Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Your Script-fu is better than mine

I have recently become addicted to the /r/picrequests subreddit on Reddit.com. This has lead to learning the art of colorizing b&w photographs, improving my photo touch up skills, and discovering more about my image editor of choice, the GIMP.

The GIMP has very nice scripting capabilities built into it. It's original scripting language, Script-fu, is based on Scheme. I have read tutorials on creating Script-fu scripts before, and have played briefly with the GIMP's built in scripting console, but never really figured out how things worked. Last week I was browsing through the /r/GIMP subreddit, and ran across a thread which described a manual process for creating a pixel dot mask for your image--a simplistic version of the early newspaper/print halftone dot look.

The described manual process is pretty straight forward, and as mentioned on the thread, perfect for scripting. I've always found it easier to dig in and learn a new language when I have a problem to solve, and this seemed like the perfect "problem" to solve while learning the GIMP's Script-fu system. My first GIMP script can now be found on the GIMP Plugin Registry website.