But how is it done? It takes 6 simple steps to do (there is an optional 7th step I will show you). In this article I am going to show you those steps.

Step 1: Create an empty image

Most likely you already have an empty image ready for your work. If not click on The GIMP main window File menu and select New. You will then have to select the size of the image you want to create. Once this blank image window is open you are ready to begin.

Step 2: Select the color for your circle

Figure 1

In the Toolbox window (see Figure 1) you will see the current colors for both foreground and background. You want to set your foreground color (in Figure 1 it is the black square) by clicking on said black square. When you click on this block it will open up the color palette window. From that new window select the color you want to use for your circle.

Step 3: Create a full circle

The first thing you do for this step is to select the circle tool. This is the tool second from the left in the top row (see Figure 1). Once you have selected that tool go to your new image window and left-click on the upper left corner to start your circle. By holding down the left mouse button and dragging the

Figure 2

mouse to the bottom right of the window you will create a circle. (see Figure 2) You will notice, after you let go of the left mouse button, there are four squares (one in each corner). You can click one of those squares and drag it around to resize your circle. Once you have the exact size you want click inside of the circle. After you click inside the circle the dotted line will become a solid line. You are now ready to move on.

Step 4: Fill in your circle

You now how to fill in your circle with color. Click on the bucket tool (first tool on the right, third row from the top – See Figure 1) and then click inside of your circle. Your circle should now be a large, filled-in circle. Proceed to step 5.

Step 5: Shrink the image

Figure 3

What you have to do now is shrink your circle. Right click anywhere inside of your circle and then click on the Select menu. Within the Select menu you will see the Shrink entry. Click on that entry to open up the Shrink window (see Figure 3). You want to set the amount to shrink to be the width of the line of your circle. This might take a bit of playing around before you get it right. As you can see, in Figure 3, I am shrinking my circle by 10 pixels.

Once you have this set, click OK and the shrinking will happen. Now, on to step 6.

Step 6: Cutting your image

Figure 4

Right click inside of your circle and go to the Edit menu. You will see an entry called “Cut”. Click the “Cut” entry and the center portion of your circle will disappear.

As you can see (in Figure 4) we finally have a circle. You could be finished at this point, however…

Step 7 (optional): Select only the circle

What if you want to lay your circle over another image? If you just copied the circle as-is you would select everything (including the white background). To avoid this you can use the color select tool (see Figure 1, top row 5th from the left). Click the color select tool and then click on the circle you have remaining. What happens then is that every color in your image that matches the color you clicked will be selected. Since there is only one color on your image, your entire circle will be selected. You can now copy that circle to the clipboard and paste it into another image.

Or you can just add to the circle you have created.

Final thoughts

You are probably saying “That’s a lot of work just to create a circle!” It might seem like it at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’s always a no brainer. By using this method you will always have unfilled circles exactly the size and thickness you want.

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PagePlus is a ‘budget’ desktop publishing suite published by Serif. The latest version (PagePlus X3) costs £80 but an older version, PagePlus SE, is offered free-of-charge.

PagePlus SE contains many different paper sizes and when installing, it asks the user whether they are American or European (for paper sizes). PagePlus SE can be therefore be used to design everything from an envelope to a letter!

Most of PagePlus SE’s features are also in Publisher but I feel that PagePlus SE is easier to use when designing something more than a greeting card etc. For example, instead of having to go through all sort of context menus to be able to specify an object’s position, PagePlus SE bears a bar which allows the user to numerically enter information like the position, size and angle of objects. This is much easier than having to right click an item or guess-timate its position.

I also feel PagePlus SE is better with kerning, with this also being in the changebar as opposed to being hidden in a menu!

Some options in PagePlus SE are also more technical: it allows the user to state the rendering they want on screen and on print, for example. The user can also opt for grid lines. There’s also a resource and text manager, where all images and text used inside the publication are listed to allow a quick summary.

Unfortunately, PagePlus SE cannot export into industry-standard formats like PDF and EPS.

Serif host a number of designs on their website which people can import int PagePlus to use.

It may not be Quark, but it’s free and easily up to the same standard as its nearest competitor: Publisher. Unfortunately, like Publisher but unlike Quark, it is Windows-only.

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One of the easiest ways to simplify use is the minimize the amount of windows open when working with The GIMP. By default The GIMP 2.4 opens with two windows: Utility Window, and Toolbox. If you are a GIMP power user you know the tools in both windows can be necessary. But it is not necessary to have both windows open in order to take advantage of all of the tools. “How?” You ask? Simple…by docking tabs.

What I am going to show you is how to add utility tabs into the Toolbox window so you can close the Utilities window. This will clean up the user interface as well as keep the user less confused. I am going to be using The GIMP 2.4 because it is more widely used.

Utilities Window

The first thing you should do is check to see what tabs you use in your Utilites window. I almost always use the Layers tab and the Colors tab. As you can see (in the image to the left) the Utilities window is open with the Layers, Channels, Paths, and Undo tabs on top and the Colors, Brushes, Patterns, and Gradients tabs on bottom. Of those tabs the Layers and the Colors tabs are most useful to me. Naturally other tabs will be more or less useful to other users (depending upon your needs).

Once you know the exact tabs you need to use you can close the Utilities window because you are going to add those tabs to the Toolbox window.

Now, move on over to the Toolbox window (see the image to the right).

Toolbox

Near the center of the window you will see a right-pointing arrow. If you click this arrow you will see a sub-menu that offers an Add Tab option. Within the Add Tab sub menu you will find a long list of possible tabs you can add to the window. From that list select the tabs you want to add (one at a time) to the Toolbox window. Once you have configured this window exactly how you want it, it will open up that way every time you start up The Gimp.

