Tilt-Shift made easy for Gimp

GIMP plug-in Toy 1.0: simple tilt-shift fakes from Alexandre Prokoudine on Vimeo.

Source : libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/toy-plug-in-for-gimp-simplifies-creating-tilt-shift-fakes

How to mimic a photo of a small model - while in fact it's a real photo of a normal sized house, people, boats etc ... The magic is in the focus blur and a feathered selection.

The plug-in (requires compilation) is available here at registry.gimp.org/node/25803

A gallery of Van Gogh's Paintings Get Tilt-Shifted (12 pics) - My Modern Metropolis

And a Photoshop tutorial to achieve the same effect www.tiltshiftphotography.net/photoshop-tutorial.php

Selvaria : sew it!

Selvaria from Valkyria Chronicles was once featured on this blog with the post on the Cerberus Project figurine.

Her full name is : Selvaria Bles and she is a 22 year old Brigadier General War Witch and one of the main antagonists in Valkyria Chronicles & Valkyria Chronicles 3.

This splendid character with silver hair had me stumble upon one of the most breathtaking cosplayer : Crystal Graziano - She really does Selvaria justice.

But then I found her various cosplay version of Cammy and then I really thought Crystal deserved to be featured in the blog. There was too many "serendipity".

Here's a few links to her website and interviews :
www.flickr.com/photos/preciouscosplay/
onpaperwings.deviantart.com/

www.facebook.com/people/Crystal-Graziano/
twitter.com/#!/itsprecioustime

My only regret is that Crystal doesn't have created a youtube account (yet).

But I won't despair : her popularity is going strong by the days, and her last shoot as "Black Widow" with the "Big white Bazooka" is a must-see.

Doom music a little extra

The previous post about Doom music revival (the original music were in MIDI format) contains a small list of website 
where you could listen to remix of this legendary tunes :

You can now add another source :
www.gamefront.com/files/4483399
for an additional bonanza of 42 MB of pure awesomeness remix of the original music  :

cdoomtheme.mp3
e1m1.mp3
e1m2.mp3
e1m3.mp3
e1m4.mp3
e1m5.mp3
e1m6.mp3
e1m7.mp3
e1m8.mp3
e1m9.mp3

And a very informative document by the author Sonic Clang (Brian Kline)

There has been so much talk over the years about how certain songs in Doom were inspired by other artists. Everyone knows “E1M1” was inspired by “No Remorse” from Metallica, and there are others. But what people don’t realize is that there are songs on the radio every single day that either sound like other songs or were inspired by them. People make such a big deal about the Doom songs sounding like a Metallica song, but it really isn’t uncommon at all.

Quick environment sketch with Gimp

Gimp 2.8 is about to be released soon (January 2012 ?!), and many people are waiting for the single window mode impatiently.

In the meantime, I've stumbled upon some nice Google+ posts involving some painting or photo-montage.

Painting environment composition is fun, and in a couple of hours, you can see result ... just experiment and try various brushes (the chaos and evolution set (by David Revoy) is recommended) ; one benefits of doing such exercise is learning to make good composition and harmonious sceneries, and how to set and use the light - because that's key.

These 2 videos might help :
YouTube - Quick environment sketch
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGYqZZwzp18 (from idrawgirls.com/tutorials/2011/10/20/how-to-paint-landscape-mountain-river/)

Picture credit : Phillip Koops / Peileppe

How to put Gif on fire (with Cammy and Morrigan)

From two previous articles: "Street Fighting with Gimp" and "cammy is back" ; Cammy White (as shadowloo "killer bee") was featured to show Gimp's ability to generate animated Gifs.

But to be honest, since there was no background, the gif files were a bit boring - now browsing through deviantart I found this gem - that script creates an animated fire effect ; just what we need to add some magic to a good fight.

And here's the result ... pure delight!

Credit : Sprites used are coming from the "Sprite Database" :

• Morrigan sprites sheet
• Cammy sprites sheet
• Fire Animated script made by Fence-post

How to Publish your own Book

Maybe you've read about self-published author "Amanda Hocking" (the 26 years old writer from Austin, Minnesota) and you're wondering how to self-publish yourself ?

First thing to notice about her, is that she tried very hard before succeeding - she had the story, the writing skills, the book was ready, the only thing that was preventing her to get published was actually ... publishers, which thought the public wouldn't like her book ?! which thought some other books should have priority ... whatever the reason, Amanda did the good thing and past over their head.

This story is really inspiring and a big hope for freelance and occasional writers because it means everyone got a chance now - and that's for the public to decide what they like.


I prepared a selection of links  to help you publish your book :

How To Publish Your Own Book (In Print) Cheaply

How to self publish your book explained in 2 mn
www.lulu.com/publish/books


Other inspiring success stories from Lulu
www.lulu.com/success_stories

But now don't be fooled, when the book is out there - it doesn't mean it will sell ... because on top of having writing skills ... you'll have to master the techniques to promote your book, and find ways to spread the word about it using clever marketing ...

Now if you make it big, make a book about it. I'll definitely buy it!

Discovering GIMP FX Foundry

There are different profiles of Gimp users, from the digital artist geniuses spending hours on a canvas, the photograph expert looking for imperfections and tweaking the color's histogram, the retouching pro mixing various images into one epic composition, to the newbies that are just wondering how to do stuffs quickly and that looks good in matter of 5 mn.

For all these audience (but mostly the last), I think the GIMP FX Foundry is a pretty good collection of scripts - that will allow creation of fun effects and experiments (like the fx-foundry banner at the top of the article - which was made using the 'shrek-text' script).

How to install the FX-foundry scripts ? just download and extract the 100+ scripts in a temporary directory and move them into the gimp script folder - then launch gimp and voila!

Now be aware that some scripts require a preexisting image or photo some don't - you'll have to experiment a bit.

A nice way to see what each script is doing is to open the FX-Foundry menu and let the cursor hover on top of the script's name, that will show a bubble with some explanations.

Inkscape - customizing keyboards shortcuts

This post is all about the attempt to standardize a bit the keyboards shortcuts within Gimp, myPaint and Inkscape.

Essentially the Zoom, the undo, accessing the layers, and exporting a file. What mainly caused this urge to maintain the same logic within these applications is the fact, that sometime you have to use all of them during a design process, and ctrl+L in Gimp to access the layers panel is doing a destructive simplification of the shape you're working on in Inkscape - also pressing Z in myPaint to undo the last command is such simpler than the ctrl+Z that it made sense to have that setup as well in the other applications.

This post will only focus on how to change Inkscape shortcuts - since it's really easy to assign shortcut in myPaint - (basically you open the command menu and press the key you want to assign) - same in Gimp you open preferences and change whatever you want to the menu command ... but when it comes to inkscape you have to dig deep into the config files to find the way to change the shortcuts ... they're hidden in ./config/inkscape/keys/default.xml

The following default.xml file is assigning the keys :
- ctrl, shift x = export
- z = undo
- ctrl z = zoom
- ctrl l = layers
- ctrl, shift l = selectionsimplify
- ctrl, shift e = xml editor

http://pastebin.com/download.php?i=Y975Q57R

You can download the config file at pastebin