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2013-05-08

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GIMP 2.8.4
Gary
Today's comic was done with GIMP 2.8.4. Up until now, I've been using 2.6, mostly because I knew it, and I didn't want to deal with the interface changes, but at C2E2 I went to an inking talk and watched the guy use Photoshop. In his demo, he showed us the puppet feature of Photoshop, and I wanted that ability, so I looked online to see if GIMP had a plug-in for it. It turns out, 2.8 has something similar in it, so I figured I'd bite the bullet and try it out. I have to say, it's made some really great improvements. That said, there are also some things that will take some getting used to, but the pros seem to outweigh the cons.

Pros I've seen so far:

Massively improved brush system (once you get used to it)
Sectional warp (puppet similar tool)/
Improved text tool (now allows you to bold/italicize/underline sections of the text, might allow more, I didn't play around with it too much yet)

Cons I've seen so far:

You can no longer move a text layer while editing the text (You can still move it by switching to the move tool)
Selects can't be dragged off the image box (I used to be able to keep dragging even though the cursor went into the menu area, useful when trying to shape an oval select for bubbles)
Save as now only does GIMP's native image type (You now have to choose export to change the image type)
Right clicks with my stylus no longer stay open (They stay open as long as I hold down the click, it used to just open the dialog and keep it open until I clicked on something in it or on another part of the image. This might be a setting I haven't found yet.)
It's a little more suggish (I might just have to play with memory settings and disk space, tweak it to work better)
The brush circle no longer appears until I use the brush (This could be because the the size is pressure controlled, and with no pressure it's a size of 0px, or it might be a config thing somewhere. Right now it makes lining things up a little difficult, but it's not too terrible.)

Now these observations are just from a little playing, and the doing of this comic, so there are probably a lot more in each category, which I'll be able to discuss later, perhaps at Wizard World, at my booth, if you have questions.

I will go into the brush system a little, because it's so very much better than the old system, once you understand it a little. First, outside of the arcade box, all of the inking in this comic was done with a single brush, and a single brush size. Normally, for a comic like this, I would have used three brush sizes, and it wouldn't have looked as nice. The first improvement they made was more control over the brush, and a better sensitivity system. All the changes in thickness you see were done by the amount of pressure I used on the stylus, and with the brush I've set up for inking, I can go from about a 2px line to a 21px line, and since I can do that without changing brushes, and more importantly, since I can do that and maintain a thickness I want for extended periods of time, it gives the flow a much more organic feel. To me, the end product feels more like a physical ink, instead of a computer ink. I did however have to make my own brush. The default brushes tend to include transparency as part of the pressure or acceleration. To my eye, that makes it look bad, so the brush I made for inking has tilt controlled by pen tilt (not sure this actually does anything, since I'm using a round brush), and line size controlled by pressure, and that's it. It's really simple. I also chose the solid circle as the brush base, and the color black to transparent (instead of foreground to background). That's another nice thing with the brushes now; they store the color you want with them (foreground/background). It would've been a little nicer if you could tell it to just store one of those, but having to store both is considerably better than not being able to store either. There are actually a lot of features you can turn on for a brush, including random size/direct/etc. if you want a more chalky kind of feel. So far, I have two brushes saved, one for inking, and one for sketching. Below are some of the playing around I did to get used to the brushes in general.

This one was all done with one brush, two different sizes, and about half was done with the brush using black to white while the rest is black to transparent.

This one is me playing around with several types of brushes. I was going for a kind of modern art, paint look.

This one is just me playing around with the floral brush.

Here are a set of links that are unrelated to GIMP that I've been meaning to share for a long time, but never got around to:

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