GIMP

For many years, plugins have extended the basic functions of GIMP. Karsten Günther pick the ones he thinks you shouldn’t be without.

Credit: http://gimp.org

OUR EXPERT

Karsten Günther loves to extend his GIMP installations with useful plugins. And playing with the new tools…

Texturize creates textures from existing images (or the material in a selection, if available). These textures can also be used as seamless patterns. Each call of the function creates a new, unique pattern.

Quickly done: create a selection and use Heal Selection to apply Resynthesizer, and the selected area is repaired. Alternatively, you can fill a transparent corner with suitable material.

Many of the most important plugins presented here are quite old, but they are still maintained and sometimes even developed further. Depending on the distribution, the plugins we describe are available individually or in the form of a complete package – which is then called, for Texturize creates textures f example, gimp-plugin-registry textures can also be used a and combines several plugins. Otherwise, plugins are characterised by simple source code and can usually be compiled by the user without any problems.

Indispensable: Resynthesizer

This relatively old plugin, Resynthesizer (https://github. com/bootchk/resynthesizer) by Lloyd Konneker, is based on a simple idea: in a selected area, pixels are replaced or supplemented by material from the environment, for example to make objects present in the selection disappear. The trick in the replacement is the way in which the algorithm selects and inserts the new pixels. Randomness plays a certain role, which means that the results cannot be completely predicted, but are subject to certain variations. (Of course, this is no different with manual editing.) In many cases, however, the results are already extremely good in the first attempt. However, this algorithm requires a lot of computing time, which prevents a preview from being available. The algorithm underlying Resynthesizer is very interesting, as Konneker explains at https://github.com/bootchk/resynthesizer/wiki/About-the-algorithm/.

The Resynthesizer package consists of several parts: the actual engine, a relatively small C program, a GUI for it and a number of Python wrappers for special tasks. When installing this plugin, therefore, a whole series of new menu entries are created, mainly in the Filter menu, under:

• Enhance: Enlarge & Sharpen, Heal Selection, Heal Transparency, Sharpen By Synthesis and Uncrop.

• Map: Style transfers the ‘style’ of one image to another (see below for more).

• Render: The Texture option makes textures from layers or selections.

• In the Edit menu: Fill With Pattern Seamless.