6.3 Image Editing | Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks

The GIMP (http://www.gimp.org) is one of the best-known open source image manipulation programs. You can get a build for Mac OS X from Fink (see Chapter 11). With the GIMP, you can create drawings, touch up photographs you've taken, convert images, and do much more.

You can even use the GIMP as iPhoto's default image editor. To do this, use the Script Editor ( /Applications/AppleScript ) to create the following AppleScript, and save it as an Application named /Applications/LaunchGIMP :

 on open all_images   repeat with image in all_images     (* replace colons with slashes, prefix path with /Volumes *)     do shell script "perl -e '$f=shift; $f =~ s/:/\//g;  " &         "print \"/Volumes/$f\";' \"" & image & "\""     set image to the result     (* set the X11 DISPLAY variable, and launch gimp-remote *)     do shell script "DISPLAY=:0.0; export DISPLAY;  " &       "/sw/bin/gimp-remote -n \"" & image & "\""   end repeat   tell application "X11" to activate end open

Next , go to iPhoto's Preferences window (iPhoto Preferences, or -,) and follow these steps:

In the Double-Click section, click on the radio button next to "Opens in other".
Click on the Select button.
Choose LaunchGIMP as the application.
Close the Preferences window ( -W).
Quit iPhoto ( -Q).

When you relaunch iPhoto, you will be able to use the GIMP as your image editing tool the next time you select an image file for editing.

Although gimp-remote's -n option is supposed to launch a new GIMP session if one is not already running, we got a spurious error message indicating the iPhoto image file was not found.

However, if GIMP was already running when we double-clicked the image, this script worked just fine. So, if you want to use GIMP as your iPhoto photo editor, be sure to launch GIMP before you start iPhoto.

There is a modified version of the GIMP, CinePaint (http://cinepaint. sourceforge .net/) that is designed to meet the needs of film professionals. It has been used in the Harry Potter movies, Scooby Doo , and other movies. CinePaint was originally known as Film GIMP, and an earlier version was available through Fink at the time of this writing. Check out the CinePaint web site for the latest version.