DDJ: Welcome to the Dr. Dobb's Journal podcast. I'm your host Mike Riley in this broadcast I'm speaking with Michael J. Hammel, author of the Artists Guide to GIMP Effects, published by No Starch Press, welcome Michael
MJH: Hi.
DDJ: For the uninitiated could you explain with the new image manipulation program otherwise known as GIMP is and why it's such a compelling application for artist and developers alike?
MJH: Well GIMP is essentially, people like to look added as a Photoshop clone but developers would like to say otherwise, what it is, is a graphics tool for doing image manipulation, for it doing graphics design work, for the web, for print production, and so forth, and it's really the grandfather to a lot of applications that are available in the open source world, both graphics and non-graphics actually. So it's got quite a long history. It's very important to the open source world in that respect, and it's also one of the most advanced applications available in the open source world.
DDJ: So how did an embedded software engineer such as yourself adopt the give the GIMP as it your image editing program of choice?
MJH: I've been around for a lot longer than I would like to admit. A long time ago I worked for Dell computer I work for the guy who wrote the original x386 video driver, which is the video driver for the desktop for open source systems. He went off to start his own company. I worked for a fellow there who introduced me to the GIMP, when it was written in a windowing interface called Motif... The fellows who wrote GIMP decided that Motif was not useful, so they wrote their own windowing toolkit the GIMP Toolkit, GTK. So I was around since that had happened. I was just generally interested in computer graphics and the GIMP was one of the first apps available for that kind of work, so I got involved. I wrote the original Sparkle plug-in for it, which is really one of my only contributions to the program in development..
DDJ: How do you think it compares to the latest release of Adobe photoshop?
MJH: They're not really targeted at the same type of audiences. The GIMP is missing, like working directly in CMYK. A lot of people think that's a bad thing. I don't have a problem with it's not a huge problem. People who are wishing for other features, like 16-bit channels, which the GIMP is missing right now, those are coming soon. There is a project that's been underway for awhile to add another sort-of core engine to the GIMP to add a lot of advanced features which will be integrated in the "2.4 release". Right now they're just getting ready to release 2.4. After that, they'll being to integrate this new engine... It's not up where Photoshop is right now with those types of features. But you can do quite a bit with it. It has layers, alpha channels, a huge amount of plug-in capabilities. It's used in GIS geographic systems, satellite imagery and so forth.
DDJ: How many platforms does it run on?
MJH: It runs on any UNIX platform, Linux, Solaris, it runs on Windows. I believe is runs on the MacOS X.
DDJ: Which platform do you prefer?
MJH: I'm a strict UNIX user.
DDJ: Does it perform identically on all of those platforms on comparable hardware?
MJH: Yes. The place you usually have the biggest difference is in fonts. GIMP doesn't have its own fonts. It uses system resources for that. The distros haven't become standardized. You can stick any kind of fonts you want it there, Truetype fonts but your initial distribution is going to be slightly different.
DDJ: In your book you go over several advanced graphic arts techniques on achieving truly stunning professional results, such as motion blurs, sepia tones, textures, water effects, as well as general web interface design suggestions. What are some of the most amazing image compilations you've seen composed with the GIMP effects?
MJH: I started out learning how to use the GIMP by looking old Photoshop texts and transferring them to GIMP. I said what are they trying to accomplish and I looked for similar things in the GIMP. What I found out that the most interesting thing that people were doing with it were making high-quality icons. This is working at pixel-level environments, making very clear, very small images. When you scaling down very large images you get away with a lot of things that you don't really notice because you've squeeze so many pixels into a small space when you print them. That's why you can take someone's face and you can stick it over someone else' body, you don't notice that with a very large image. But you'll notice a mistake if you're working in a very small scale, like with an icon.
DDJ: I admit I'm no designer, but when I read over your tutorials it became like. "Wow this is possible." Working through your examples made it very approachable.
MJH: That was my idea behind the book. People asked me to write a user's manual for the GIMP 2.4. What we have is the GUM, the GIMP User Manual, which is online directly linked from the program. The problem with that is saying what this buttons does is easy to do. But what people want to know is how to do a particular task. How do I make a beveled button? How do I take out the background of a picture. Those are the things people want.
DDJ: Some of the features in the upcoming GIMP 2.4, such as background removal, or red-eye removal will be easy. Those things where available as plug-ins before but you had to go find them... This is just another tool in your set of tools to do whatever you need to do... It doesn't matter that it's open-source.
DDJ: Are you working on any other follow up projects to the book?
MJH: The book took me a lot longer than I thought. A tutorial is not as easy as a user manual. A tutorial is for a much larger audience, and they don't want to hear a lot of jargon. It took about two years to do the 2.2 tutorial. In the meantime the new version of GIMP was getting closer. They're just about there. If the book doesn't well, we'd like to do a 2.4 version. The differences in the tutorials are very minor. The only thing that changes will be very small changes to the interface.
DDJ: Where can listeners go to find out more about the book?
MJH: http://www.graphics-muse.org/artistsguide/
