Resources on the Net

There are a number of items I didn't cover in these articles: Channels, Undo/Redo features, dealing with transparency, etc. A little experimentation will provide some insight into these areas. You can always purchase a book on Photoshop to get ideas on how some effects are created, but you need to have a good understanding of how the Photoshop features and filters map to their counterparts in the GIMP for this to be useful. I should note that I probably learned more about how to use the GIMP from scanning the Photoshop texts than I did from scanning the source code. But I learned more about why things worked by looking at the source.

Beyond that you can find many helpful voices on the various mailing lists. The GIMP User Mailing List and the GIMP Developer Mailing List are both active discussion lists devoted to the GIMP. The GIMP Announce Mailing List is a low-volume list provided for announcements related to the GIMP. Information on subscribing to these lists is available from the GIMP's primary web site at http://www.gimp.org/. The windowing toolkit upon which the GIMP is based, gtk+, has its own mailing list to further its development. This list is sponsored by Red Hat. Sending e-mail to gtk-list-request@redhat.com with the word “Subscribe” in the Subject line should get you access to that list. Otherwise, try checking the Red Hat web site at http://www.redhat.com/ for more information.

There are other resources of interest on the Net related to the GIMP. The main starting point is now the relatively new http://www.gimp.org/ web site. This site has pointers to a number of sites, one of which I mentioned in the past three articles: Federico Mena Quintero's page at http://www.nuclecu.unam.mx/~federico/gimp/index.html. Quartic has links to most other GIMP resources and his site is considered the canonical list of resources for all things GIMP. Some of the links you may find useful include:

1. Nem W. Schlecht's Tutorials Reference: http://abattoir.cc.ndsu.nodak.edu/~nem/gimp/tuts/. The primary site to visit when searching for a GIMP tutorial.
2. Zach Beane's GIMP News page: http://xach.dorknet.com/gimp/news/, all the latest in the GIMP world.
3. The GIMP Plug-In Registry: http://gimp.foebud.org/registry, where all Plug-In developers register their plug-ins. You can often find plug-ins that are not in the base distribution here or simply grab the source for the latest version.

Also, for non-Linux users (and those who wander the various worlds of Unix in general): Michael Sweet (mike@easysw.com or http://www.easysw.com/~mike/gimp) has said he'll be making the SGI and Solaris binaries for the 1.0 release available from his web site as soon as the 1.0 is generally released.