Notes from MerriLUG, 17-May-2007: Máirín Duffy on Graphics on Linux

[Ted Roche]

Twenty-one attendees made it for the May meeting of the Merrimack Valley
Linux User Group, MerriLUG, meeting on the third Thursday of the month
upstairs at Martha's Exchange in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Heather Brodeur mc'd the meeting, ran through a few announcements. We
had  a brief round of introductions, including several new people -
Welcome! - and got on with the main presentation.

Máirín Duffy presented "Graphics on Linux." She brought a handout [1]
that listed the killer Open Source graphics applications: Inkscape, The
Gimp, Scribus, Krita, Blender and a batch of "Others" including Agave,
ImageMagick, Fyre, K Icon Editor, F-Spot, gLabels and Dia, and provided
brief explanations of what each could be used for and which commercial
products they could be compared with.

Máirín's main presentation was "How to Iconize Your Boss," but her
presentation was flexible and she welcomed interaction with the
audience. We did a little bit of digital picture manipulation, and she
demonstrated remarkable facility with the tools (I guess she does this
in her day job at Red Hat) in taking a picture and working the digital
information to improve the contrast, bring details up out of the
shadows, shift the color emphasis of an image and more. We then moved on
to iconizing a digital photo into a "HackerGotchi" headshot, primarily
using The Gimp. It was an impressive display of talent as well as a
great display of some of the capabilities of The Gimp. Several attendees
mentioned afterwards how pleased they were to see someone _using_
applications on Linux, rather than our usual shows of hacking Linux or
doing geeky things like firewalls.

Máirín had a followup: "Another thing I mentioned to some folks was a
recent column we started in Red Hat Magazine on working with open source
creative tools ("The Open Palette"):

http://www.redhatmagazine.com/category/design/

"If there are any specific things I went over that folks would like to
know more about in depth, do let me know and I can use it as a topic for
a future article!" You can reach Máirín at duffy at redhat.com

Thanks to  Máirín for a great presentation, Heather and Jim for
organizing and announcing it, to Martha's Exchange for the use of the
facilities, and to all for attending and participating.

[1] Handout:
http://people.redhat.com/duffy/graphic_goodies/handouts/foss-visual_design_tools.pdf

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com