Shallow Thoughts : : gimp

Printing in Landscape orientation in GIMP (and some spinbutton tips)

I was printing out a map for a new trail we wanted to hike. I wanted to fill the paper with the map -- Google maps' print and Firefox's print, while fine for most map printing, weren't what I wanted.

So I took a screenshot of the maximized browser window with the map in it and imported it into GIMP. In the Crop tool, I constrained Aspect-ratio to 11:8.5 and cropped the image so it would just fit on a page, in landscape format -- wider in east-west than in north-south. Then I chose File->Print.

Since printing defaults to Portrait orientation, I went to the Page Setup tab and changed Orientation to Landscape. (It's so nice to have that as part of the dialog. I'm forever amazed at how some apps, like Firefox, make you use a separate dialog first to change the print's orientation. How can anyone possibly see that as sensible UI design?)

Unfortunately, When I went to the Image Settings tab to check , I discovered that GIMP hadn't adjusted the image size when I changed to Landscape. It had Width listed as 8.500, Height as 6.567, and the image only took up part of the page.

I went to the Width field and replaced 8.500 with 11, and hit Tab. Whoops! The field reverted to 8.500. The same thing happened if I tried typing 8.5 into the Height field.

These fields aren't plain text entries -- they're "spin boxes", with a text entry plus up and down arrows. It turned out that under GIMP 2.8 and earlier, round-off errors sometimes prevent you from setting a spin box's maximum value. I could type 10.999 and it would work fine, but 11 or 11.0 failed.

Of course, 10.999 would have been fine -- I don't mind a little margin on a printed map. It's also trivial in GIMP to rotate a landscape photo 90 degrees and print it in portrait orientation. But by this point I was into stubborn mode -- by gosh, I wanted a way to fix this!

The best workaround, it turns out, is to use the spin box's up-arrow. Holding the mouse down over the up arrow will eventually get to the maximum value. But there's a faster way: right-clicking on the up-arrow goes straight to the maximum value. A nice trick!

The problem doesn't exist in GIMP 2.9 -- I reported it as bug 694477, and the awesome GIMP team fixed it very quickly. The spin boxes work beautifully now. (Thanks, Mitch!) But as long as 2.8 is around, or for any other app using spin boxes, I'm glad to know about right-clicking on the spin box arrows.

Tags: gimp, printing
[ 11:26 Feb 27, 2013    More gimp | permalink to this entry | comments ]

GIMP plug-in to export scaled-down versions of images

In a discussion on Google+arising from my Save/Export clean plug-in, someone said to the world in general

PLEASE provide an option to select the size of the export. Having to scale the XCF then export then throw out the result without saving is really awkward.

I thought, What a good idea! Suppose you're editing a large image, with layers and text and other jazz, saving in GIMP's native XCF format, but you want to export a smaller version for the web. Every time you make a significant change, you have to: Scale (remembering the scale size or percentage you're targeting); Save a Copy (or Export in GIMP 2.8); then Undo the Scale. If you forget the Undo, you're in deep trouble and might end up overwriting the XCF original with a scaled-down version.

If I had a plug-in that would export to another file type (such as JPG) with a scale factor, remembering that scale factor so I didn't have to, it would save me both effort and risk.

And that sounded pretty easy to write, using some of the tricks I'd learned from my Save/Export Clean and wallpaper scripts. So I wrote export-scaled.py

It's still brand new, so if anyone tries it, I'd appreciate knowing if it's useful or if you have any problems with it.

Geeky programming commentary

(Folks not interested in the programming details can stop reading now.)

Linked input fields

One fun project was writing a set of linked text entries for the dialog:

Scale to:

Percentage 100 %

Width: 640

Height: 480

Change any one of the three, and the other two change automatically. There's no chain link between width and height: It's assumed that if you're exporting a scaled copy, you won't want to change the image's aspect ratio, so any one of the three is enough.

That turned out to be surprisingly hard to do with GTK SpinBoxes: I had to read their values as strings and parse them, because the numeric values kept snapping back to their original values as soon as focus went to another field.

Image parasites

Another fun challenge was how to save the scale ratio, so the second time you call up the plug-in on the same image it uses whatever values you used the first time. If you're going to scale to 50%, you don't want to have to type that in every time. And of course, you want it to remember the exported file path, so you don't have to navigate there every time.

