More of my favourite stuff. It’s often necessary for graphics, ebook covers, webpages, blogs etc to need photographs. They can be bought sometimes at a reasonable price from the usual places istock etc but there’s a site I often use which is free. Morguefile.com Sounds a bit gruesome but it’s not. Just scroll down to the catagory list on that page.

You can sometimes get some good images through Google. Select images and enter your keyword. Then in advanced image search there are several dropdowns under the Usage rights you can select various options the greatest one being ‘labeled for commercial reuse with modification’. You still need to check the rights under ’some rights reserved’ which you’ll find under Additional Information on the right hand side. Commonly you need to attribute the source.

Still on graphics, there are some incredible font sites around which are also free. dafont.com is one of my favourites as is 1001freefonts.com but there are many more. Just search for free fonts in Google.

Continuing with graphics, you probably know that I’m a big fan and exponent of Gimp, the open source software answer to Photoshop. Naturally it’s free, being open source , it’s a completely different inetrface to Photoshop but one of it’s greatest pluses is you can open PSD’s in Gimp. Now it sometimes doesn’t always get all or the exact layer information in the PSD but I’ve never found that to be a problem and you can’t argue with the price!

The version of Gimp that you can download off the net is 2.6.x and I have to say that I don’t like it compared to 2.4. If you want to grab a copy of 2.4 you can get one from here learn-graphics.com which is another of my sites.

If you would like a quick start to using Gimp and some easy yet fancy techniques you can always grab my Gimp video course at Gimpvideos.com.

Tell you what, for the next few days you can use this coupon code and get them at half their normal price. Coupon code seblog. I don’t know how long I’ll leave that code up for, I’ll see how it goes. Oh, you can only use the code once, so if you back out you won’t be able to use it again.

I think I’ll call it a night at this point. I still have plenty more favourite things to share so keep a look out over the next few days.

By default all the ‘Utility’ windows, what was the Toolbox, layers and Brushes,Patterns etc dialogues, are on top by default. So any image window that is larger than the gap between them is behind these dialogues ergo you don’t see all of your image. I really hate that!

You can fix it though. Go into Edit->Preferences and then Window Management. In the ‘Hint for the toolbox:’ and ‘Hint for other docks:’ drop downs select ‘Keep Above’ and then OK.

You’ll be told you need to restart Gimp for the changes to take effect and once you do your image window will be the one on top when it’s active.

Now that, I like.

The Toolbox menu has gone and with it the Xtns menu! It took me a little while but I’ve found the inhabitants of the X’d Xtns menu and File menu.

‘Buttons’, ‘Logos’, ‘Patterns’ and ‘Web page themes’ live under ‘Create’ in the File menu in the empty image window that opens on startup. Also in there are what used to exist under the Toolbox File menu ‘Acquire’ entry, namely  ’Paste as New’ now ‘From Clipboard’, ‘Scanner/Camera’ and ‘Screen Shot’.

Other entries from the Toolbox menus have been scattered around. Sticking with the File menu ‘Preferences’, ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’ and ‘Units’ are now in the Edit menu of the afore mentioned empty image window. Also in here is the Xtns menu ‘Module Manager’ now just called ‘Modules’.

‘Script Fu’ from the Xtns menu now resides at the bottom of the Filters menu. The last two items from the Xtns menu ‘Plug-in Browser’ and ‘Procedure Browser’ have eloped to the Help menu.

The Dialogs menu that used to exist on image windows has been replaced by the Windows menu and has an added ‘Recently Closed Docks’ entry which is basically a Dialog history.

One major addition to this version is GEGL the Generic Graphical Library which is a programming library under development for image processing applications. It is mainly developed to bring support for images with more than 8 bits per color channel to GIMP. It has been partially implemented in GIMP 2.6.

You can check out the release notes for 2.6 here.

A lot of the changes in 2.6 are in the engine room with the only obvious ones being the change to the user interface, brought about, apparently, by many users complaints.

Personally, I can’t imagine what complaints could have led to this change in the layout. The only obvious advantage is that in Windows it now only takes up one slot on the taskbar and clicking on it will restore all windows and dialogs whereas before you needed to do them individually and Gimp could fill the taskbar all on it’s own.

When I first looked at this latest version I have to admit to having a minor panic attack when I saw the Toolbox menus gone! Checking the release notes confirmed my worst fears, it had been taken away. What I found to be disappointing was that no one had taken the trouble to tell us poor schmucks where all the contents had gone to!

I did quite a bit of searching around forums, user groups etc to see what the story was, nothing! Admittedly it didn’t take too long to find them all again in the new version but to my way of thinking if you are going to change something like that it’s just good user support to document it. Isn’t that a sign of the times? Don’t get me started on that one, a topic for a grump session!

As yet, I believe the latest version of Help is the 2.4 version so you won’t find it in there.

I haven’t yet used this version enough to be able to comment on the other improvements so I’ll have to leave that for another day. One thing I did do though, was to install this version in a seperate location so that I retained my familiar version 2.4(security blanket). I suggest you do the same, at least initially. All your shortcuts, Start menu etc will be overwritten with the new one, just means you have to make a shortcut to the previous version.

Well, that’s my take on it so far. I would be really interested to hear what your thoughts are on it and also your thoughts on my thoughts so, please, feel free to leave a comment.