After an image has been edited and I am satisfied with the look, can the image be transferred to PE4 for conversion to photo-art if desired? What about the printing of the image if that is what I wish to do? I am concerned about whether other software programs can read Gimp files or do you convert the image to jpg or some other file format after the post processing is done? Thank you.

for use in any other program always save in a format that is LOSSLESS (like png for example).
jpg is lossy, that is it uses compression when saving the image. you can therefore end up with "artifacts" within your image as a result of the compression formula.

if you are interested in eventually printing an image maybe a format like tiff would be useful. although a high res png is still nice.

I don't do a lot of printing so others will have to speak up with their advice.

Do you mean Photo Shop Elements?

Hi Rod,
No Corel Painter Essentials 4 it is the junior program to Corel Painter. I have these 2 programs to help me turn some of my images into photo-art. They each have an auto-paint feature that allows some discretionary input from me then they do the rest.
I will never be a painter but this allows me to express myself in a slightly different manner. It also gives me another method to extend my vision of what I see.

There is a gimp plugin called Gmic that has some excellent filter to turn photo in painting ,sketch etch.

Gmic contain a lot of filters those for "Autopainting" and similar are all in the Artistic submenu

Thank you PC for the heads up on GMIC. I will look at it and see if I can use it in my efforts. My approach to my work is pretty simple by most standards and I don't want to bloat Gimp with a lot of unnecessary plug-ins, scripts etc. that I will never use. That is why I am being so careful about what I add to it. Thank you again for your suggestion.

You'll find that G'MIC will be are part of your retouch flow once you start using it. It puts GIMP on steroids and if any Photoshop gurus are out there, they would do wise to port this plugin for Photoshop too. I use it on nearly all edits that I do (both artistic and photo) so yes, I will add that G'MIC is more then a necessity if you want to take GIMP to the next level Tim. It's that big of deal.

Ahahahaaha... Thanks Lyle, I downloaded it about 30 minutes or so ago. I looked under artistic as PC suggested and found some interesting possible uses for my work. Thanks everyone. I appreciate your help in getting Gimp set up for myself.

Ahh something like DAP? Dynamic Auto Painter.

*****************************************
Now that you have GMIC, you can also add Photo Shop plugins into Gimp.

PSPI.exe
place it in your plug-ins folder restart Gimp.
You will find it under Filters/Photo shop plugin settings.
Open it and create paths to your 8bf files.Restart Gimp.
The files will be found under Filters in alphabetic order.

Or if you have Python-Fu installed just add Robs Shellout.py script to your plugins folder ,and call them through XnView.

Hi Rod,
I tried to load the PSPI plug-in but kept getting an error message. Something about a dll or some such file.

What is the name of the DLL file ?
Is it plugin.dll ?

I still cannot get shellout to work. I get this error when I start the script from gimp:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/python/gimpfu.py", line 692, in response
dialog.res = run_script(params)
File "/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/python/gimpfu.py", line 353, in run_script
return apply(function, params)
File "/home/robert/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins/ShellOut.py", line 122, in plugin_main
child = subprocess.Popen(args, shell=False)
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/subprocess.py", line 633, in __init__
errread, errwrite)
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/subprocess.py", line 1139, in _execute_child
raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

Also, starting xnview from terminal the program starts ok, but everything below the toolbar has a transparency of about 90%. I open an image and can barely see it.


Anyone have any suggestions? Or are they just not compatible with linux?

@ nixnine

It works in linux but you have to modify the script. Obviously your home "name" will differ.

I think this covers the relevent bit - 4, 5 & last lines.

# Use temp file names from gimp, it reflects the user's choices in gimp.rc
# change as indicated if you always want to use the same temp file name
# tempfilename = pdb.gimp_temp_name(progtorun[2])
#tempfilename = os.path.join(tempfile.gettempdir(), "ShellOutTempFile."+progtorun[2])
tempwinfile = "C:\\windows\\temp\\tempfile.png"
tempfilename = "/home/rich/.wine/drive_c/windows/temp/tempfile.png"

# !!! Note no run-mode first parameter, and user entered filename is empty string
pdb.gimp_progress_set_text ("Saving a copy")
pdb.file_png_save_defaults(tempimage, tempdrawable, tempfilename, tempfilename)

# Command line - Change to match where you installed XnView
command = "/usr/bin/wine \"C:\\Program Files\\XnView\\xnview.exe\" \"" + tempwinfile + "\""

from memory the details are on this site somewhere.

This is what I have in my xnview edit:

# Use temp file names from gimp, it reflects the user's choices in gimp.rc
# change as indicated if you always want to use the same temp file name
tempfilename = "C:\\Window\\Temp\\tempfile.png"
tempfilename = "/home/robert/.wine/dosdevices/c:/windows/temp/tempfile.png"


# !!! Note no run-mode first parameter, and user entered filename is empty string
pdb.gimp_progress_set_text ("Saving a copy")
pdb.file_png_save_defaults(tempimage, tempdrawable, tempfilename, tempfilename)

# Command line - Change to match where you installed XnView
command = "/home/robert/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/XnView/xnview.exe/" \"" + tempwinfile + "\""

The italicized parts are differences between your script and mine. Are these important or are they just OS and installation choice differences?

FWIW

Should have noted this before but I am using PCLOS KDE, Gimp 2.6.11, Python 2.6.6, wine 1.2.2 & ShellOut05.py

AFAIK it should be tempwinfile. You have plenty Caps there as well, linux is case sensitive, so are these correct.

The .wine directory - You have ./wine/dosdevices/ on the first line and .wine/drive_c/ later on. Check which is correct, all the linux's I've used have drive_c but who knows.
A quick check and dosdevices is just a directory of links to drives, so use drive_c

the command - that is never going to work. for any windows app running under wine the command is

wine "path to executable"

so the full path for wine is /usr/bin/wine unless it installed elsewhere.
and the path to the executable is "C:\\Program Files\\... etc ..." Note the double slash need in a script.

I always use the dos version C:\Program Files.. but I recall in an ubuntu machine where it did need the full "/drive_c/Program Files/..." same as windows anything with a space needs to be in quotes (a pox on Windows).

What else, not a bad idea to comment out all the other applications at the start of the script leaving only XnView, just in case

Ok. Thanks. Made the edits but still get the same errors as noted in previous post. I'll investigate further,

Just out of interest, which linux?

The transparency problem could just be a DM setting. I've recently moved from compiz to kde's own. Find that it now has more settings although never much bothered about rotating cubes anyway.

Just for info, the sort of messages that show up for me.

http://i.imgur.com/vCQdc.jpg

best of luck

Hi Rod,
The error I get is libglib-2.0-0.dll was not found. My son tried to load it as well and he couldn't get it to work either.

Try this
Move the PSPI.exe plugin into your
C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins folder and restart Gimp.

Tell me what happens then.

Hi Rod,
That did the trick, bud, it shows under filters and when I click on it there is a pop-up box asking for the directories. Naturally, I have no idea what it wants but at least I am a step closer .