For that, I used GIMP parasites: little arbitrary pieces of data you can attach to any image. I've known about parasites for a long time, but I'd never had occasion to use them in a Python plug-in before. I was pleased to find that they were documented in the official GIMP Python documentation, and they worked just as documented. It was easy to test them, too: in the Python console (Filters->Python->Console...), type something like

img = gimp_image_list()[0]
img.parasite_list()
img.parasite_find(img.parasite_list()[0])

and so forth. Nice!

Not prompting for JPG settings

My plug-in was almost done. But when I ran it and told it to save to filenamecopy.jpg, it prompted me with that annoying JPEG settings dialog. Okay, being prompted once isn't so bad. But then when I exported a second time, it prompted me again, and didn't remember the values from before. So the question was, what controls whether the settings dialog is shown, and how could I prevent it?

Of course, I could prompt the user for JPEG quality, then call jpeg-save-file directly -- but what if you want to export to PNG or GIF or some other format? I needed something more general

Turns out, nobody really remembers how this works, and it's not documented anywhere. Some people thought that passing run_mode=RUN_WITH_LAST_VALS when I called pdb.gimp_file_save() would do the trick, but it didn't help.

So I guessed that there might be a parasite that was storing those settings: if the JPEG save plug-in sees the parasite, it uses those values and doesn't prompt. Using the Python console technique I just mentioned, I tried checking the parasites on a newly created image and on an image read in from an existing JPG file, then saving each one as JPG and checking the parasite list afterward.

Bingo! When you read in a JPG file, it has a parasite called 'jpeg-settings'. (The new image doesn't have this, naturally). But after you write a file to JPG from within GIMP, it has not only 'jpeg-settings' but also a second parasite, 'jpeg-save-options'.

So I made the plug-in check the scaled image after saving it, looking for any parasites with names ending in either -settings or -save-options; any such parasites are copied to the original image. Then, the next time you invoke Export Scaled, it does the same search, and copies those parasites to the scaled image before calling gimp-file-save.

That darned invisible JPG settings dialog

One niggling annoyance remained. The first time you get the JPG settings dialog, it pops up invisibly, under the Export dialog you're using. So if you didn't know to look for it by moving the dialog, you'd think the plug-in had frozen. GIMP 2.6 had a bug where that happened every time I saved, so I assumed there was nothing I can do about it.

GIMP 2.8 has fixed that bug -- yet it still happened when my plug-in called gimp_file_save: the JPG dialog popped up under the currently active dialog, at least under Openbox.

There isn't any way to pass window IDs through gimp_file_save so the JPG dialog pops up as transient to a particular window. But a few days after I wrote the export-scaled, I realized there was still something I could do: hide the dialog when the user clicks Save. Then make sure that I show it again if any errors occur during saving.

Of course, it wasn't quite that simple. Calling chooser.hide() by itself does nothing, because X is asynchronous and things don't happen in any predictable order. But it's possible to force X to sync the display: chooser.get_display().sync().

I'm not sure how robust this is going to be -- but it seems to work well in the testing I've done so far, and it's really nice to get that huge GTK file chooser dialog out of the way as soon as possible.

Tags: gimp, programming, python
[ 17:34 Sep 02, 2012    More gimp | permalink to this entry | comments ]

GIMP: Re-uniting Save and Export

In GIMP 2.8, the developers changed the way you save files. "Save" is now used only for GIMP's native format, XCF (and compressed variants like .xcf.gz and .xcf.bz2). Other formats that may lose information on layers, fonts and other aspects of the edited image must be "Exported" rather than saved.

This has caused much consternation and flameage on the gimp-user mailing list, especially from people who use GIMP primarily for simple edits to JPEG or PNG files.

I don't particularly like the new model myself. Sometimes I use GIMP in the way the developers are encouraging, adding dozens of layers, fonts, layer masks and other effects. Much more often, I use GIMP to crop and rescale a handful of JPG photos I took with my camera on a hike. While I found it easy enough to adapt to using Ctrl-E (Export) instead of Ctrl-S (Save), it was annoying that when I exited the app, I'd always get am "Unsaved images" warning, and it was impossible to tell from the warning dialog which images were safely exported and which might not have been saved or exported at all.

But flaming on the mailing lists, much as some people seem to enjoy it (500 messages on the subject and still counting!) wasn't the answer. The developers have stated very clearly that they're not going to change the model back. So is there another solution?

