The online tool for precision vectorization VectorMagic impresses very much with its results. This great service is the result of a Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research project by James Diebel and Jacob Norda. In comparison with Adobe Live Trace (Illustrator CS2) and Corel PowerTRACE (CorelDRAW X3) online VectorMagic look like much more precise tool both in shapes and colors. (more…)
When you sleep less, you seriously boost your creativity for that particular day. I discovered this amazing thing from my own experience. We all know how important is to sleep well and long enough but if you had insomnia last night you can turn it to advantage instead of worrying about sleeping. I can’t say certainly why this happens, but in my opinion it is related to a bit weaker control of your conscious over your thoughts. I really don’t recommend to use this advice often as to fulfill your ideas efficiently you have to be in good form. Nevertheless it happens with me of itself. Now I know that when I slept last night 6 hours instead of usual 8, it is a good idea to generate something creative this day.
Retrievr is an experimental image search engine which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr photos by drawing a rough sketch (using 4 brushes of different size and color palette) or uploading image to find similar photos. Testing Retrievr I tried a very roughly smile, a firtree and a cup and got a bundle of photos similar to my drawings. The results were fairly fine, sometimes even surprising. Surely it’s only prototype and you can’t demand much of it. But how does it actually work? (more…)
If you have no idea which color to choose for this particular project or looking for inspiration and something original or just like to have fun with colors, there are some valuable resources for graphic designers, web designers and illustrators. (more…)
Quick, feature rich and easy to use multi-platform image viewer XnView replaced on my PC sluggish, awkward and non free ACDSee a long time ago. Firstly I use XnView just for viewing and cataloguing images but soon I was amazed how much wonderful functions XnView has. In addition, XnView supports a lot of image file formats (read more than 400, write 75) has customizable interface and layout in Browser mode and much more useful features not mentioned in this list. (more…)
Adobe updater could be really annoying, though I find Adobe Creative Suite 3 as a masterpiece. Every time that you start Photoshop, Illustrator or Acrobat Adobe updater pops up and tries to download updates. It is also a big resource hog. So how can you disable Adobe updater?
The solution is very simple. Find through search in disc C file “AdobeUpdaterPrefs.dat” (c:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Updater5), click with right mouse button and change Attributes of this file to "Read only". UPD: Open this file with any text editor (Notepad) and change year value in this line to 2008 or 2009 <LastDateCheck>2008-10-29</LastDateCheck> or just delete this file, though its very radical cure to my mind.
New version of open source image editing software GIMP 2.4 recently came out with new goodies and long-awaited improvements. Most valuable new features are scaling for all kinds of brushes, intuitive selection and crop tools, improved printing and color management, red eye removal, a new object alignment guide and advanced tools like perspective cloning and lens distortion filters.
The main advantage of GIMP is that it is best FREE image editing software and it works on Linux, Windows and Mac. Without doubt it lacks some substantial features in comparison with Photoshop which are crucial in a commercial printing environment and has many drawbacks. In GIMP there is NO support for CMYK colorspace, support for digital camera’s RAW format, support for 16-bit, 32-bit, adjustment layers, the history brush tool, folders in the layer window, a free transform tool to rotate, scale and move in one tool and an interpolation code to draw smooth brush strokes using a tablet.
The GIMP also requires basic Script-Fu programming knowledge for automation upon it, while Photoshop can record your actions and repeat them with a "Play" button. Though, there are many plugins to improve GIMP, there’s no way to make it right out of the box.
Since there are really no any innovative features which are superior to Photoshop or makes the image editing easier, I don’t understand why the GIMP developers should invent new bicycle i.e. “different product vision” since they anyway follows the graphic design industry leader Photoshop.
Even novice who doesn’t ever see Photoshop User Interface feels lost and disappointed with GIMP UI. Certainly there is GIMPshop available which makes the GIMP accessible to the many Photoshop users applying renamed and reorganized GIMP’s tools, options, windows, and menus to closely resemble Adobe Photoshop’s menu structure and naming conventions.
When someone say that most users don’t need all that Photoshop features, there is less complicated software than GIMP itself to handle simple photo processing such as XnView.
The development of GIMP 2.4 took about 3 years, so we could expect GIMP 3.0 in next 3 years with huge improvements such as higher bitdepths, more colorspaces, layer grouping, adjustment layers, filter layers and shape tools.
To sum up, GIMP has a long way ahead in development to be not just a toy for geeks i.e. “experienced users” but real competitor to Photoshop and other commercial image editing software as it happened with Mozilla Firefox. Most of all, it needs to be more user friendly, intuitive, implement all industry standards and gain some exclusive new features which other tools don’t provide to users.
