This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,180 for Friday 9, 2020. Today's show is entitled,
GIMP, Miscellaneous Tools, and is part of the series GIMP, it is hosted by our Huka,
and is about 13 minutes long, and carries a clean flag. The summer is
these few remaining tools are important, but don't fit neatly into one category.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by Anannasthost.com. Get 15% discount on all shared hosting
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Hello, this is Huka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting
episode in our GIMP series. What I'm going to do today is take a look at a few
miscellaneous tools that don't fit neatly into anyone category, but they're important.
So we do need to take a look at this. To recap briefly, there were tools that fall into
groups like selection tools, paint tools, transform tools and color tools, and we've covered
each of those groups in previous episodes. But the ones that are left are kind of a grab bag,
and there are five of them that we want to take a look at paths, zoom, measure, text, and something
called giggle operation, and that'll be fun. So they don't have anything to do with each other,
but they're useful. So we want to take a look at them. Now again, as with any of the tools we've
looked at, practice makes perfect. So what you probably want to do is open up GIMP and either create
a blank image or open a photo to work with these tools. Now I would suggest a photo for most of them
is probably good, but blank image will help for things like the text tool. Now all but the giggle operation
tool, all of the others have icons in the toolbox and all of them are accessible on the tools menu.
Now the first one is called the paths tool, and let you create a manipulate,
busier curves on your image. Now I've put a link in the show notes to a discussion on Wikipedia
of busier curves, so that should prove interesting if you want to dig into that a little bit more,
but you probably have seen things like this before if you've done any graphics work. So you click
on the icon in the toolbox. Now this one does not have a pop-up dialogue box, like many of the other
tools do. Instead, we're now going to look at the right side bar, which we haven't really paid
much attention to so far. And on the top of that right side bar, there's a section will use a lot
more often when we get to layers. The first tab is layers, the second is channels, the third is paths,
and the fourth one is undo. You can see individually each of that, you can go back to any undo level.
So, all useful stuff over there, but the paths one is the one we're going to take a look at right now.
So you probably want to click the paths tab and just have that open.
Now there is also a tool options for this tool, which is on the bottom of the left side bar,
just as with all of the other tools. Now busier curves are defined by anchor points and tangent lines,
essentially. And you can manipulate the curve by moving the anchor points or twisting the tangent
lines or both. For example, if you select the paths tool and then select design mode in the
tool options and click on the image, you'll get one anchor point. Click again on a different
part of the image and you'll get a second anchor point with the straight line connecting the
tool. Now this all works the same as the selection tools we looked at earlier. One of these points
is active. The one you most recently clicked on and that one is the one that is in empty circle
instead of a solid dot. From there you'll have a tangent line with squares on either end.
You can then adjust the curve by moving one of those squares to reshape your curve.
Now note that if you check the polygonal or polygonal, I'm not quite sure how to pronounce that,
box and the tool options on the lower left, you'll get straight line segments between the anchor
points, which makes it very similar to the free form select tool. But the real power of this tool
is the curves. And so having the polygonal option is helpful if you want to do a mix that combines
curve sections and straight line sections. Now when you get to the end you want to be able to
connect all of this but to connect it what you need to do is control click on the very first anchor
point connected to the last anchor point. Now when you do this you've got a complete selection
and so you can then cut the image out and use it in another image. Now you fine tune your path
by using edit mode. This lets you add anchor points in the middle of your path for instance.
And you enter edit mode by using the control key as you click if you don't want to keep changing modes.
Used with other tools like the zoom tool, this can let you draw very precise outlines around objects
in a photo. If you then click a selection from path and the options on the lower left,
you can do anything you want with it such as copy the selection and insert it into another image.
And this makes the paths tool extremely useful. Pads can be saved as well to do this right click
on the path in the upper right section and select export. Save it as a dot s v g file and you can then
open it up in another image via import but also in another program. s v g stands for scalable
vector graphics and that is the type of graphic that can be re-scaled without any problems because
it is not raster based but instead based in equations. So you could open this path in
an inkscape for instance which is the premier open source vector graphics program and you can also import
from inkscape. Gims vector graphics tools are not all that powerful it really is a raster program
but the having them there is handy. Finally the paths tool allows you to do other things as well
you can paint along a path. You can stroke the path which sounds vaguely dirty but really all it
means is drawing a line which can be dotted or dashed or all the different styles you can use for lines.
