My Precious

New Toy: Wacom Graphire4 Tablet

February 2nd, 2007 by SmrtSkoso

For a long time I’ve wanted to have a graphics tablet to draw with. So, a couple of days ago I’ve decided to finally order one. Yesterday I received it. It’s a Wacom Graphire4 Tablet.

The Mandriva Linux 2007 operating system recognised it almost out of the box. All I had to do was to install the package named linuxwacom and restart the computer. After that the tablet worked almost correctly. In order to get it to work properly I had to open the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change the lines for three input device sections (Eraser1, Cursor1, Stylus1) from
Option “Device” “/dev/input/event0”
to
Option “Device” “/dev/input/event2“.

I’ve tried the tablet with three graphics applications: Krita (you enable and configure the tablet by going to Settings > Configure Krita > Tablet), GIMP (File > Preferences > Input Devices > Configure Extended Input Devices) and Inkscape (File > Input Devices). There is a bug in GIMP. When you draw with the pen and move over the rulers, GIMP crashes. Other than that it works quite well.

At first it’s a bit of a weird feeling drawing with the pen, but you quickly get used to it. It’s much more practical than using the mouse. All in all, I’m extremely happy with the purchase and I highly recommend Wacom tablet also because it works well in Linux.

   Post in Personal, Graphics    2 Comments

Fixing red eyes problem with GIMP

August 20th, 2006 by SmrtSkoso

Since I take a lot of photos and they don’t always look the best, I’ve decided that I’ll start learning GIMP to improve them.

It happens that in some of them, people have red eyes. So the first thing I had to learn was how to solve this problem. I’ve found out, that it is not all that hard to do, if you follow the steps in the Red Eye Removal tutorial. In short they are:

1. Open the guilty photo
2. Select the Dodge or Burn strokes tool
3. Set the tool options (double click on the tool, if they are not shown):
• Brush: circle fuzzy
• Type: burn
• Mode: highlights
4. Open the Channels dialog
5. Deselect green and blue channel (by clicking on the name and not on the eye)
6. Brush away the red colour from the eyes

   Post in Photography, Graphics    1 Comment

Elephants Dream

August 14th, 2006 by SmrtSkoso

I watched a short film named Elephants Dream yesterday. It’s about two men, Emo and Proog, who are trapped in a big machine. It is beautifully made and the makers of the film used two free and open source programs - Blender, which is program for 3D modelling and animation, and Gimp for textures and image editing. I can only hope that more projects like this will happen in the future. At the end I invite you to watch the film and truly appreciate the hard work and talent that has been put into the film. If only I could master the tools the same way they do.

   Post in Personal, Graphics    1 Comment