Hello, Michael

As for me, it would be nice to tell potential GIMP users how to process their digital camera images. The growth of digital cameras use is rising a problem of post-processing to novice users who do not own proprietary professional tools like Photoshop. So if they see GIMP as a solution to their problems and needs it can increase the GIMP user base greatly.

Of course, there are various techniques described at different sites, but these are not located in one place and many of them are advanced techniques which require high background knowledge of GIMP and image processing.

If one can propose some framework how to process digital camera images with GIMP from the beginning (download GIMP for Windows from the site..., GIMP for Linux from ...) as some work flow of items, it could be helpful.

There are a few items to be described in this article: 1. Work flow: the order of processing. 2. Typical operation: WB (levels) - detailed description to the novice user, cropping, scaling (how to set the best algorithm), sharpness, red eye removing (my preferable method is the tone-saturation tool), noise reduction and so on.

The advanced user may be interested in opening of RAW images from the digital camera. This can involve the description of dcraw and rawphoto utilities (with links to Linux and Windows versions). Also a few images shown will be nice.

This is my IMHO :).

Dear Michael,

Take a look at the tutorials on www.gimp.org, especially the ones related to photo retouching. These are currently written for older versions of GIMP. What you can do is to convert them to work with GIMP 2.2, and submit patches for the tutorials, and also publish these tutorials with examples in your magazine (be ware of copyright issues.. clear it up first). This will both make the tutorials on gimp.org current, and also make more of the public aware that "this is possible with the GIMP."

The tutorials you write for Linux Format, you could even try sharing with gimp.org so that visitors to gimp.org could read them. This email probably sounds very selfish as it's gimp.org centric rather than Linux Format centric, but you get attribution for your work and you'll be reaching more GIMP users.

PS: I work for Xinit Systems (one of your advertisers) and I do read your articles sometimes, and I really suggest you contribute these to gimp.org (check out the current tutorials first and see how yours can fit in).
Mukund

On Tue, 2004-12-14 at 21:58 -0600, Michael J. Hammel wrote:

First, a little background:
I've been writing a column for LinuxFormat (a UK magazine) for about a year and half now. It is mostly about GIMP but every so often I cover other topics like Inkscape or Ming (the Flash API) pr CSS or other graphics related topics.

I've also started work on a column for another magazine, Tux Magazine, which will be published by SSC (the Linux Journal publisher) starting in February. This column, too, will focus on GIMP and desktop graphics issues for the end user.

Now on to the real issue: After having written about GIMP almost non-stop since about 1996 (countless articles and two books) I'm starting to run dry on topics. The magazines seem to be happy with my work, but I get almost no feedback from readers so it's hard to tell if the articles are useful or not. And with two columns on the subject it's getting hard to not cover the same thing twice in a short period of time.

What I need to know is what readers want - what problems do they have using GIMP, what techniques do they want to learn, what projects are they trying to work on? Where and what do you need help with? The only requirement for these two magazines is that the questions are about using GIMP on Linux (I couldn't help with detailed stuff on Windows anyway since I don't use that platform) and that they are generally more end-user oriented than developer oriented articles. I also try to cover both 1.2 and 2.0 since there are still a lot of users out there who have not upgraded.

While I can't offer a free copy of the magazine (I don't carry that much clout) I can offer to give you thanks in the columns for your suggestions (assuming the publisher doesn't have a problem with that, which I don't think they will though I still need to clear it with them).

So, if anyone has suggestions for topics related to GIMP please send them my way. If you have a favorite plugin you think should be covered or a tool that needs explaining or a "How did they do this?" question about some image made with Photoshop, let me know. I can even throw in the occasional interview of "important person X" if you think that would be interesting - you supply the name of "X". :-)

I'll do my best to answer as much as I can.

Many thanks, and happy GIMP'ing.