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