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Hixie's Natural Log

2002-11-01 16:16 UTC Doodling with the Gimp

While working on a custom background for yet another a CSS test, I started playing around with the Gimp's filters. Wow! Very quickly I had made myself a groovy subtle green background, and after a few more filters and contrast and colour adjustements, I suddenly stumbled across a landscape of maroon mud flats. While there I ran a couple of filters and found a damaged metal surface as well.

My aimless wondering didn't really find any new pretty patterns for a while after that, so I simply ran filter after filter until I noticed that a hue change would get be these lovely blue crystals. Two clicks later, I had myself a green canvas version of the same picture, an abstract pattern which I called Busy Green.

At this point my journey was nearly over, because after creating some cloth, one of the Gimp filters died quietly and the ensuing corruption of Gimp's internal state caused me to shut it down, at which point I just got on with writing the test which started all this.

The Gimp filters are quite something. I'm definitely a fan of the Colormap Rotation plugin, and the Make Seamless filter is simply amazing. The various "render" plugins and filters are also a great time-saver for those of us with no artistic talent! On the other hand, the thousands-of-windows interface needs some work. Also, having to do everything through context menus (even if you can tear them off) is a little tedious.

Now back to finding bugs in browsers...