An Easy and Cool GIMP Effect
Today I learned a cool GIMP trick through tutorialegimp. I think it is a Spanish blog. For some reason, the video was not available anymore after I watched the video tutorial once. Fortunately, I remembered all the steps to create this effect because it is very easy if you know GIMP well.
Here are the steps to create the effects (I will use one of the Star Craft 2 wallpapers, you can use any image):
- Use the Crop Tool to crop out the black borders around the image (Use Ctrl+mouse wheel to zoom in to precisely crop to the edge of the image)
- Duplicate the layer and select Image -> Canvas Size to enlarge the width of the canvas to 200%
- Use Move Tool and zoom in to move the duplicated layer to the empty part of the canvas which is to the right, make sure to fill the canvas
- Select Layer -> Transform -> Flip Horizontally to connect between left copy and right copy of the image
- Right-click the first layer and select Merge Down to merge the layers together
- Again duplicate the layer and select Image -> Canvas Size to enlarge the height of the canvas to 200%
- Again use Move Tool and zoom in to move the duplicated layer to the empty part of the canvas which this time is to the bottom, make sure to fill the remaining canvas
- Select Layer -> Transform -> Flip Vertically to connect between top copy and bottom copy of the image
- Right-click the first layer and select Merge Down to merge the layers together
- Duplicate the layer again and this time select either Layer -> Transform -> Rotate 90 degree clockwise or counter-clockwise
- Change Layer Mode to Darken Only for the first layer and Merge Down
- Duplicate the layer once more and use Rotate Tool to rotate the layer either to 45 degree or -45 degree
- Change Layer Mode to Darken Only for the first layer once more and Merge Down
- If you want, you can also duplicate the layer and rotate the layer to the opposite 45 degree and repeat step 13
- You also can lighten the image by selecting Colors -> Levels if you want to bright the image
Below is the completed effect:
Here is its video tutorial:
Remove Part of File Names using PHP
Since David’s Batch Processor was pre-installed in GIMP on Ubuntu Studio, I used it extensively in the ICAF Gallery project today. My goal for these images is to resize their thumbnail version to 10KB or smaller and retain the original size for the enlarged version. Because most of these images are in different resolution, I randomly selected the scale value in the Batch Processor to resize the images. Then I had to manually view the file size of each image to see whether or not an image has to be resized again. After the differentiation, I moved the images that need to be resized once more to a new sub-directory and started the above process one more time. I would repeat these steps again and again until all the thumbnail version of the images are under 10KB.
During the early use of the Batch Processor, I missed a very important feature that is to save the newly processed images to a different folders. This resulted my decision to write this Batch File Name Remover script. The source code for this script is very easy to understand. It’s just some PHP functions plus two Linux commands: ls and mv. I always place a postfix after the file name of processed thumbnails: “-thumb”. Because of that, I need to remove this postfix whenever I repeated the above resize steps. The ls command is used to list the file name that contains the specified characters into an array. The mv command is used to remove the specified characters from the file name using PHP explode function. I used PHP instead of native Linux Bash script because PHP is easier than Bash for me 
. The source code for this script is available here.
Below is the Batch File Name Remover in action:
Linux movies website overview
I watched some psychology related films today because of my recent interest for multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder). Therefore I don’t have much to write about GNU/Linux or web development. However, I’m going to talk a little bit about a website called linuxmovies.org. This website is about how the movie studios use GNU/Linux to create special effects for the movies. As those of you who followed my Twitter and/or identica feed, I already talked about the site. For this post, I will focus on the Software section. When I first arrived on this page, I only scrolled down to look for the free software. Perhaps it is my habit to believe that only free and open source software should be used on the GNU/Linux OS. Unsurprisingly, there are greater number of free software than commercial software. After looking through the list, I have chosen K-3D, including Blender, GIMP, and Audacity which I’ve already been using. After some usage of K-3D, I personally think that this program is easier to use than Blender once I know the basic usage of the program. Unfortunately, I’m not interested in art very much. Therefore I don’t fell that K-3D has any use for me, except when I want to improve creativity and get some inspirations for my upcoming projects.
Created a new logo
I decided that the logo redesign is my next step for the project. Blender and GIMP are two editors that I used to design the current logo. The tools I used to create redesigned logo are Inkscape and GIMP. I used Inkscape to design the basic text and add shadow and reflection effects using GIMP. This is the first time I have used Inkscape so I only can discover its features through using it. I found out that it has the ability to directly change the font size without converting the text to image like GIMP does. This means that I can change the content of the text after I changed font size. Inkscape also has drag and drop feature to import different image files into the document, including JPG and PNG. Below is my finished text created using Inkscape:
Click to enlarge
The file saved by Inkscape is a SVG file. It can be imported into GIMP as an image file. By following this tutorial, I was able to create a shadow effect for the logo, as well as the reflection effect. Below is the logo with effects added:
This image is directly linked from beta.robbychen.com
Note that this logo might change based on the future development of the site. For instance, I might add or remove some open source software images, such as Ubuntu logo for letter o in my name. However, I will write a post about the change once I make a change on the beta site.