Baby's first graphic

[jonobie]

Recently, I've been fooling around with Inkscape and GIMP. Inkscape, like other vectored programs, started as a complete mystery to me and required copious searching for tutorials to figure out how on earth things worked. (For example, there is no eraser in the tool. Why? I don't know, but apparently it's common for vectored graphics programs.)

Comments

[cpeel]

Very cool! It does look very steampunkish!

Feel free to ping Benjamin if you have questions about Inkscape as he's been using it extensively for a couple of years now. He does virtually all of his creative school projects in Inkscape. He toys a bit in the Gimp but I think most of that is cropping, scaling, and format conversion (decided it was easier to let him continue using the Gimp for that instead of coaxing him into ImageMagick ;)

[jonobie]

Interesting! I hadn't realized that Benjamin was an Inkscape guru! I definitely found it a steep learning curve.

Gimp's pretty cool -- you think ImageMagick is better, though?

[cpeel]

The Gimp is geared towards interactive image manipulation whereas ImageMagick is geared for more scripted image manipulation (conversions, resizing, scaling, etc). Often Benjamin just needs to change some PNG files to JPEGs (since Inkscape seems to only export PNGs these days -- it use to export JPEGs but I think they moved to using a different image library), something that ImageMagick is well suited to doing but he's not at all a command-line person! So not better, just different.

Benjamin too found it a very steep learning curve. It was just recently that I showed him the alignment tools and the path set functions (intersect, union, etc) -- many things that he was attempting to do by hand.

[jonobie]

I like The Gimp for freehanding graphics and then pulling them into Inkscape to smooth by vectorizing. But definitely nicer to script conversion stuff imo. :) I found a ton of free vectored graphics in eps format, and I was THIS close to giving up on getting them into a usable format for me. I actually installed 3-4 different products that claimed to be able to read eps and save as svg, but none of them quite worked.

Eventually I got pstoedit to transform eps->pdf (it didn't work directly to svg), and then I could import the pdf into Inkscape. Weird route, but it worked.

I haven't yet used the union/intersect stuff yet. I think it would be useful for logo-type stuff, but not sure what other scenarios its used in.