Gimparoo!

Sorry there haven’t been more posts lately. Here’s some fluff. Pictures of my daughter’s toys in fun positions. Have a look.

The tutorial adaptations on this blog would not be possible without the Creative Commons (CC). All the work on this blog is CC licensed from the start. I’m a huge fan, and believe they are the way of the future for licensing creative works. Please help spread the word by “friending” them on your favorite social network.

From the CC blog:

Looking for another way to support CC? Be our friend! By connecting with Creative Commons on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr, you can help us broaden our reach and educate the masses about the Creative Commons mission.

So, starting today, we’re issuing a 50,000 friend challenge to our community. We’re asking you to help us expand CC’s overall friend network to 50,000 people across the Web’s various social networking and content sharing sites by December 15 – the date of our fifth birthday party.

Here are some ways you can help our friend network grow. If you aren’t a member of any of these sites, please help us by starting (or expanding) a CC group on any site you do use.

• Join our Facebook Cause, become a top recruiter, or become a CC Fan
• Participate in the 2007 CC Swag photo contest on Flickr
• Become a Creative Commons friend on MySpace or Friendster

Of course, you can also help Creative Commons by contributing to our annual fundraising campaign. As always, we thank you sincerely for your support!

Hat tip to Jon Phillips.

In place of actual content, I have rearranged my existing content to make it more accessible. I hope you like it.

My very first tutorial was an adaptation of a Photoshop tutorial on how to make one of those trendy violator badges. Well it turned out pretty ugly looking because the GFig plugin for the GIMP doesn’t anti-alias the lines. Much discussion was had on whether or not I should include Inkscape tutorials on this blog to make up for the shortcomings of the GIMP, and I decided that I would give it a shot.

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Today I’m going to touch on some very simple yet extremely effective things you can do to make any photo look better. This is an adaptation of the Photo Edit 101 tutorial done by Worth1000.com user Dallas_TX.

You can use these basic guidelines to enhance just about any photo. In the future, I’ll use this post as a reference on what to do before starting whatever it is I’ll be writing about that day. So, anyway, let’s get started. Pick an image you want to enhance and open it up. I’ll be using another CC licensed image originally posted by flickr user Munzerr.

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Note there are several updates to this entry at the bottom.

Today’s tutorial is an adaptation of Christopher Phin’s Fake Model Photography tutorial for Photoshop CS, and it’s all about faking tilt-shift photography.

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What I’m wondering is, should I include Inkscape as a tool for the tutorials on this blog? It’s another open-source application which does vector paths a lot better than the GIMP’s GFig plugin and I could make things like the Web 2.0 violators look a million times better. I’d still try to do everything here with the GIMP whenever possible, only using Inkscape when I felt it could accomplish the task in a way the GIMP could not.

I don’t know how to do one of the fancy polls, so just post a comment with your opinion please. Thank you.

Update: It seems like the overwhelming majority would appreciate some Inkscape content. Havoc makes a very good point though. I’m a very busy guy. I’m a husband and a father. I have a full time job, and I am also taking a couple of courses at the local University. My time is Precious. However, one of the benifits of my job is that when things are going well, I can pretty much research and do what I please. I’m not terribly familiar with Inkscape, but since people (including myself) feel that it is a valuable addition, I will make an effort to include it when appropriate. After all, one of the reasons I started this project is to learn new things. So far, there’s really only been one post where it would have made a difference in my opinion, so there may not be much call for it.

Thank you everyone. I really appreciate the input.

Holy moly. I checked my blog stats on a whim, and for a minute, I thought maybe I had somehow logged in as someone else. Right now I’m sitting at 1,801 hits, and at this rate, it looks like we’ll hit 2,000 before the day is done. (My previous high was 39. As in, less than 40.) I believe I have Ubuntu Blog and Planet Ubuntu to thank, so, thanks!

I hope you are all finding something useful. Keep in mind I just started this blog recently, so after a while there will be a lot more material. I would love it if you would recommend some tutorials you’d like to see adapted. It’s helpful to know what people are looking for. Before today, my most popular posts were the ones regarding Web 2.0, but now it seems most are checking the Lomography adaptation out.

I seriously almost cried when I opened up google reader and saw my blogs’ name right up on top. I even took a screenshot.

Thanks again for visiting. I hope you’ll stick around. I should have some new content for you very soon!

Update: Just cracked 2,000 visitors. Thanks everyone, you’re seriously making my day.

I’ve got a lot going on right now, but I wanted to let everyone know that there are more Photoshop adaptations in the works for you. I’ll probably put up new content this weekend. We’ll move away from this web 2.0 business and delve into the real meat and potatoes: photo retouching. Stay tuned, and we’ll hopefully be able to help some of you photog’s out there save a bit of cash and maybe learn a few things.

As it says in my info page, I’ll be using this space to adapt existing popular Photoshop tutorials into GIMP tutorials. I will attempt to obtain permission from original tutors when necessary, and will at least always attribute the original work, so if you’d like to see something done the Photoshop way, you can simply follow the attribution links to the original work.

At some point, I plan on actually being more proficient with GIMP and will be authoring original Gimparoo tutorials. If you ever see the “Gimparoo” category attached to a post and no attribution links, this means I have succeeded.

For those of you wondering what the heck GIMP is; GIMP stands for “GNU Image Manipulation Program”. It is a program similar to but not exactly like Adobe’s popular Photoshop application. The most significant difference to the lay user is that GIMP is free. I say “lay user” because Photoshop does have significant advantages for the professional user, but to the average user, GIMP is more than sufficient. Especially for free. You can download GIMP and a large number of add-ons for Windows, Macintosh or Linux by visiting their website. If you are running some modern flavor of Linux, chances are good that you already have it installed. Being open source software, there are a number of ways you can personally contribute to the project. Please explore the GIMP homepage and it’s associated links for more information.

So, on with the show already! Up next I’ll start with everyone’s favorite new fad: Web 2.0. I’ll be walking you through a few of the more popular Web 2.0 Photoshop tutorials, GIMP style, and hopefully we’ll all learn something in the process.