Misadventures at 720nm

I finally finished out the rest of this series over the course of this afternoon:

As places go in World of Warcraft, Kharanos in the Dun Morogh zone has a special place in my heart. My very first character was a Gnome Warlock, and it was the very first town I stopped in in the game. My first trainer. Consider that I exclusively play as Gnomes on the Alliance side of the game, I have been here a lot through the years. In honour of this fact, tonight I set out to capture a series of panoramas in and around the town. My first scene from this series of six images is a 360°x180° panorama taken from the centre of the Thunderbrew Distillery, that hub of ale-fuelled debauchery and questing.

So I’m two days into using The Gimp v2.7.1. instead of Photoshop. Eh. It handles just fine. The Gimp’s tools and features are complete to me, as a Photoshop user (mostly-I cannot figure out, for the life of me, how I can change brush hardness on the fly short of changing brush. Anyone?). I can zoom, layer, clone, crop, paint and sharpen to my black little heart’s content. I understand that GEGL, the Generic Graphics Library, actually supersedes Photoshop’s adjustment layers in functionality, but as of tonight I haven’t had any reason to go and play with it. I’ve been happy to discover that I can clone non-destructively.

Irks and quirks:

Mild disclaimer: I am using a packaged beta which was compiled by a third-party, so my experience may not reflect that of somebody using a mainstream version:

• The zoom tool (Z) works fine…if I just want to zoom in. However it seems to zoom in on a random segment of the image?
• The “Hand” tool (space/middle mouse) is a little bit wonky. Even after I “released” it, the hand continued to drag the image around.
• Tooltips. There is no way to configure them?
• When cloning, “Sample merged” is sinfully less intuitive and informative than Photoshop’s “sample all layers.” I was annoyed by having to flick between layers until I figured it out.
• There are separate move, shear, resize (etc.) tools. Couldn’t they all be rolled into one, improved Move tool?
• Some of my tool choices don’t seem to be saved. I certainly had to change back the Move tool after restarting.

Un-irks and non-quirks:

It isn’t all bad.

• There is a great, accessible interface to change every possible keyboard shortcut. I’ve been gradually changing The Gimp to match what Photoshop has. It is looking up.
• The Clone tool was wholly less obnoxious other than its obfuscated “sample merged”.
• The single-window interface is a really nice step up on the old interface, albeit still buggy. I have to click on the image before I can tab-hide panels.
• GEGL. I haven’t actually used it yet, but a dry-reading on its documentation is fascinating. I’m actively looking for reasons to use it.

I’ve been itching do something at least quasi-photography related, but I still have no desire to go and pick my camera to do so. Instead I went and resubscribed to World of Warcraft for the purpose of capturing panoramic vistas from the video game. Dalaran? Netbook? Graphics on high? Fuckin’ murder, guvn’r.

As a bonus to any open source fans here, these images were entirely processed using open-source tools: Hugin, The Gimp, and Imagemagick

I’ve been happy to discover that as well as the Gimp maturing, so has Hugin (and it’s suite of tools) since I last used it. No more nightmares in having to pick out control points by hand because autopano was being crotchety. I even made a wee little screencast to go along with this; I’ll put it up later.

Gimp users: Is there any easy way to change the hardness of brushes on the fly, short of changing to a different brush?

Many people have friends. Some people like me are lucky to have glamorous friends. Thank you, Kerry, for giving me some needed Photoshop practice. :]

Look at the groomed beard! Look at the neatly-cut hair! Look at the steady gaze and strong jaw!

Among my little social circle, a circle that mostly consists of myself and those poor others who are so paralysed with the fear of my insane wrath that they dare not flee, my hated of The Gimp is legendary. No other program, to me, exemplifies just how frustratingly right and how wrong the open source community can get things.

The Right: Features, features, features

I’m currently experimenting with Gimp 2.7.1. with Ubuntu 10.4, and feature-wise I believe it can compete fairly with Adobe Photoshop in core tools: Sharpen, blur, clone, crop, resize, heal, selection (by colour, magic wand), layers and it’s own experimental content-aware fill equivalent in Resynthesizer. There are even a limited subset of editing actions (creating borders and fine-tuning selections) that I find to be easier in The Gimp. And blessed of blessed, the 2.7 beta builds and the coming 2.8 version will have a native single-window mode. Huzzah. No more relying upon a(n outdated and unsupported) third-party solution for me to get my single-window fix.

The Wrong: Adobe Photoshop

Oh snap.

I am a Photoshop user. If you’d believe it, I even have a certificate that says, in part, yes Mark, you officially know how to use Photoshop. My personal point of hatred with The Gimp has always been its GUI, it’s interface. The keyboard shortcuts were (to me, completely backwards). Imagine your first time moving from to Firefox to Google Chrome or Apple Safari. You sit down and discover that instead of Ctrl+t to open a new tab, it might be Ctrl+i. Select all might be Ctrl+y, not Ctrl+a. Etcetera. Your very first experience is to discover that the keyboard shortcuts are all completely different to what you know and understand. Some things aren’t even bound to the keyboard at all! Where are my palettes? My brushes? Our first experience with The Gimp has typically overwhelmingly negative.

In the pioneering spirit of a man who has little else to engage him, I have set out to really give The Gimp another try by turning on single-window mode and changing all of the keyboard bindings so as to bring it closer to Photoshop’s. I’m ungimping The Gimp. The results have been pretty good so far.

It’s usable. The team has come a huge way since I last really used The Gimp (2.2-ish?) in GUI, in utility and in tools.

Watch this space for a keymap.