Perspective is the ability to make it look like you are seeing objects coming or going or to give them a three dimensional shape. Although it may seem like a difficult tool to use, it’s actually quite easy (once you get the hang of it). Let’s see just how this is done.

Assumptions

Naturally I will assume you already have The GIMP installed on your machine. I will also assume you have at least a rudimentary grasp on how The GIMP is used (as I won’t be explaining fundamentals of GIMPs usage). Now, with that said, let’s get to work.

Figure 1

The Perspective tool

When you open up The GIMP you will find the Perspective tool in the toolbox. Figure 1 shows the Perspective tool selected. As you can see you can change the Interpolation and the Clipping as well as the Direction.

What I want to do is to show you how to create a road that

Figure 2

looks like it’s coming at you. The initial image (Figure 2) was created by simply drawing two solid lines and a dotted line.

Because you are going to be actually changing the shape of the image, you need to copy your image onto a larger image. If you do not do this you will not have room to change the perspective of your working image. In the case of our example I will create a newer, larger workspace with the same background color as what you see in Figure 2.

Figure 3

With the new workspace created copy the contents of what you want to work with into the new space. Once that is there select the perspective tool.

When you click on your working image you will see four small squares appear, one in each corner of the copied image. All you need to do is manipulate those corners around until you get the exact perspective you need. Figure 3 shows how The GIMPs perspective tool shows you the original perspective and your working perspective.

When you have the exact look you want you will need to click the Transform button in the floating Perspective window.

Figure 4

When you are done, you will have a 3D looking image of a road appearing to come your way (see Figure 4).

Sure you could have done this freehand, but the task is far, far easier using the tool dedicated to that single purpose.

Final thoughts

The GIMP is filled with handy tools like the Perspective tools. And each of these tools only takes a short period to get used to how they work. The Perspective tool is no different. And, in the end, you will create fantastic images with ease.

The developers of the startup tweaker have now released an updated version of their software program. This version is – finally – compatible with all Adobe Photoshop versions from Adobe Photoshop 3 to Photoshop CS4.

The program interface on the other hand remained the same. Adobe Photoshop Speedup will scan the computer system for installed Photoshop installations and display versions that it discovers at the bottom of the interface.

Adobe Photoshop SpeedUp significantly decreases the time it takes to load Adobe Photoshop by disabling the plug-ins that you may not need. There are several options such as whether to load the Adobe fonts, load the presets, and set the memory usage. You may restore to the original settings at any time.

The program offers four options to speed up and optimize Photoshop. It can limit the memory usage of the image editor, prevent that Adobe Presets, CMAP and Base are loaded and remove certain plugins from the list of available ones so that these are not loaded during startup.

Adobe Photoshop Speedup is available at the developer’s website. The portable software program is freeware and compatible with Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, 2000, XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

Update: The program has not been updated for a while. It does not support the latest version of Adobe Photoshop (that is CS5) at the time of writing.

Sadly, there is no publicly available codec for the Photoshop PSD format but the newly released Microsoft Expression Blend 3 design tool (which, by the way, is nothing short of amazing for WPF and Silverlight design) includes such a codec so installing Blend 3 automatically installs the PSD codec. For those who don’t have a need for Blend and don’t want to install it, here is a little hacking guide to extract the codec (a 256KB dll) and use it separately:

Get the codec and its dependencies:

Download Microsoft Expression Blend 3.0 (3.0.1927.0 7/20/2009) Trial: Link
Using 7-Zip, open ‘Blend_Trial_en.exe’ from step (1) and in the ‘Setup’ subfolder, open ‘BlImp.cab’ then extract ‘PSDCodec.dll’
Download the Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86): Link

Codec installation:

Install the VC++ Runtime by running vcredist_x86.exe from step (3) above.
Copy PSDCodec.dll from step (2) to some location on the harddisk, e.g. “C:\Program Files\PSDCodec”
Register the codec from an administrator’s command prompt by running the following command: regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\PSDCodec\PSDCodec.dll”

That’s it, Windows Vista Explorer should soon begin to display thumbnails for all PSD files that were saved from Photoshop with the “Maximum Compatibility” option. As a side effect, WIC-aware image viewers such as FastPictureViewer Professional (http://www.fastpictureviewer.com) automatically benefit from the codec installation and uses it to open and display the same PSD files with full fidelity.

The software program has been designed to speed up the start of Adobe Photoshop. It supports all Photoshop versions from Photoshop 3 to 8 and tries to identify the installed version automatically upon start. Adobe Photoshop Speedup is a portable software which means it can be run from any location. It asks the user to enter information about the installed Adobe Photoshop version manually if it cannot be located automatically.

Adobe Photoshop Speedup will display a basic interface afterwards that allows the user to remove items from the Adobe Photoshop startup including plugins, Cmap and Base and Photoshop Presets.

Specific plugins can be removed from the startup process which afterwards will usually be noticeably faster. The settings can also be restored at a later time in case some of the plugins or features should be loaded at startup again.

