Gimp Decorator

There is no such product as "Gimp Decorator", but there probably should be.

I was visiting my daughter a few days ago, and she and her husband were trying to hang two pictures behind their couch. Hanging one picture is bad enough - we all know the drill of holding up a picture while our partner stands back and says "No, higher". With two pictures that you want to offset at different heights, this becomes almost impossible, and that's especially true if two people have different opinions about positioning. These two were trying to get by that with taping up pieces of appropriately sized paper, but weren't getting very far.

I suggested using The Gimp - take a picture of the living room wall, take closeups of each picture to be hung, bring all three into the Gimp, scale the two pictures appropriately, and then they could just drag the pictures around until everyone was happy.

My son-in-law had already put X11 on my daughter's MacBook, and of course they use a digital camera, so the longest delay in doing this was downloading the Gimp software. It's been a long time since I've used it, but fortunately my son-in-law is proficient, so he quickly taught my daughter the basics and we had it working very quickly. Unfortunately, they still couldn't agree on exact positioning, but at least now they can print out various options and mull them over.

My daughter also realized that this would be just the thing for redesigning their garden. She had some pictures and was soon busy cutting out plants and moving them around - it's all pretty easy and the results are quite impressive. With just a digital camera and a little effort, you could use the same idea to redesign your kitchen, to shift furniture around virtually, and even help visualize major additions. The Gimp is free software, and runs on Mac, Linux and Windows.

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Tue Jan 9 11:41:54 2007: Subject: http://mike.hostetlerhome.com   MikeHostetler


My wife and I were thinking about painting a wall in our house a deep red but we wanted to get an idea of what it would look like before we did it, with the fireplace, pictures on the wall, etc. So I took a digital photo, and used Gimp to give us an idea.

One you get your head out of the box, it's amazing what you can do with digital photos and GIMP (or Photoshop for those with $$$)



Tue Jan 9 15:48:18 2007: Subject:   BigDumbDinosaur


take a picture of the living room wall, take closeups of each picture to be hung, bring all three into the Gimp, scale the two pictures appropriately, and then they could just drag the pictures around until everyone was happy.

I just use my CAD program. My wife thinks I'm a linear sort of person, so it all makes sense to me.



Wed Oct 8 18:47:32 2008: Subject:   TonyLawrence


I noticed that there is now a native OS X Gimp - no need for X11.

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