Art

I've been trying to improve my digital art skills lately, and it seems that the problem of the day is Gimp. I've finally figured out how to describe what's wrong with it.


I think the problem here is that GIMP followed the obvious implementation of their paint tools: every so often, another splat gets added to the canvas at that instant in time. Opacity is applied, the brush head moves without coloring, and 20%* of the way across the brush width, splat! another stamping is fully rendered. The quality problem arises because this series of splats interacts with itself, laying down ribs where the most overlay happens. It's not tracing the path of the brush and filling in color along the way.

Gimp's way is probably the fast way, but it's also getting in my way. I can't get around this texturing problem with the paintbrush, because putting down two strokes next to each other can never really be done cleanly—once the first stroke is rendered, if it's not fully opaque, I'll end up with either a gap or a darker spot if the regions overlap. The only thing to counteract this texturing seems to be to go over it with smudge or blur, which are too strong or not strong enough. At the edge of a selection, both tools create artifacts, because they use the color from pixels outside the selection, instead of extending the selected color. So, I get black or the neighboring colored area smudged into the selection instead.

I think what I want is a painting tool that tracks the region covered, and smoothly fills it in with color. Obviously this would take more CPU time, but realistically, it would have to get down to a quarter of the speed before it would be faster to clean up after the sloppy airbrushing with the smudge and blur tools.

* The default spacing is 20%, anyway. Smaller numbers yield finer ribs, until you get down to 1% which is pretty slow and moots the point of using a pressure-sensitive tablet.

Today, I present for your pleasure, my first light gnome-terminal theme, Chill:


More after the jump...

The new Ubuntu branding for Lucid is "Light", which is not too different than "Aura" which accompanied Windows Vista. In fact, I was looking at the default wallpapers available on my Vista machine at work, and noticed this one:


It particularly caught my eye because I've seen Canonical's choice for their default wallpaper in 10.04:


There are only so many ways to craft soft, glowy light themes, I suppose.

Today, I present for your pleasure, a quick port of this desert/zenburn PuTTY theme (found via igvita.com), Desert Putty:


More after the jump...

Today, I present for your pleasure a second dark theme for gnome-terminal, Deep Sea:


More after the jump...

Lately, I've been working on some new themes for gnome-terminal, because the tango palette is getting kind of stale for me. I guess that can happen, after four years or so. Dark themes are my favorite for late-night coding, so these will be the first ones showcased. Today, I present for your pleasure, BlackRock:


More after the jump...

The GIMP changed how their selection tools worked for 2.4. Most of the time, it hasn't been a problem, but today I got fed up with never knowing what was going to happen when I clicked.

The new selection code has two basic modes. When you first select with the rectangle tool, it goes into selection-edit mode, with handles along the corners and sides. In this mode, the selection can be resized or moved around without touching the image at all. Only the selected area changes. Ctrl, Shift, and Ctrl+Shift work to remove, add, or intersect with the selection, like they always have; with the rectangle tool, these motions also go into selection-edit mode, changing the new rectangle only. In selection-edit mode, dragging inside the selected area will move the selection, not the selected pixels.

Only the most recently added/changed piece of the selection is in selection-edit mode at a time. Once a second region is added, the first moves to selected mode. The entire selection can also be put into selected mode by hitting Enter. In selected mode, Ctrl and Shift still do their traditional thing, but the Alt key gains new actions. First is the plain Alt+drag, which moves the entire selection, again without touching the pixels. (If this moves the whole Gimp window instead, you can also do this with the Move tool, using its Selection mode, without the Alt key.) Alt+Ctrl+drag will move the actual selected pixels, and Alt+Shift+drag will move a copy of them. Just trying to drag will now replace the selection. In other words, the old drag behavior is moved to Alt+Ctrl+drag.

In summary: the old behavior for add/remove/intersect remains the same in all modes. You can go from selection-edit to selected mode by pressing Enter. Once in selected mode, the old drag-to-move behavior is available with Alt+Ctrl+drag. Once the drag is started, letting go of the keys on the keyboard won't do anything. Gimp will keep dragging as long as the mouse button is down. (This is similar to the add/remove/intersect mode: once it has been started, the keyboard keys don't need to be held down.)

I was looking at the lone picture in my DeviantART gallery, and specifically the Creative Commons license on it. BY-NC-SA? They don't offer non-attribution licenses these days, so that's a given. But non-commercial share-alike?

It's a decision made on auto-pilot, but I see it today with fresh eyes. It's an anti-commercial message cleverly disguised as "serving the public good". It's more of a quiet rage wasted against the vastness of the world. Something that could be a battle cry, if I actually wanted to fight.

My art is a hobby. It's going nowhere, commercially speaking. And I'm fine with that—I'm striving to be a world-class programmer (if I'm not already), so my art can be a hobby. It's not something that has to be fully under my control or I'll starve. So, in acknowledgment and celebration, I've relicensed the fin critter as BY (attribution only).

Recently, I purchased a Nikon D40. It has been the plan for a long time to purchase a DSLR, but the final nudge came when I decided to get the Powershot repaired. Canon's Web site was throwing errors when trying to confirm the repair from Tuesday through Friday of that week. In typical soulless-corporate style, they have no contact info except for the address of their World Headquarters™. As if they expect someone to write a letter to tell them that their website is down.

So, in need of an operable camera and out of patience, I searched a bit and purchased the boring D40 kit from B&H Photo. After taking a couple hundred photos, this is what I have to say about it.

First, the good: the battery life is truly luxurious compared to point-and-shoot cameras. It's going to last between two and three times as long. The sensitivity is awesome. HI-1 (which would be ISO 3200 if such a thing existed) looks like ISO 200 did on the PowerShot, which is to say, finally getting distracting. Other benefits of SLR technology, such as phase-based autofocus and low shutter lag, are also much appreciated.

The most confusing thing so far has been how the D40 handles auto ISO selection. In the scene modes, you're stuck with completely auto ISO. In P/S/A/M, you get to pick an ISO, but the "AUTO" option is grayed out. When pressed, the camera claims that auto ISO isn't supported in this mode. This puzzled me for quite a while, since my fiancée had obviously set it to auto-ISO mode. It turns out that the auto-ISO settings are actually controlled on the pencil tab, away from the other settings on the camera tab. There, you can turn the mode on or off, and set limits for maximum sensitivity and minimum shutter speed to use. The ISO selected in the regular menu then ends up being your minimum sensitivity.

The eyepiece cover is the only other thing to send me scurrying for the manual, so overall, the camera is laid out fairly well. The D40 is rather heavier than what I'm used to, but I suppose the weight is the necessary payment for decent optics and a larger sensor. And truth be told, a D70 with a really good lens on it isn't all that light, either. So overall, I'm quite happy with the D40 and its quirks.

For the curious and technically inclined, Armed Bear Common Lisp compiles Lisp to JVM bytecode.