Paint.net is not compatible with Adobe Photoshop psd files by default which can be quite troublesome if you need to work with psd files occasionally. The psd plugin for paint.net adds support for Adobe Photoshop psd files to paint.net. It does not implement all features of the psd file though, only those that are needed to convert the image in the image editor and those that have a paint.net counterpart. Below is the list of support features:

• Layers
• Masks (only loading see To do list)
• RAW or RLE compressed files
• The following color modes are supported for loading an image: Gray scale, Indexed, 32 Bit-RGBA, CMYK (lossy conversation), Multichannel CMY (lossy conversation), Duotone (as gray scale), Lab (lossy conversation)
• For saving an image only 32-Bit RGBA is supported

The psd plugin comes as a single dll file that has to be placed into the filetypes folder of the Paint.net installation. The association of psd files with paint.net has to be created manually. This can be done by right-clicking a psd file on the computer system and selecting Open With > Choose Program from the context menu. Paint.net has to be selected as the program to open psd files and the checkbox “always use the selected program to open this kind of file” has to be ticked.

So instead, I gave Paint.net another go, an application which I have tried before, but gave up because I heard GIMP was so awesome. Paint.net is a graphical application just like Photoshop, but without many of its fancy tools. If you just need some cropping, resizing and positioning action for images in your blog, Paint.net will be great. At around 6Mb in size, it doesn’t take a toll on your system either.

For me it works quite well for basic web design too, simple gradients, some web 2.0 style reflections, nothing too complex. The two things which I miss most about Photoshop though is the text capabilities and vector graphics. Text capabilities in both GIMP and Pain.net are shabby compared to PS, and Paint.net doesn’t really have great pen tools either. If you need way more power than the simple Windows Paint, but way less than Photoshop, Paint.net is a solid, well built, lightweight image editor for you.

If you’re looking for Photoshop tutorials, Vunky Search is the place to go to. This site labels itself as the ‘Fast and Furious Photoshop Tutorial Browser’ or in other words, a Photoshop search engine. Both in looks and function, Vunky Search resembles one of the many multi-torrent search engines out there.

When you look at the homepage, you notice the links to popular searches. Below that are some of the featured tutorials for the day. If you’re searching for something specific, type in a search term. If you’re browsing around, just ‘randomize’ or click on a link that interests you. The selected tutorial opens in its original site with no hassles.

Vunky Search currently indexes 88 tutorials but I expect this number to increase over time. Some of the tutorials are simply superb. One more thing I’d like to see is tutorials for more software like Paint and the GIMP. After all, not everyone uses Photoshop.

What do you think of Vunky Search? How do you think the site can be improved? What’s your favorite image tutorials site? Let me know in the comments.

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.

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.

You need to create an account before you can start uploading photos. Only the United States can be picked as the country at the moment but there does not seem to be an IP check that prevents users from other countries to signup for an account. Once the account is verified the fun begins.

Adobe Photoshop Express has two main functions. The first is to function as a photo album and the second to edit the photos that you have uploaded. Each user gets 2 Gigabytes of storage space for his images which can be sorted into different albums. Images can be uploaded from the computer or imported from Facebook, Picasa or Photobucket.

Images can be shared with the outside world by dragging them into an album that is shared. Everyone can then access the images by loading the username.photoshop.com url of the user. The shared albums of other members of the website can be browsed as well.

I’m a bit disappointed about the image editing capabilities of Adobe Photoshop Express. Only 17 different tools are available to edit the image from rotation the image to changing the hue. This function of the website will be neglected by the majority of users in my opinion. Community features are missing, there is no way to comment on images for instance and no private messaging system.

This leaves us with another image hosting service with a slick interface, nothing more, nothing less.

How do you get started? You could open Photoshop and go through some very complicated and time-consuming steps. Alternatively, you could download a software called U.R.Celeb. This program does all the major work for you.

The program has a bunch of ready made magazine templates. Choose the magazine whose cover you want to grace. Then, hit the ‘Picture’ button and navigate to the picture you want to use. You can resize the picture according to your preferences.

The next step is to customize the magazine cover. You can add your own titles and text. You can also add pictures and text for smaller sections of the cover to give it a more ‘authentic’ feel. When you’re done, save your work, as an image file. The program also allows you to send the image as an email or print it.

This is one of those ‘fun’ programs that you can play with. Create covers of magazines featuring you, family members, or friends. Which magazine would you want to grace the cover of? Do you know of other ways to do this?

Update: The service has been discontinued. The project website is showing a file not found error, and it is likely that the project has been abandoned completely by its developers. Alternatives are available. Among them Mag My Pic to create fake magazine covers from a variety of available templates or the Windows software program U R Celeb to design custom magazine covers in minutes.

This online service let’s you create shiny buttons to look just the way it’s “cool” now. Each part of the button is customizable, including the size, background, all colors and roundness of your unique piece. It’s good to set rendering speed to “zippy” for preview and “wicked slow” for the final rendering. At the end you simply download the result as a zip that includes jpg, png and gif files. When putting the button on a website it looks best along with a hover effect achieved by using CSS.

The example button on their site doesn’t show the best of this service in my opinion, for another example take a look at the button I’ve made for a friends website.

I found a video on youtube demonstration how powerful this way of image editing is. Enjoy the show.

It is possible to create a wide variety of images. The website hosts a so called gallery forum where artists show off their work and some looks very impressive. They also offer a tutorial about creating the cartoon figure in the left picture. I like it, will show it to my nephew who is four years and I bet he will enjoy playing with it.