I don't think I'm the most artistic person in the world, but I like to play with stuff like this.

In an earlier entry about editing my avatar, I wrote that I used GIMP. This is an open source image editing application that comes with most Linux distributions but is also available as a static Windows binary. That last part of the sentence basically means it's available for use on Windows.

GIMP can be used to edit things from scratch. In a nutshell, each aspect of an image is done by layering.

It can also be used to clean up or retouch images, such as removing red eyes, adjusting color, removing static, and the like. It can be used to make buttons, labels, borders, etc. I use it all the time to make my charts and other presentations stand out.

One of my amusements is editing various images. Sometimes that involves doing things from scratch. Stuff like my avatar and the backgrounds for my banner.

Sometimes I change existing images around to match my perspective of reality.


Or sometimes I go a little further and turn people into aliens or warp them into caricatures. This one isn't as good as some of my others. Sorry Eddie, yours was the first head shot I saw on the front page. I also looked for a bigger image in your gallery. There goes my mybloggers account...


It can do just about anything with any image. Even if you're not an artsy type.