Fun with pictures

Posted June 5, 2006
Filed under: Tech |

I worked in a print shop when I was an undergraduate, and over the course of several years got pretty good with graphic design applications — Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks, Freehand, QuarkXPress, InDesign and PageMaker. It took several years because I did not have access to these applications at home. In fact, until I found a way to get these applications on my desktop without paying[*], I never really got to know them. It’s difficult to learn a complex application on the spot with only intermittent access.

Too bad that the open-source graphics applications weren’t then what they are today. I’m talking specifically about Gimp (the Gnu Image Manipulation Program) and Inkscape. Gimp is the open-source community’s answer to Photoshop. It offers many of the same functions: painting, gradients, resizing, filters, layers, etc. Inkscape is the answer to Illustrator. It’s a vector drawing application, and it offers many of the same advanced features as Illustrator — gradients, path operations and conversion, etc. Both Gimp and Inkscape remind me of their commercial counterparts about 3 versions ago: feature complete, if rough around the edges in some areas.

Why do I bring it up? Because I hadn’t had the need to do any advanced vector or raster manipulation in awhile, so I didn’t have graphics software on my machine capable of anything more than simple operations. And these applications have come a long way since I last tried them. They used to be buggy and crashy, but now they are very stable. And, no matter who you are, it pays to know how to use an advanced image editor and a vector illustration program, especially if you create educational documents. Illustration is the hardest part of creating high-quality instructional documents, but if you know how to use the software, it’s actually quite easy.

So go check out Inkscape and the Gimp. They are free, open-source and cross platform (Lin-Win-Mac). And if you’re an OS X user, you’ll be impressed by how clean X11 apps are starting to look.

[*] I’m legal now.