Touching on Touchups

In this post, I will engage with Dr Jenny Weight’s introductory post on using photo editing software. In particular, I will draw on my own experiences with both GIMP and Adobe Photoshop, and examine the issues that may come with using said software for image editing.

Before I start, I should clarify that I’d had intermediate knowledge of PS (Photoshop) from a previous VE&T course, and have long since ingrained the knowledge into my brain-space. That means that it’s become a little difficult for me to thoroughly and critically engage with such a basic overview in digital image editing, because none of the knowledge occur to me as new, nor do issues register on my radar because I automatically know how to fix them.

Before I launch on my tirade on GIMP, it is important to note that the software is completely free, and, for most casual intents and purposes, has all the features of the extremely pricey Adobe Photoshop. GIMP also has an extensive community that discuss and help each other out on the forum, where almost all the questions a new user would possibly have (mine usually began with “where can I find…?”) are answered.

In one of Jenny’s lectures, she mentioned that GIMP has a steep learning curve. To that, I say: yes and no. For someone who got used to the way Photoshop worked, and where things were and what they were called, the learning curve wasn’t so much steep as frustratingly ‘almost’. Toolbars and menus were almost but not quite in the same place, and the UI (user interface) was almost but not quite identical, meaning I sometimes found myself hitting “B” repeatedly to access the Brush tool, only to have nothing happen.

But for users completely new to the image editing scene, I think GIMP would be as confusing as a first session with Photoshop. It’s simply a new skill to think in terms of Layers – “what, you made a mistake drawing on the image, and when you erased it everything was gone? Yeah, should’a used layers” – and all the menus with “Curves”, “Color Balance” and oh, the FILTERS! Not to mention all the doo-dah over Opacity, Layer Styles, Vectors…GIMP doesn’t do anything to ease that initial vertigo, but neither did Photoshop, for me.

The major difference, at least to me, was the way in which Adobe set out an intuitive UI once the ball had successfully been rolled. Once I learned how menus were organized, and some keyboard shortcuts, Photoshop suddenly became quick and easy. GIMP (and again, this is tainted heavily by my PS leanings), on the other hand, was not. The very fact that I had to download and install scripts to use a few functions were testimony to that. (However, the additional script-fu and plug-in community is actually pretty awesome, and I wish I had explored them more.)

There’s not much to engage with in terms of Jenny’s post – the basics are the basics, and there’s not much to say about it. Yes, YouTube tutorials are amazing, but once you find yourself among this league (video below), it’s probably easier to just turn off your computer and go throw a stick for your dog.

One thing I will say: LAYERS! LAYERS LAYERS AND IF YOU’RE NOT SURE, THROW IN ANOTHER LAYER! If you want to test two different types of brush strokes…use two layers! Delete the ugly one! It’s so much easier to delete a layer than to press Ctrl+Shift+Z (er, I use PCs, but I’m pretty sure it’s Apple+Shift+Z on Macs) a million times.

Finally, here’s a (repost) of the images I edited in GIMP, and its counterpart in PS. The focus should be on the colors, not the speech bubbles, because the GIMP version had me do speech bubbles in GIMP, but the PS one had me do them in Illustrator.

GIMP

PHOTOSHOP

Please note that the images are hosted by Tumblr, but are made by me. I didn’t rip off someone else’s work, but the dog isn’t mine personally. I have permission to photograph the dog, who is a minor.

Alex.

P.S. It would seem that my broad “RMIT” category will soon be insufficient. If any tutor reads this before the final due date, but sees no extra categories, please note that I will be adding and organizing more specific categories extremely soon. I know in a professional space that this is inexcusable, because once it’s out it’s out. I apologize.

Creatively Creative Commons License

For this blog, I chose the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Creative Commons License, because there are some original creative work which are published on the blog.

The license essentially allows others to share the posts that I make, and/or adapt it into any form or medium, provided they attribute the work to me and give me proper due credit. It does not allow commercial use of any of my posts, as I do not want anyone to make money off of my creative ideas without my expressed and explicit permission and/or involvement in the project.

What this means is, anyone who reads a blog post I make about a certain topic is more than welcome to copy and paste and excerpt from the post, attach it to their own and engage with it, provided of course they link back to my blog post, instead of passing the idea off as their own. Similarly, the small (and sub-par) pieces of fiction that were published here (they’re hidden now, but if they hadn’t been, it was easily accessible) would not be allowed to be adapted for commercial purposes in any way or form.

Of course, a small gathering of pixels isn’t the police. Nor can it stop spammers from rudely making this blog ugly.

As this was also mostly my personal blog until recently, spam hadn’t been a major issue in my comments area: that is, I have received the odd spam comment from either a spambot or a troll. In the past, if I saw one of these comments, I would either manually delete them, or sarcastically respond to it, but that was when the traffic I gained were mostly from people who personally knew me.

Let’s pretend for a second that I was running a professional or interest-themed blog (which, for the next Semester, I actually am). There is the option with WordPress to automatically moderate and delete any comments that involve more than two hyperlinks. In fact, WordPress offers bloggers varying degrees of spam and comment control.

To begin with, users could turn off “anyone can comment, as long as they have an email address”, because many times fake emails are accepted. By restricting it to “only someone with a WordPress account”, it means often the comment maker could be traced back to their account. I was also given the option to moderate comments, and only allow comments through automatically if they had been allowed by me before. Finally, I was given the choice to simply disallow all comments until I’d moderated each and every single one of them.

I feel that the last choice is anti-constructive to a blog which is inviting people to comment and discuss. For now, I’ve kept the setting at WordPress accounts only, but as my posts reach further into the deep corners of worldly topics, I may have to turn on light moderation. Especially if I begin to touch on sensitive topics which may be triggers for certain readers, in order to prevent insensitive comment makers from hurting potential victims.

Alex.