Gimp interface overhaul

It seems Gimp's interface will be changed to a single window interface. I for one won't be against that change. I'm using Ion because I can't organise windows that clutter my desktop, so you can imagine how much I like Gimp's multiple windows: on for the image, one for the tools, one for the layers, one for the currunt tool's settings, etc, etc.

Krita: the reconciliation

After the miserable failure of yesterday, I was again forced to use graphics design software and I launched the gimp. It was a very bad start as when I added text to the image I was editing, the text appeared garbled. I went over to Krita. There it worked fine, houray! And I even found the brush! It's hidden behind the broken line icon, the first of the list and tooltiped "Draw freehand".

When I wanted to save it as gif however, it failed. It seems Krita in Ubuntu doesn't have support for GIFs because Krita uses graphicsmagick, a fork of imagemagick that won't be included in Ubuntu anytime soon. Free software is great, but it has its problems too... The solution was to use ImageMacgick's convert. Did you know it's as easy as

convert image.gif image.png

?

As Krita doesn't have support for animated GIFs, I've had to use the gimp anyway. And I again encountered a problem with the gimp: to be able to specify the delay between 2 frames of the animated GIF, I had first to do a "save as". A simple save didn't do the trick.

Anyway, now the Profoss finally has usable banners. Take a look!

The Gimp and Krita

Warning: this can be considered as a rant, needed needed to get back to a normal state after 2 frustrating hours of work with the gimp and krita

I tried to make a banner for the Profoss, and failed miserably. I had a template, and just had to fill in the text. But the background was a bit too dark on the right, and I wanted to make it lighter but gradually, as the left was fine. It was impossible (for me) to find a way to do that (there was a pattern in the background), so I went for a plain background.

The main reason of the failure is I'm not a designer. It's not that I'm a bad designer, I'm worse than that. But combined with unintuitive tools as The Gimp and Krita, it ended up in a catastrophe. Here are examples:

• in Gimp, I ended up not being able to draw with the brush anymore. I had done it 10 minutes earlier, but when I tried again I couldn't. I searched if there was a selection, if I was on a bad layer, but I couldn't change its behaviour to doing what I wanted: draw with the brush
  
• in Krita I didn't even find the brush tool!
• I didn't find the option to add text with the border of the letters in another color than the body of the letter. This is easy to do with Inkscape eg, but doesn't seem possible with those tools.

Is is me that is not understanding the tools, or is such a frustrating experience normal with these tools for a beginner like me? Whatever the reason, I don't even want to know it: I won't try the experience again anytime soon....