Simpler GIMP

As you can see, in the image to the left, The GIMP can be used with only a single window open. In the lower section the utilities I need to work with all appear in their own tabs. Now I can work with The GIMP and only have a single window (outside of the working image window) open.

Final Thoughts

The GIMP (and its interface) has been much maligned over the years for being overly complex and busy. Many of these complains stem from a simple lack of familiarity. But even being unfamiliar with the interface doesn’t make The GIMP’s UI unfriendly. Because the interface can be configured to better suit your needs, I would venture to say it is one of the more user-friendly interfaces available. Some times it is just a matter of taking the time to get to know the UI and customizing it to fit your needs and your style. Once you have done this, you might find The GIMP to be one of the best image applications available.

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The GIMP is a very powerful application that can handle most any image manipulation needs. Although The GIMP and read and write most every known graphic format, its native format, xcf, is not widely supported. But why would you want or need The GIMP? And who would best fit as a user of The GIMP?

Let’s first take a look at the feature list of The GIMP.

• Customizable interface
• Photo enhancement
• Digital retouching
• Wide range of hardware support
• Huge file format support
• Cross platform
• Plugin support
• Scripting language built in
• Built in file compression
• Layer support
• Masking
• Full alpha channel support
• Animation support
• Profession-level color management

That is just a sampling of what The GIMP has to offer.

As I stated before, I have used The GIMP for quite some time and for a great many projects. I have yet to find anything The GIMP can not do. And every time I use this application I am shocked that more people don’t use it. I am pretty sure the main reason why most don’t use The GIMP is familiarity. The masses simply do not know The GIMP exists. If they did they would gladly download and use a professional-quality graphics application that came free of charge.

But for those that have dabbled in The GIMP in the past, one of the biggest complaints has been the user-interface. The GIMP is not a clone of Photoshop. The interface is actually different. But is the interface difficult? No. The interface is actually one of the most intuitive interfaces I have used. And not only is it intuitive, it’s flexible. If there is something you do not like about the interface, change it! The complaints about the interface became all too obvious with the latest release (2.6). With this release came some minor changes to the look and feel of the UI. For the most part these changes not only made sense, they also enhanced the experience.

The GIMP Interface

For those who are unsure if they would like The GIMP it’s a win-win situation. You download the binary for the correct architecture from The GIMP website, you install it, and you try it. It’s not a demo that will time out…it’s free. And when you find yourself wondering “How can they give this away for free?” you’ll know you’ve found yourself a keeper.

The GIMP can be used by anyone in nearly any setting. It runs on practically any hardware (even older machines), can be employed for home, schoool, business, enterprise, professional graphics, you name it. And anyone that has used a graphics application before (be it Photoshop on down) will quickly figure out the interface.

If you haven’t given The GIMP a go you should. If you have a need, on any level, for graphics manipulation or creation, and you want a solid, reliable application (that won’t bring your machine either screeching to a slow painful crawl or crashing) The GIMP is where you should look.

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Expensive software like Illustrator appears to make editing vectors simply unaffordable. Fortunately, this is untrue! Inkscape is a free, open-source and cross-platform vector editor. Whilst it will no doubt lack behind Illustrator in certain aspects, in my opinion it suffices the requirements of any non-professional graphic designer. Inkscape, for example, cannot utilise gradient meshes or have multiple strokes, or fills, for one object. Yet, it has much better support for the SVG format (utilised by Wikipedia) and beats Illustrator on several minor usability issues (Inkscape, for example, allows anchor points to be edited with a keyboard). Key features, such as the ability to trace bitmaps, are also included.

Inkscape’s interface, like that of most graphics programs, is quite complex but I find myself being able to adopt to its much quicker than I adapted from PSP to Photoshop.

There are a few issues with Inkscape. The version for OS X requires X11 to be upgraded and several work-arounds to be implemented prior to it functioning and the upgrade to OS X 10.5.2 prevented Inkscape from working without further updates to X11. It appears to function much better under Linux and Windows.

Inkscape serves the needs of any home user and is such a substantial saving, of both disk space (being about 100MB big) and money, it can make Illustrator nearly useless for such customers. Its support for SVGs is also useful, as Firefox can open some SVGs meaning the recipient of a file Inkscape produces often does not need Inkscape to view the file as a vector.

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Sizlopedia discovered a web service called What The Font that can identify the font that has been used in a particular image. Images can either be uploaded to the service or directly from a website. The image that has been uploaded to the server is then analyzed automatically and the user is asked for verification after that process.

Each font char is identified separately and the user can correct or add chars that have not been identified properly. The whole process, from uploading to analysis and manual correction does not take longer than a few seconds.

The matches that have been found are displayed on the next and final page. The original image is floating on top of the page scrolling with the site to speed up the comparison and final identification.

The thing that’s bothering me a little bit is that all fonts on that website are sold which means that you cannot download the font immediately. It’s still nice for identification purposes.

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By default icons of all supported sizes (12×12 16×16 22×22 32×32 48×48 64×64 128×128) are selected and displayed in the search results. Each size can be unchecked so that only those icons are displayed that have the desired size. Many icons are available in several sizes.

A click on an icon loads a detailed profile page of that icon displaying it in all available sizes. The license and the website of the developer is listed on that page as well.

Iconlook offers two additional search options. The first is the random search which displays random icons on the result page. The second is a tag cloud which is huge and kinda confusing.

Still if you are looking for icons you will definitely find a great selection at Iconlook.

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