Tutorial : Create Mac like Wallpaper with Gimp.

Tutorial : Create Mac Like Wallpaper using Gimp

Have you ever wondered how those glossy and stupendous wallpapers are created ? If not ! Then let me take you on a tour which will help you to create glossy wallpapers without any havoc.. This guide is targeted towards beginners .. I have tried my best to make it simple .. Being an Open Source user and FOSS follower I always use Open Source software to do my work. In this tutorial I had used GNU Image Manipulation Program [Gimp 2.4.2] to create wallpaper, so this tutorial will be focused on GIMP while people using Photoshop can still use the same technique to create this wallpaper..

The wallpaper I created has been inspired by Mac Aqua series of wallpaper.. Since I am using GNU OS I dedicate my 1′st wallpaper to my Operating System . i.e. Kubuntu 8.04..

In this tutorial we will focus to create a wallpaper like this..

Gimp is a multi platform Image Editor available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.. So you can use tutorial on any OS.. So lets get started …

GIMP 2.4.4 and Animation Package 2.4.0 Now Available.

The GIMP Animation Package, or GAP, is a collection of plug-ins that extend GIMP with capabilities to create and edit animations. The 2.4.0 version of the GIMP Animation Package is a bug-fix release that makes GAP usable with GIMP 2.4.x releases.A new release for the stable branch of GIMP, version 2.4.4, was released along with the GIMP Animation Package 2.4.0. You should know that this version of GIMP is a bugfix release and no new features were added.

New features in GIMP 2.4.4:

• A typo in stock icon name was fixed
• The handling of PSD files with empty layer names now works normally.
• Merged TinyScheme bug-fixes

GIMP 2.2.17:The ultimate Ps replacement!

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

Features and Capabilities:

Painting

1. Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
2. Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
3. Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
4. Supports custom brushes and patterns

System

• Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
• Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time

Advanced Manipulation

• Full alpha channel support
• Layers and channels
• Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
• Editable text layers
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
• Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy and intelligent
• Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
• Transformable paths, transformable selections.
• Quickmask to paint a selection and more…

Bugs fixed in GIMP 2.2.17:

1. Fixed regression in PSD load plug-in (bug #456042)
2. Fixed crash when loading a corrupt PSD file (bug #327444)
3. Work around for Pango appending ” Not-Rotated” to font names

Download: Gimp 2.2.17