Yes -- a very simple solution, in fact. Write a plug-in that saves or exports the current image back to its current file name, then marks it as clean so GIMP won't warn about it when you quit.

It turned out to be extremely easy to write, and you can get it here: GIMP: Save/export clean plug-in. If it suits your GIMP workflow, you can even bind it to Ctrl-S ... or any other key you like.

Warning: I deliberately did not add any "Are you sure you want to overwrite?" confirmation dialogs. This plug-in will overwrite your current file, without asking for permission. After all, that's its job. So be aware of that.

How it's written

Here are some details about how it works. Non software geeks can skip the rest of this article.

When I first looked into writing this, I was amazed at how simple it was: really just two lines of Python (plus the usual plug-in registration boilerplate).

    pdb.gimp_file_save(img, drawable, img.filename, img.filename)
    pdb.gimp_image_clean_all(img)

The first line saves the image back to its current filename. (The gimp-file-save PDB call still handles all types, not just XCF.) The second line marks the image as clean.

Both of those are PDB calls, which means that people who don't have GIMP Python could write script-fu to do this part.

So why didn't I use script-fu? Because I quickly found that if I bound the plug-in to Ctrl-S, I'd want to use it for new images -- images that don't have a filename yet. And for that, you need to pop up some sort of "Save as" dialog -- something Python can do easily, and Script-fu can't do at all.

A Save-as dialog with smart directory default

I couldn't use the standard GIMP save-as dialog: as far as I can tell, there's no way to call that dialog from a plug-in. But it turned out the GTK save-as dialog has no default directory to start in: you have to set the starting directory every time. So I needed a reasonable initial directory.

I didn't want to come up with some desktop twaddle like ~/My Pictures or whatever -- is there really anyone that model fits? Certainly not me. I debated maintaining a preference you could set, or saving the last used directory as a preference, but that complicates things and I wasn't sure it's really that helpful for most people anyway.

So I thought about where I usually want to save images in a GIMP session. Usually, I want to save them to the same directory where I've been saving other images in the same session, right?

I can figure that out by looping through all currently open images with for img in gimp.image_list() : and checking os.path.dirname(img.filename) for each one. Keep track of how many times each directory is being used; whichever is used the most times is probably where the user wants to store the next image.

Keeping count in Python

Looping through is easy, but what's the cleanest, most Pythonic way of maintaining the count for each directory and finding the most popular one? Naturally, Python has a class for that, collections.Counter.

Once I've counted everything, I can ask for the most common path. The code looks a bit complicated because most_common(1) returns a one-item list of a tuple of the single most common path and the number of times it's been used -- for instance, [ ('/home/akkana/public_html/images/birds', 5) ]. So the path is the first element of the first element, or most_common(1)[0][0]. Put it together:

    counts = collections.Counter()
    for img in gimp.image_list() :
        if img.filename :
            counts[os.path.dirname(img.filename)] += 1
    try :
        return counts.most_common(1)[0][0]
    except :
        return None

So that's the only tricky part of this plug-in. The rest is straightforward, and you can read the code on GitHub: save-export-clean.py.

Tags: gimp, programming, python
[ 11:26 Aug 21, 2012    More gimp | permalink to this entry | comments ]

GIMP: Build-it

Are you a GIMP user or Summer of Code student who's been wanting to get involved, but having trouble building, or a bit intimidated by the build process?

I'll be running a session on IRC to help anyone build GIMP on Linux, as part of the OpenHatch "Build it" project.

The session will take place on #gimp on irc.gimp.org (also known as GimpNet), on Fri, Apr 15, 0300 UTC -- that's Thursday night in the Americas. To convert to your time zone, run this command on your local machine:

$ date -d 'Fri Apr 15 03:00 UTC'
Thu Apr 14 20:00:00 PDT 2011

Or try this link: world time server.

This is a time that's usually fairly quiet on #gimp -- European users don't fret, since it's pretty easy to get help there during more Europe-friendly time zones. I'll hang around for at least two hours; that should be plenty of time to build GIMP and all its prerequisites.

For folks new to IRC, note that irc.gimp.org is its own server -- this is not the #gimp channel on Freenode. You can learn more about IRC on the LinuxChix IRC for Beginners page, or, if you have trouble getting an IRC client configured, try this link for mibbit web chat.

Note: The #gimp IRC channel was recently under attack by trolls, and it's possible that it may not be usable at the time of the session. In that case, I will update this blog page with the name of an alternate channel to use, and any other necessarily details.

