Friday, March 23, 2007

Praise for the GIMP

I've been recently introduced to digital scrapbooking, and I'm loving it! It's so much more conducive to using digital photos (and isn't that all most people have anymore?), it's lots cheaper, and I don't have to have a room dedicated to scrapbooking. The problem with paper scrapbooking is that you have to have someplace where you can leave everything out (virtually impossible with a toddler) or you have to have a huge chunk of time open for scrapbooking--at least 3 hours. With digital scrapbooking, all I need is my computer, a image manipulation program, and digital "papers" and "elements," which are readily available for free on the internet (and legally, too, I might add).

I had been using the Creating Keepsakes Scrapbook Designer, but it was very slow and didn't allow for much customization. Now, for someone who doesn't want to do a lot of tweaking, this would have been a fine program. But I needed something a bit more high-powered than that. So with this most recent page, I created it entirely in the GIMP. The GIMP is a free image manipulation program, similar to Photoshop, but at a much, much more reasonable price (how can you beat free?). There's quite a steep learning curve when using the GIMP, and their help section definitely isn't the most user friendly or informative. But with some tinkering, I was able to figure out how to do everything that I wanted to. For those of you who are familiar with Photoshop, there's a version of the GIMP that's styled after Photoshop and which works similarly. However, since I've never used Photoshop, I decided to stick with the classic GIMP.

There's a "script-fu" for the drop shadows, which made creating those quite easy. The GIMP also works with Photoshop file formats, such as .psd, so you can use pretty much anything that was created for Photoshop in the GIMP. My big complaint about the GIMP is that it's text editor isn't very easy to use. Once you've rotated a text box, you are no longer able to edit the text inside. Apparently the current version's editor is much improved over past versions, but it still needs a bit of work.

I was quite pleased with how this page turned out. I think it's my favorite digi page that I've done. Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Scraplift of Kate Hadfield
Papers, alpha, and most elements from the Zippity Doo Da kit by Zoe Pearn
Photo frames with drop shadows by Nancy Comelab
Staples by Kirsty Wiseman
Font is from Creating Keepsakes Scrapbook Designer

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The shadows are cool, and I love the text. That font is really cool-looking. Good job!

Kate Hadfield said...

Oooh this is lovely! All that yellow really makes the page pop and gives it such a fresh feel! Thanks for such a great lift!!