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Every fall I teach an Internet development online course.\u00a0 One activity in the class deals with creating simple graphics for web pages: banner, background, transparency,\u00a0animated gif and graphical buttons.<\/p>\nEvery fall I teach an Internet development online course.\u00a0 One activity in the class deals with creating simple graphics for web pages: banner, background, transparency,\u00a0animated gif and graphical buttons.<\/p>\n
These graphics are placed on a web site developed as part of the course.\u00a0 I don’t cover specific use of programs: FrontPage, DreamWeaver, PhotoShop, etc.\u00a0 The students are free to use whatever is available to them.\u00a0 The web development side is never a problem.\u00a0 I know enough about most HTML editors\u00a0that I can\u00a0help students through most problems that are unique to each editor.<\/p>\n
Graphics are a different story.\u00a0 Few students have a good graphics program or the knowledge of using one.\u00a0 I can’t ask them to go out and buy a $70 copy of PaintShop Pro let alone a copy of PhotoShop.<\/p>\n
This year I decided to try GIMP<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s a free, open source, photo retouching, image composition and image authoring program.\u00a0 It is as close as you can\u00a0get to PhotoShop without spending any money.<\/p>\n There was only one problem with my plan; I\u00a0had never used GIMP before.\u00a0 I was\u00a0sure I\u00a0had downloaded and installed it several times, but I\u00a0had never spend an hour trying to use it to create something.<\/p>\n I blocked out a little time and dove in.\u00a0 I was surprised how easy it was to do fairly sophisticated image editing.\u00a0 Within two hours I had created all the graphics for the class activity.\u00a0 On top of that, I felt good enough about my skills that I did an interactive session with my class and showed them how to use the GIMP.\u00a0 I prefaced the session with, “I have only used this program for two hours, so I might not be able to answer questions about advanced use of the tools.”<\/p>\n It went pretty well.\u00a0 I recorded the session in Elluminate so it could be reviewed as the students worked with the software.<\/p>\n The GIMP web site has many tutorials<\/a>.\u00a0 I reviewed\u00a0some of them as I learned how to use GIMP to create an animated GIF (the only thing I couldn’t figure out on my own).\u00a0 The tutorials are divided into Beginner, Intermediate and Expert.<\/p>\n For a free program, the GIMP is a great application.\u00a0 Many of the processes used in GIMP are identical to those used in PhotoShop.\u00a0 For a student, it’s a powerful program to learn the basics of image manipulation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every fall I teach an Internet development online course.\u00a0 One activity in the class deals with creating simple graphics for web pages: banner, background, transparency,\u00a0animated gif and graphical buttons. These graphics are placed on a web site developed as part … Continue reading