Waffle

I've been pretty down on The GIMP lately, but on Tuesday I coloured three pages in it, and by the end of the process, I'd mended fences with it. Not literally; the GIMP doesn't have DIY-fu yet. But I've managed to make it do what I want at a decent speed.

The first page I coloured took me over 4 hours. But my mistake was trying to do the colouring the way I used to do it back in 2001, but with higher resolution. That is, I created a multiply layer on top, then coloured the background layer by using Wand-select, Selection Expand and keyboard-based flood fill. For the second, I decided to do it the way I've gotten used to since then - threshold the high-res image and colour on the single layer with the Bucket Full tool. That cut the working time down to 2 hours, with good hope of cutting it down further once I'm more familiar with the interface.

GIMP is always at its best within linux, by the way. In the two GIMP vs. Paint Shop Pro Steel Cage Death Match posts, I compared GIMP for Windows with Paint Shop Pro 8, which is unfair because on Windows, GIMP is an unstable, clunky program that is always a bit slow to respond to the Wacom mouse, creating a feeling of discomfort. In linux, it's stable as a rock. I was particularly pleased at not having to worry about the size of my Undo queue as I do when working in PSP. The GUI is still not as good as it should be (although that has improved a lot) but the dependibility compensates for that a lot.

I've got a buffer for Courtly Manners! I can slack off until Monday!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 26th, 2005 at 8:57 am and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.