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Gradients and Warping

Both tools are invoked the same way: You have to choose a direction by putting the mouse in the drawing canvas and moving it with the left button down to select the endpoint.

The Gradient Tool

This tool is of course inspired by the Gimp, so it should be familiar to you and i will not describe the various options here. The gradient tool will respect the current drawing mode and opacity like the drawing tools. You may use gradients in order to create some sort of lightning effects. Gradients are perhaps the most important tool to create cool desktop icons. Here some examples of some application icons for Windowmaker i made with Babygimp.

[Example image] [gradient example 2] [gradient example 3] [gradient example 4]

Such effects are done in a few minutes.

The Warp Tool

The warp tool acts in such a way, that the point where the selection arrow starts is moved to the arrowhead. The surrounding pixels are trsnformed in such a way that the image remains smooth. The warp factor determines, how strong distant regions of the images are affected. The border of the image will be fixed. Example:

[Example] Original

[Example] Warped with low warp factor

[Example] Warped with high warp factor

If you are childish, the warp tool allows you to create funny noses :-) In this example i first cutted the lower part of the face the clipboard (to prevent the mouth from beeing transformed to), then I stretched the nose with the warp tool and then I copied the saved part of the face back (in the background drawing mode). The background was created using ppmforge (of course i used it as a plugin).

[Example Image] (That's not me!)


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