De (D. A.) Clarke

GIMP baby step 4

• The lightning bolt is a fractal effect from FractalExplorer, not to be confused with IFS Explorer (see below)
• The reflection is a vertical flip of the lightning image
• The original lightning image has been colormapped into high-contract b/w
• The reflection has been posterized to (I think) 7 levels, to give the "Peter-Max-y" appearance
• The reflection has been rippled
• The reflection has been made semitransparent, and under it is a grayscale texture giving an illusion of a more complex water surface
• The lettering is the output of one of a set of way cool script-fu "Logo" modules, slightly modified for my purposes
• Who could resist that blue-white nova effect?
• The nova effect is independently reflected, though you can't see much of it.

Now, for the longer story. In between the last image and this one I got a new version of GIMP. This was an adventure in its own right! For the "where are the toys" user, I say, stick to what Red Hat gave you, you won't like building it yourself. It's not GIMP itself that is the challenge, but it requires lots of little pieces. And then you discover (oh no!) a lot more tools and options that you can add to the core. And some of those require yet other libraries and packages... and this server in Vienna is down tonight, and this server in Norway is down tomorrow... and so disappeared two or three evenings of my free time. But in retrospect and in summary, it was the extensions and tools that proved really troublesome. If I had stuck with 1.02 out of the box I would have had very little difficulty.

But when the dust settled I had a GIMP 1.02 to be proud of. It has about eight more nifty tools than the as-shipped version, one of which is the abovementioned FractalExplorer (a video game of choice in its own right). And it matches the PDF manual, which was written around v 1.02.

If you've read this far, then let me sing the praises of the Gimp-Users mailing list (see the website for more info). The members were uniformly courteous, patient and informative as I stumbled through my first build, through multiple servers on the other side of the planet, and through various extensions packaged by a motley crew of creative nonconformists :-)