You can even write text that follows the path. So you see this tool is really very useful.
Next the zoom tool this one is pretty straightforward you can zoom in or zoom out.
But it is very useful for making precise edits since you can zoom in to the point that you can see
individual pixels which can be very helpful in making a selection whether you are using the
selection tools discussed previously or the paths tool discussed above. Note that you can also
control the zoom level very precisely using the percent zoom setting which is in the status bar
on the very bottom. This will let you type in a percentage for the zoom if the image is at 100% it
is no zoom at all less than that it's zoomed out and higher numbers are zoomed in.
And next to it is a drop down that lets you pick from some pre-selected zoom levels.
Next I want to talk about the measure tool. This lets you measure the distance and pixels
between any two points in the angle of the line connecting them. To use this tool click on the first
point and holding the mouse button drag the cursor to the second point. On the image you will see
the line connecting the two points and an angle marker but the actual data is on the status bar at
the bottom right next to the zoom indicator. And you'll have a series of numbers the first
numbers the actual distance computed using the Pythagorean theorem and I checked it is accurate.
The second is the angle away from the horizontal and the numbers in parentheses are the horizontal
and vertical displacements between the two points. Think of those as like coordinates.
Now the text tool is mostly standard if you've ever used a text tool in any graphics program
such as LibreOffice Impress. You draw a box and start typing in text. When you draw the box
a window pops up where you can select font, size and so on. I assume most people have seen
something of the sort before and this is very standard but there are a couple of things to point
out that are not exactly standard and so I want to mention those. So the first is hinting which
is a technique for making fonts more legible at smaller sizes. There's the full discussion
about it on Wikipedia, link in the show notes if you want to get in the weeds about this but
for most people the idea of making small sizes more legible is probably sufficient.
Now the other is anti-aliasing which you've probably heard up before which is used in computer
graphics to reduce the jagged edges that can appear particularly when something is scaled up.
There is a nice brief definition at Webapedia again, link in the show notes.
So these are things you wouldn't see in every text tool that you run across but in graphics
they're very good to have. Finally, gaggle operation, gaggle is G-E-G-L, it's an acronym and it stands for
generic graphics library and it was introduced in GIMP 2.6. It is continuing to be developed but as of
GIMP 2.8 it was still not quite ready for normal use. The documentation carries this warning.
Gaggle is in a very early phase and still under construction. The Gaggle operation tool is
experimental, link in the show notes. However if you look at the documentation for GIMP 2.10 which is
the most current version as I write this you see instead GIMP 2.10 is nearly fully ported
to Gaggle. You will find here some operations that are still experimental and I'd link that in
the show notes as well. So you can see from this that GIMP is developing this and making it central
to GIMP's further development. There's a nice YouTube video explaining how Gaggle is the future
of GIMP again, link in the show notes. For instance it supports high bit depth images,
non-destructive editing and beginning in GIMP 2.10 the Gaggle filters will be replacing the
filters GIMP head previously and so on. So to use this tool you go to the tools menu and select
Gaggle operation and you will get a dialog box with a drop down. So pick an operation and click
the drop down and make a choice. I have to be at least 50 choices here. Not that I counted them
just there's a lot. And many of them are not immediately clear to me but some of them are things
like newsprint and Gaussian blur and so on. Now for each tool a settings dialog will open.
Remember keep preview checked so you can see what your changes are doing and remember that the
reset button will always get you back to your starting point. Now because Gaggle is where GIMP is going
I have made the choice to support the principal developer and I'm probably not pronouncing his name
anywhere near correct. I'm going to say, oh even Coloss. He has a Patreon account. I have signed up for
monthly just a few dollars donation. As I have said many times and we'll continue to say many times
I advocate supporting free software. And since I'm using this wonderful program I intend to help
make it better through my financial contributions. And while Gaggle is not 100% there yet it
is exciting to see where it can go. Now this does finally complete our look at all of the tools available
in GIMP. Again open an image and practice using these tools to get familiar with them.
And next time we're going to take a look at brushes. So this is a hook up for Hacker Public Radio
signing off and as always encouraging you to support free software. Bye-bye!
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