in CMYK color model and I will cover that later .

|The next question is also related to color and the color picker. I had mentioned in my podcast of ‘Ship in the Fog’ that you can take the color picker and get color information of the image and Glulio asks here how to get the color information of resulting color and not the color of one layer.

|I have the color picker selected and when I press shift and click into the image, I get the current color information, and you see here the ship, the trees are white and also the sky, which is not very satisfactory result. And it’s because I have selected  white background . So I go to layers dialog and change it to the original background layer in dialog and you see its fully different color from what you see on the screen.

|There’s an option in layers dialog called sample merged and when you activate that you get the result of all stack layers and with the sample merged you see in the color picker information, the foreground color  keeps on changes all the time. With sample merged activated you get results of all layers.  

|when you de-activate the sample merge option you get only the color information from the active layer and I forgot to tell that in previous show and when you select the blue layer you get information of blue color. So go back, select sample merged and you get result of all layers.

|There another option here called sample average and when you select it you get a large color picker and get an average of all the pixels in that area. It’s good option for getting color information for noisy image where you have big difference between the single pixels.

|Glulio has another tip for the GIMP. If you use not only .xcf as a file name but xcf.pz2 or xcf.bz2 the gimp compresses the image and you get a smaller file size. I don’t know if this works also on windows machine and you have to try that. Perhaps on windows it would work if you name the file xcf.zip but I don’t know if it is true. Perhaps somebody should try it and post on the blog.

|He asks if I can increase the quality of the video by trying different codec. But I didn’t find this codec H 264 for linux in a free version. There is a commercial version but it’s too expensive for me. This is just a hobby and I pay for uploading the stuff and it’s not much but I don’t want to spend money on this here.

|But I have a quality question for you. I am recording this in 800/600 pixels and scale it down to 640/480 pixels just because everyone does it and this way it works on apple tv and so on.

|My question to you is do you prefer the original file size 800/600? The image is clearer and you could see it better. The files get a bit larger and there are people out there who can’t really see this bigger files.

|Answer to this question is no, not in GIMP. Photoshop can do that with this adjustment layer and there are lot of GIMP programmers who are working on that and trying to implement it.

|And he is asking about a book Beginning GIMP from Novice to Professional by Akkana Peck and I have this book. It is really good if you are starting with the gimp or you have a bit knowledge then it’s a very good book and its hands on the book. And I can really recommend that book.

|Yesterday I got a nasty shock when I started my work again after the summer break and that should be shocking enough but I looked the 1st time in meet the gimp block with a windows computer and in internet explorer. And I was really shocked because all the images were blown up and nothing was fitting into the frames and so on.

 

|Check out the website, there is a podcast made by the members of the photocast network and it’s called Focus ring and just today episode 8 came out. And eventually Meet The Gimp will pop out here on the left side.