The world (and word) of jaymz

I really like GIMP, I use it all the time at work along with Photoshop. The great thing about computers is that you can install whatever the fuck you want. If you fancy driving yourself crazy go google for “photoshop vs gimp” and try and read more than a page of banal arguments bouncing back and forth with very few people piping up to say “use whatever the fuck you want”. A lot of people seem to think that if you don’t use photoshop you’re just an amatuer. Very often these are the same people that are using PS simply to open a photo, click “auto-levels” and then resize it.

If you’ve never used GIMP and you are one of these “pro’s” then I suggest you install it anyway and at very least checkout the selection tools. I know you can transform a selection with Photoshop but I find the marquee tools vastly superior in GIMP and its something I hope finds its way into Adobe’s offering. I’ve gone off on a tangent here, the real purpose of this post is all down to the number fucking one reason people using GIMP complain about it – the multi window interface. This is so much of a PR problem for the GIMP team that they’ve finally started coding a single window mode for the upcoming 2.8.x branch. I have never understood the trouble this causes people. I understand it even less because many people then say Photoshop’s UI is so much better. This winds me up further because whenever I think of PS I think of something like this:

When I think of GIMP I see this:

Do you know what I see here? I see a floating toolbox, a floating image and another fucking set of floating panels. I see the same fucking thing. Ok, Photoshops menu is right at the top since its a mac but I really have never understood what the hell is so wrong with this. Very often even the linux users complain about this, when really what they should do is maximise the image and then mark the two floating panels as “always on top”. I get that’s not ideal but hey, you’re using a free OS, with a free desktop with a free graphics app. Work with us 1 fucking minute!

No doubt I am simply delusional but I really have never found the GIMP UI, especially when compared to the PS UI on a mac, to be such a problem that you literally couldn’t fucking use it.

I’ve been mucking about with Python of late, well more Django, and one of the ways I’ve been trying to learn it is by writing small scripts to do something ‘real’. Since one of the things I like doing is graphic work my python ‘apps’ are centered around doing something of use to do with that.

The first python app I wrote let me click on points in a photo to build up an RGB gradient. Writing this for GIMP was ridiulously easy since I could just have a look at the source code that handles gradient files. These GGR files are very simple consisting of just a plain text header & some (decimal) color codes. Photoshop on the other hand uses an undocumented binary file. So my script outputs GIMP compatible gradients.

Fast forward to last night and I was browsing my bookmarks and clicked through to ColorSchemer.com. Its a cool website with user submitted color schemes. Theres a couple of generated graphics on the site for each palette and the option to download the .cs file for it. This file is, like photoshop assets, in binary form but looking at it in a hex editor it’s quite obvious where the interesting bits are. It took maybe 15minutes to write a quick python script to convert these into GIMP compatible palette files.

This is one of the reasons why I like open source, information is transparent. I just opened an existing GIMP palette file into a text editor and there was the information I needed to create new files. And I didn’t have to jump through hoops or employ some sort of encryption. Nice and easy