Bring Out the GIMP Part 1: GIMP Basics

Robert Strohmeyer — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 11:26:13 -0500

No matter which Linux distro you run, chances are it came with a magnificent little image editor called GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). Unlike Paint and other free-with-your-OS image editors, GIMP is a full featured graphics app with a broad range of capabilities that rival those os Adobe Photoshop. (Note: GIMP does lack many features of its $749 rival, but it has the distinct advantage of costing absolutely nothing.) In this, our first of several posts about this powerful Linux app, we'll give you a quick-and-dirty intro to GIMP's most basic features. Note that there are multiple ways to accomplish these basic tasks in GIMP, but these methods require the fewest steps. In later tutorials, we'll show you more advanced (and more efficient) image editing techniques.

Crop an Image
Cropping in GIMP is fairly straightforward. To start, open an image and select the rectangle selector from the toolbox. Then place the cursor in one corner of the area you'd like to crop. (It's often easiest to start in the upper left corner, like reading a book.) Now drag the rectangle toward the opposite corner of your desired area. (If you started in the upper left corner, you'll be dragging toward the lower-right.) Once you're happy with the selected area, right-click in the box and choose Image > Crop Image.

Resize an Image (aka Scaling)
Like cropping, scaling is a simple operation in GIMP. Open your image and select Image > Scale Image from the menu. Enter the dimensions you want in the fields, and then click Scale to make it so. Easy peasy.

Alternatively, you can handle both cropping and resizing with the Crop and Resize tool located in the Tools > Transform Tools menu. It works similarly to the above examples, but for quick edits, we like the above methods more.

Fix Your Pics
You can manually adjust color, hue, and saturation easily in GIMP. In this image, my tortoise is looking a little hot in the Hawaiian sun, and I'd like to eliminate those washed out white spots from his shell. To do it, I'm going to modify the color balance in the highlights by clicking Tools > Color Tools > Color Balance and using the sliders to make small adjustments. Because I really only want to tone down the highlights at this point, I check the Highlights option at the top of the Adjust Color Balance dialog, and then I push the Yellow-Blue slider a little to the right. A small adjustment quickly removes most of the annoying white spots from the tortoise's shell without significantly altering the image's overall appearance. While I'm at it, I'm going to turn up the Red and Green just slightly to preserve the natural red tones of the soil and shell and preserve the bright greens of the surrounding grass. As long as you make small adjustments, the result maintains a natural look while bringing out more of the subject's fine details. You can also make adjustments to brightness, hue, and saturation in the same way, by choosing those options from the Tools > Color Tools menu.

That concludes this week's GIMP tutorial. This one was elementary, but in upcoming posts, we'll dig a lot deeper into this app's wide range of features, including working with paint tools to manipulate your images, using layers, and playing with the array of plug-ins and scripting tools that make GIMP such a powerful graphics tool.

Pinnacle Systems Studio Plus 10

Gordon Mah Ung — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 15:58:15 -0600

When it was released, Pinnacle Systems Studio 9 gained a reputation as a roach motel: Bugs went in and they didn’t come out. The bad word spread so fast and so furiously that the company wadded up the product, tossed it in a dumpster and started over again.

The result is Studio Plus 10. In a nutshell, the program features Studio 9’s familiar and super-friendly interface bolted to an engine based on Pinnacle’s professional Liquid Edition editor.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, things didn’t gel. Despite putting reliability and bugs at the top of the priority list, Pinnacle’s new Studio is less than optimal. OK, it was a buggy, horrible mess on not one, but two different machines. That’s really unfortunate, because Studio sports some truly compelling features that make it a far friendlier video editor than its direct competitor: Adobe’s Premiere Elements 2.0, which we reviewed in March.

Our first problem surfaced during the install on a dual-Opteron machine. The app took an inordinate amount of time to install, giving us an error message during the process, yet somehow the install completed anyway. We successfully captured 10 minutes of video from a DV cam, but after a few minutes of editing, the program crashed to the desktop. Mind you, that’s with the latest update for the program installed. Indeed, the program crashed on us enough times that we gave up and moved to a second machine.

Our second PC was an Athlon 64 FX-60 with 2GB of RAM, an nForce4 X16 chipset, and SLI. The program successfully installed the first two discs, but the third gave us an error. Nice. We finally gave up on the third bonus disc completely.

Pinnacle said the installation problem is a “known issue” that will soon be fixed with a new patch. The company also said it’s working on a patch to specifically address “issues” with AMD machines.

If you can successfully install Studio, you’ll find that it’s quite welcoming to users of all stripes. If Premiere Elements 2.0 is like an old college buddy, Studio is the little poodle that humps your leg when you come to visit—it’s in your face and friendly from the start.

Newbies will feel right at home with the storyboard mode, which lets you perform a quick edit rather than tangling with the traditional timeline, although the program does support a timeline, if you prefer. And for users who don’t want to actually edit their own videos, the SmartMovie mode will automatically turn your footage into a music video. It works in a pinch, but hardly counts as an actual project. It’s analogous to a “write my sentence for me” button in Word, or an auto-crop mode for your images. Not everything about Studio is intuitive, however. We found DVD creation to be more straightforward with Elements 2.0.

We appreciate Studio’s comparatively large assortment of transitions, but we find the program’s pay-as-you-go scheme to be quite annoying. The program dangles page upon page of transitions in your face that you can’t use unless you pay for them. Fortunately, you can disable the “premium” content ads, but it’s a drag to be reminded that you need to pay more money for a product you already purchased. The program also includes more robust audio tools than Premiere Elements 2.0.

Studio boasts the ability to edit high-definition video, but we were unable to capture any video with our pro-level cam—a Sony HVR-Z1. It was probably an issue of how we configured the camera; after all, it’s pretty unlikely someone will use an $80 program to edit video from a $5,000 camera.

Pinnacle says the latest version of Studio might be labeled 10, but it’s really a totally new product. We believe it—this definitely feels like a 1.0 app! While we think Pinnacle is laying the foundation for a potentially great new editing application, it’s pretty freaking far from that right now. That coupled with its Athlon stability issues make it impossible for us to recommend this program.

Month Reviewed: April 2006

+ STUDIO 54: New engine and friendly interface.

- STUDIO APARTMENT: Crashes and has installation issues on Athlon 64 machines.

VERDICT: 3

URL: www.pinnaclesys.com

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Bring Out the GIMP Part 1: GIMP Basics

Pinnacle Systems Studio Plus 10