Stacey Falconer - Big Blue and Cousins

Big Blue & Cousins September 2000
Next, the earth and sun image that I
like to use from time was opened, selected
(Ctrl + A for select all) and copied (Ctrl +
C) into the working window.
The image was pretty big, and I
made a new circular selection so I could
offset the image up or down, and then applied
the Gimp’s Glass lens filter. After trying
a few variations in the filter to get the
results I liked, I changed the layer mode to
screen, and reduced the layer opacity to a
level I liked.
Duplicating the image through image
> duplicate (or Ctrl + D) then allowed
me to use image > color > hue-saturation
to change the color of the iris to blue. Since
the iris was the only place with color, only
it changed and everything else stayed the same.
Merging down the layers, I selected all, copied and then
pasted the eyes into a new document that was 8 inches by 10.5
inches at 200 pixels per inch. The Brown eye layer was duplicated
and resized four times, and the blue eye was duplicated in
the same manner another two times. Because the Gimp isn’t as
efficient at handling huge multi-megabyte images as Photoshop,
if you have limited memory or scratch disk space you may have
to merge down some layers and close some images to save
memory and scratch disk space.
The colored background was a new layer to which Filter
> Render > Clouds > Plasma was applied, and then vignetted
using an inverted elliptical feathered selection filled with black,
and the opacity pulled down to an acceptable level. Vignetting
can be very useful in creating mood, but especially useful where
coloured backgrounds that may not easily translate well to a
black and white image.
Computer Funnies Compiled by Cindy Thorson
(various authors unknown)
You know You’re a Computer Geek when (Part III)...
Your favorite TV channel is actually your computer screen.
When having a chat means starring blankly a scrolling text
on a glowing box
You Buy a Pentium III so you can reboot even faster.(hey
Billy, thanks.)
You check your e-mail before you brush your teeth in the
morning.
You’re grossly offended that anyone would want to make
his or her Linux box work anything like Windows 95.
System Errors 101:
breakfast.sys halted... cereal port not responding.
coffee.sys missing... Insert cup in cup holder and press any
key.
Bad or missing mouse. Spank the cat? (Y/N)
The BBC keys and the gold metallic lettering
was copied and pasted by opening the
previous month’s Photoshop cover with all it’s
layers and channels (amounting to about 50
megabytes of source-file space) in the Gimp,
and pasting into some new layers. Cutting and
pasting with the gimp creates floating layers
which will be familiar to users familiar to
Photoshop from the 3.0 and earlier era.
The layer was finally flattened and saved
in TIFF format so that it could be easily placed
into PageMaker.
The Gimp allows for a variety of TIFF
file compression modes including JPEG and
Packed BITS compression. At this time LZW
compression is listed but not supported because
of it’s propriety licence.
The Gimp is available in all it’s various Linux flavors
from http://gimp.org, and if you want to down load the Windows
ported version go to http://gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32, and
it will take you to an web page where you can download the
current version (about 10+ megabytes).
If you are upgrading a Windows version from an older
version, then it may be necessary to delete the Gimp directory
in the Program Files folder even after it has been uninstalled,
and sometimes it may be further necessary to look for old glib
and gtk+ libraries in addition to g*.dll files for the newer version
to work properly.
If you are installing into Linux, then it may be necessary
to install newer glib and gtk+ libraries, especially after release
gimp-1.1.14. After gimp-1.1.19, glib-1.2.8 and gtk+-1.2.8 are
absolutely necessary.
Billy-ware:
The following are new Windows Error messages
that are under consideration for the upcoming Windows
Millennium edition coming to a geek-store near you:
Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue.
Press any key to continue or any other key to quit.
Bad command or file name! Go stand in the corner.
This will end your Windows session.
Do you want to play another game?
Windows message: “Error saving file! Format drive now?
(Y/Y)”
This is a message from God Gates: “Rebooting the world.
Please log off.”
Runtime Error 6D at 417A:32CF: Incompetent User
Error reading FAT record: Try the SKINNY one? (Y/N)
To Shut down system, type “WIN”
more on pg 9...
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