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Nineteen

Chapter


 

An introduction to filters

A short description of how filters generally work in Gimp.

 

Plug-ins

When an ordinary Photoshop user thinks of plug-ins, things like Eye Candy and Kai's power tools come to his or her mind. Gimp plug-ins do the same; they permit the user to add extra features to Gimp. With features, we mean filters, printer drivers, mail interfaces, save/write modules etc. This is also true for Photoshop and similar Windows programs. As far as we know, the Gimp is highly modularized, so nearly every function beside basic Gimp stuff has to be done by plug-ins.

Many Gimp users/developers have made Gimp plug-ins, which are available to the Gimp community. We encourage you to do the same. If you have made your own plug-in, submit it to the Gimp community under GPL license! It will make Gimp even greater.

In these chapters, we will discuss the filters menu, and we will call these filters plug-ins, because that's what most people think of when the hear the word plug-in. The Script-Fu image menu is similar to the filters menu because these Script-Fu's can be applied as ordinary filters to your image. You'll find that you can make your own filters quite easily, without expert knowledge of C programming and GTK libraries.

Since plug-ins and Scripts develop rapidly in the Gimp community we at Frozenriver can't keep this chapter as updated as we would like to do, so we encourage developers to send us a mail about their new or changed plug-in so we have a easier job updating this chapter. In Chapter 41 you'll find some tips on how to compile plug-ins. When we use the term image we mean (most of the time) both image and drawable. It can also be wise to visit the filter developers home pages to get uptodate information about the filter.

In this chapter and following filter chapters we'll often use the same pictures when we want to show the result of the filter: two colored images and one grayscale. The screen dump of the plug-in dialogs and their value isn't necessarily the same as we used to generate the outcome. The reason for this is that we sometimes like to exaggerate a bit so you can really see what the filter does.

Extracted pic [1]

The main categories

In the filter menu you'll find the following sub-menus, which also groups the plug-ins by function.

Notice the handy short cuts; Shift+Alt+F to bring up the last plug-in you used (if you haven't reassigned the short cut), and Alt+F to apply the last filter once more.

 


The Gimp User Manual
Last modified: 19 May 1998

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