GIMP

Splash. Mr. O.R.I.G.I.N.A.L will be making the real one. I strongly suggest that you just stick with the one they give you.

However, I made some and put them online and you can use them as well.

It took some doing to get the mathmap plug-in working with my gimp-2.3 because of how I have liberated its build from libtool. Then, it took a while to work through the information that is online about how to make these images with this plug-in. Then it took more time than you might first think to get an image that will work.

The nice thing is that the script that makes Mathmap make these Escheresque images was already written before I started. This how to is about how to prepare a desktop image to work with that script and that plug-in. It should be helpful to those attempting to use their photographs for the same type of image.

Other applications windows are not so easy to prepare as a screenshot of your desktop and a GIMP image window for making the image within an image Droste Effect with.

From my point of view as a user of software, there are two ways to put software on your personal computer, one demands that the sources be available and that tools are available to build it and install it and also that the sources you have make sense enough to build with those tools. The other way is to move binaries from one medium to another (like from a cd/dvd or from another computer via a network connection). This simple explanation of the different ways to install software is in reality not so clear cut, but for this how-to it should suffice. Both methods expect that software should be easily & readily available and (the build &) the installation of it should be simple and just work.

In the years since I started to use Linux and also since my developer friends encouraged me to use a specific distribution (if I wanted to work with them), there seems to be a little something going on within that system where the people who are building the Debian binaries do not want their users to build and install their own preferred versions of software. The point where this "something" is occurring is with one of the build tools.

It takes only a little bit of pre-configuring of the environment variables to allow both conditions to exist at the same while on your desktop, in spite of that problematic build tool. Here is what I learned about how to do that....

In my defense, the how-tos were already long and too complicated compared to what I thought they would be when I started this.

When I was growing up, my dad was working with black and white photography, taking the photographs and then developing them in the basement. The first time I had black and white film developed using a locally owned and managed photograph print shop, the prints were like the ones that dad used to make. Lately, I know only the location of color photograph processing and printing and I rarely make prints of my photographs.

Here, I tried to remember everything I learned or heard about filtering the lense for black and white film and see if this works doing digitally the same thing with GIMP.

With GIMP there are several methods to reduce the colors of a digital image into shades of white, gray and black.

In the week of October 16-22, 2006 PyGIMP is using a new console.

One of the problems with a brand new desktop and a brand new bunch of applications is that if you did not save your previous configurations or even if you did and are wondering if you really liked things that way. Or even, maybe you are simply too busy with other things to move or install the old configuration -- you might find yourself changing the configuration slowly because some of the default set up is simply horrible!

One thing I did notice while using the default GIMP was this:

A small change via the Tools Dialog and a nicely balanced toolbox will be yours. This is clever. I wish I had invented this default....

This is what happened the third time I used the default GIMP. I decided to allow the irritation to interrupt the laziness and this is what I changed and why.

My first task with GIMP on my new computer was to make a set of desktop backgrounds for the new display. The first tool I needed was a color tool and they are not exposed in the toolbox in the default setup. I shut off those Menubars and told it to shrink wrap again at the same time....

The first time I used GIMP was on a monitor which could only display 256 colors. If you have never had the pleasure of using a monitor like this to make images with, you have missed quite a bit. For example, if I used text highlighting in the text editor, the computer would steal colors from the rest of the display to use for this. It was really impressive to see it work, actually. From this experience, I learned to trust the numbers of the colors and not what my eyes were seeing.

On such a monitor, square images were never square. Even when I started to use newer displays with more display area and more colors monitors, square images usually drew on the screen taller than they were wide. GIMP image display windows can be adjusted to draw themselves in a way to make up for the difference.