oh dear, more messes to clean up from this tutorial!
gramg: i'm glad you actually learned something:). i know you're busy learning new stuff all the time, but i'd appreciate it if you told me why you thought you should erase on a duplicate background?

jas45: thanks again . this was an easy one: you just forgot about setting the layer mode of your first text layer to "grain merge" - you got that one right in your first xcf and the tutorial clearly says "grain merge", so hopefully i don't have to change anything there.

esper: thanks for your feedback, brother - sheesh, this tutorial must have been a lot worse than i thought if it's reduced you to shouting!
you have a point about the explanation, i do it in some places but not all through. i always think my tutorials are too long and unnecessarily wordy, so i've stopped explaining so much - probably a mistake.

im sorry, didnt expect this would be perceived as shouting

it edited it

i dont think your tutorial is bad, i just feel its unneccessarily complicated
please dont let that turn you off

esper: unnecessarily complicated is the word! i'm actually very pedagogic as long as i don't have to be pedagogic in writing . but i have no idea what should be left out and how i should explain things so people understand! i think i should use more screenshots, that seems to work fine.

AnMal, your tutorial is fine but maybe when you are writing them, explain which layer we should be working on and where in the layer stack it belongs.
When I write a tute I try to put it in a Newbies language. I know it takes longer with more steps but a newbie might not know where a lot of these things are and if they should be selected or not.

AnMal: I have a different take on this. Please do not reduce the complications in any way, or leave anything out... that is what makes it a great tutorial. Every time I go over it, I appreciate the effects a little more. For me, it was an introduction to Gimp subtlety, and I really learned a lot. If you “dumb it down” most of the value will be lost. Anyway, that is just my opinion.

The only thing I would suggest is an occasional screenshot that includes your layers at that point. Screenshots like this don't really help understanding, but they reassure the student that they are on the right track. As Esper alluded, the problem for the student (in all tutorials) is that they don't know where you are headed.


Setting my text layer to grain merge solved everything for me...thanks. I just took a quick glance at the tutorial and I don't see that, but I'm sure I just overlooked it.

Thank you again for a great tutorial.


Variation on your theme

you guys are the best teachers a person could ever have in tutorial-writing . i'll make some edits now and i will make this tutorial understandable in the end!

jas45: that's a great looking picture! very creative . and guess what? you're actually right about the grain merge thing. i checked and it just got lost after my very first version (that i didn't even post on gc, because it was so full of typos), i must have deleted it by mistake while i edited up to the first version i posted .

gramg: aha, i see - i just got so confused when you talked about erasing on a duplicate background . i really like glitters too, so i understand your decision. but glitters work by contrast, so the darker the surroundings, the brighter those little dots will sparkle. for an experiment, you can try making a new transparent layer over the glitters, paint random dots on it with a black brush, gaussian blur the layer by 25 and then experiment with the opacity on it or by simply turning the layer off and on. don't the glitters look more like real glitters when you have the layer turned on and at a rather high opacity level? you're of course free to disagree!

molly: you're perfectly right of course. in my revision number 2 i will write in instructions on the layer order and also add a screenshot of the layer stack. i'll try to think of newbie friendliness too.

edit: i've now posted my revision number 2. hoping for some poor innocent gimper to show up and try it out so i know if it's worth keeping!

and because you've of course all been dying to know, here's what the effect looks like on a pink paisley:

AnMal: The pink paisley looks great with this effect... even better than text.

jas45: thank you! if you ask me, pink paisleys always look better than text

i dont understand what pedagogic is supposed to mean in this context
i think when you want to teach something, context is important

for me its very important to teach more than a single effect with my tutorials
and it seems people like that

k1tesseraena: i'm pretty sure there's nothing i could teach you, brother .
esper: by "pedagogic" here i only meant something along the lines of a good teacher. i teach people stuff all days, explain and show, and try to figure out where the difficulties are on the learners side and get around them. i'm darn good at it. trouble is, i can't seem to do it in writing.