Friday, December 16, 2011

Gimp 2.7.4 Experiments, MyPaint and a Submarine

I recorded a speed painting to show it in action, you can see it on Youtube below:



Here's the new interface, though the default is different of course, this is how I have it set up. There are a number of improvements on 2.6.11 that I was able to spot, as well as a few issues of course:

  • Single window mode is great
  • Absolute and relative control over slider bars for better control
  • It's now easier to see where to click & drag to resize windows
  • Layers are shorter and more compact and efficient
  • So many Paint Dynamics! For me this is the best feature
  • A much improved make seamless filter which doesn't give "blurred" results
  • Improved selection graphics, the lasso tool is especially nice
  • Brush outlines no longer take up huge amounts of processing time, a real issue before

  • Paint Dynamics are quite difficult to get to and slow the painting process down
  • Quick access to most used dynamics - size & opacity > on/off and simple curves would be nice
  • Not sure why some sliders do not look the same (navigator zoom and the opacity sliders)
  • "Export" instead of "save as a copy" for .jpg etc takes getting used to at first
  • Bugs, though they are to be expected in an unstable release

Overall, while some aspects feel slow and clumsy, it is very nice to use and seems much more professional than previous versions. Click for larger version:


I also dabbled in MyPaint which was interesting, though I sorely missed having the powerful features of Gimp such as masks, selections, filters etc. MyPaint is a program which simply "feels" fantastic to work in, everything is so smooth, it reminds me of swimming for some reason. I'd really like to be able to quickly transfer my work from Gimp to MyPaint and back since they both have fantastic features. I did a quick paint-over of a simple in Gimp, sketch done in MyPaint. Result below:


Ah, the fluid post is on the way, I hope, it turned out it was more work than I anticipated. I'm rendering the last of the flooded sub corridor though, more on the way :)



2 comments:

  1. Hi,

    GIMP 2.8 (just released) allows you to interchange images in OpenRaster. You can use this to transfer multi-layered images between Krita, MyPaint, GIMP, Pinta and similar.

    ReplyDelete

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