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Happy happy joy joy
Bah. I'm not getting any LJ notifies and LJ has dorked at least one of my icons, replacing it with two bald strangers hugging each other. I deleted it. Is anyone else having trouble?
Humbug. I don't rate an invitation to the office Christmas party though contractors directly paid by the company do.
Greg isn't getting that trip to Germany either, at least this year. Surprise, surprise. He's going to Singapore for 10 days next week instead to do the work there. I'd go too and spend some time in Malaysia but the notice is too short to get off work and the person I work most with is away in the UK for 5 weeks starting about that time. Sigh. I'm just hoping for a holiday up north early next year as we totally missed out this year.
Oh, well. The sun is shining outside. It's so beautiful, I'll have to resist the lure of my book and go for a walk at lunchtime.
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You shouldn't delete the icons. Everyone else is having problems with them too, but they will eventually revert back to your normal ones... LJ has physically moved and here (http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_maintenance/108728.html) is the explanation for the pic misery... damn it, I've done some spiffy icons but can't upload them properly/get them to show properly on LJ's server. The Cally-rage manip I did I had to post to my webdump instead, plus some other stuff.
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And yay for GIMP!:)
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I'm sure that there's more than one way to do it, depending on how you want to treat your image.
Here's one: say you just want a 1-pixel border around the icon, what I usually do is this:
1. Select -> all
2. Select -> shrink (and tell it to shrink by 1)
3. Select -> invert (giving a 1-pixel selection all around the edge of the image)
4. bucket fill the selection (I usually do this in a new, transparent layer)
Another way of doing it would be this:
1. Script-fu -> Decor -> add border
This gives you a bevelled border of a given colour and thickness around the edge of the image. This command adds the border around the image so that the whole image gets bigger, which is why I don't tend to use it for icons, since I'm usually already working at 100x100.
There's also
Script-fu -> Decor -> fuzzy border
which gives you a fuzzy border; this one doesn't grow the image, it puts the fuzzy border over the existing image. One nice thing about this command is that it gives you the option to (a) work on a copy of your image and (b) flatten or not flatten the image. I like to have it work on a copy and not flatten the image, then if I like the border, I just copy it back over to the original image (just a level of paranoia I suppose).
The way I got my "slightly bevelled" look in the bear icon I made for
If you want to just "set the BG colour and resize the canvas", a similar method of doing that in Gimp would be
1. set the BG colour (to what you want)
2. Image -> Canvas Size
and change the size there to make the image size larger. However, what Gimp does by default (and I think it's reasonable) is that if the image size has been made larger, the extra background stuff is transparent. All the layers still remain at the old image size, unless you explicitly do
3. Layer -> Layer to Image Size
Which means, to get a new coloured border, you do that to the bottom layer, which will expand that layer with the new background colour in the "grown" bits.
Which I didn't actually know until just now, when I tried it.
and also put a border round text / a layer
There's more than one way to do it...
One can select something (if I want to select text, I usually use select-by-colour, since the text will be the only thing of that colour in that text layer). Generally it's a good idea to have the border in a new, separate layer (so you can turn it on and off and decide if you really want it, as well as being able to do effects on it), and of course make it a transparent layer.
I can think of two things one could do after that;
Select -> Border
(which turns the selection into a border)
or
Select -> Grow
which enables you to do a bucket fill in the new border layer, and then do stuff to said border. This is the way I usually do borders around text. Often I do a
Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur
on the border layer, to make a fuzzy border around things.
Note the text in my Giles icon, the text is black, but has a white fuzzy border around it. Wheras in my TARDIS icon, the text has a non-fuzzy border around it.
This is also the classic method of making shadows. The only difference between a shadow, and a fuzzy border made this way is that with a shadow, you then use the Move tool to move the layer to the right and down in order to make it look like a shadow. Which you will also see in the Giles icon, if you look carefully, on the edges of the "photo". It's more clear in my Anachronism icon, where there's more shadows.
And distort a layer (e.g. make text fit the width of an icon)?
Well... if you want to make text fit the width of an icon, it's a far better idea to just change the font-size of the text, surely?
Or else I'm misunderstanding what it is you're wanting to do.
However, if you want to enlarge or shrink a layer, you can use
Layer -> Scale Layer
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Well... if you want to make text fit the width of an icon, it's a far better idea to just change the font-size of the text, surely?
I was trying to add text to an icon to fit across the bottom, and 8 was too small and 9 too wide. I suppose I could experiment with fonts but I wanted that one. [pout] Maybe I could do it in the big image then rescale. I'll try tonight.
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However if you are going to rescale the font... I'm not sure which level of rescaling is better, actually.
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I think I had it easier because I had less to unlearn. The main image program I used before The Gimp was Micrografx Picture Publisher, and I'm not sure that it even had layers (at that time, anyway).
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Are you still working in the city area - I was thinking it would be nice to catch up and have lunch with you before Christmas. :-)
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Where do you suggest? Do you know any good places? There are quite a few interesting-looking ones on Khyber Pass and I heard the pub (Cock and Bull) is good.
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I thought it might be an old post because I'm getting lots of them right now.
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12? 12:30? I guess if the pub's full (being Friday) we can easily find somewhere else.
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