Preparation

If you want to get your system set up ahead of time, I've put the instructions needed to build on Ubuntu Lucid and other older Linux distros here: Gimp Building Tips (for Linux). I might be able to offer a little help with building on Macs, but no guarantees.

Mac and Windows users, or people running a very old Linux distro (more than a year old) might want to consider an alternate approach: install Virtualbox or VMware and install Ubuntu "Natty Narwhal" (currently still in beta) in a virtual machine.

Of course, this isn't the only time you can get help with building GIMP. There are folks around on #gimp most of the time who are happy to help with problems. But if you've been meaning to get started and want a good excuse, or you've been holding off on asking for help ... come hang out with us and try it!

Tags: gimp, programming, education
[ 11:50 Apr 13, 2011    More gimp | permalink to this entry | comments ]

GIMP: Don't get confused by the Auto button

A couple of people recently have appeared on GIMP IRC channels wondering why no filters or layer operations seemed to work in GIMP, even though they had an image open.

In at least one case, it was a setting most of us had forgotten about: the Auto button. It's easy to miss, but if you turn it on accidentally, you may be unable to do anything in GIMP until you realize what's happened.

The Auto button is the one at the upper right of your Layers dialog. It's on by default, and what it does is ensure that dialogs like Layers, and GIMP's notion of the currently active layer, follow the active image. Open a new image, or click in a different image window, and your Layers dialog switches images -- so whatever you do next will apply to the image you just chose.

If you turn Auto off, then by default, no image and no layer is active. Notice, in the screenshot at left, how no image is shown in the option menu just left of the Auto button.

Even if you open a new image, you can't do anything with it until you explicitly choose an image from the menu.

I'm sure you can see why this could be confusing. So why have that button at all?

Well, it's useful when you're working with lots of images -- for instance, if you want to drag a layer from one image into another image, you can use the menu to switch quickly among images and layers without needing to bring those image windows to the front. I don't find I need it, but for those who do, I guess it can be a real time-saver.

Just to make it even more confusing, not everyone even has the Auto button or the menu next to it. You can turn it off (and gain a little extra vertical space for your layers dialog) with the tiny menu button right above the mode menu. "Show Image Selection" controls whether the image option menu, and the Auto button next to it, will be displayed. "Auto Follow Active Image" is the same toggle as the Auto button itself.

So if you ever get stuck and the Layers dialog doesn't seem to be showing layers from your image, and you can't figure out why ... remember that pesky Auto button. It might just be the problem.

(If not, try quitting GIMP and moving your profile aside. That works for curing all manner of mysterious ills -- including this one. Come to think of it, that deserves an article of its own. Coming soon!)

Tags: gimp, ui
[ 10:04 Feb 19, 2011    More gimp | permalink to this entry | comments ]

New GIMP Arrow Designer

While writing a blog post on GIMP's confusing Auto button (to be posted soon), I needed some arrows, and discovered a bug in my Arrow Designer script when making arrows that are mostly vertical.

So I fixed it. You can get the new Arrow Designer 0.5 on my GIMP Arrow Designer page.

It's purely a coincidence that I discovered this a week before SCALE, where I'll be speaking on Writing GIMP Scripts and Plug-Ins. Arrow Designer is one of my showpieces for making interactive plug-ins with GIMP-Python, so I'm glad I noticed the bug when I did.

Tags: gimp, programming, python
[ 20:28 Feb 18, 2011    More gimp | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Editing Batches of Photos with GIMP and David's Batch Processor

Have a lot of images to edit, but confused by command-line tools like ImageMagick? Try David's Batch Processor, a GIMP plug-in that lets you apply multiple operations like resize, rotate, or brightness/contrast to groups of photos.

The article is on Linux Planet: Editing Batches of Photos Easily on Linux.

Tags: writing, gimp
[ 10:07 Dec 23, 2010    More gimp | permalink to this entry | comments ]

More advanced GIMP tricks for cutting parts out of photos

My previous Linux Planet article covered beginner tips for cutting foreground objects out of photographs. Part 2, from last week, covers some more flexible advanced techniques you'll want to use as your GIMP skills increase.

Find out how to put a butterfly in space!

Read it here: More GIMP tricks for cutting objects of photos

Tags: writing, gimp
[ 14:14 Nov 15, 2010    More gimp | permalink to this entry | comments ]