Club Linux Coffs Harbour

It's just been brought to my attention that the Coffs Coast Community College is offering courses this semester in OpenOffice.org and the GIMP, led by one David Bryant, a familiar face to ClubLinux regulars. Well done David! I would advise anybody interested to enrol ASAP.

Tired of having to manually rotate an image every time you take a photo in portrait orientation? This screenshot, from a CVS (ie. not yet officially released) version of the GIMP speaks for itself:

 

I am trying the question and answers for the first time...I had to find out that one question had been answered and I just could not find the answer.  Our man Matthew put me on the right track...Thank you Matthew.

GIMP Question:   When saving a photo from GIMP after resizing or other work, what 'file' or format should it be saved in to make it suitable to send to most other operating systems.

Deadfrog

What is a File Format?

A file format is essentially the set of rules for turning information into zeroes and ones and vice versa.

See Wikipedia's article on file formats.

Proprietary Formats

A proprietary file  format is one where this set of rules is not freely useable by everybody, for one or more reasons such as:

• Trade Secrets
• Software Patents
• DRM/DMCA

Document FormatsRecommended

• ASCII/Unicode text. Most applications will have an option for saving files as "plain text"; some will allow you to specify the character encoding used. ASCII is the oldest, simplest, and most widely supported (which is why it is the standard used by Project Gutenberg), although it's support for languages other than English is minimal. Unicode is a set of different plaint text character encodings designed to address this issue. ISO 8859 is another often-used character encoding that is generally considered to have been superceded by Unicode. Document formats which are based on plain text, such as SGML and XML document types, by necessity use one of these character encodings. UTF-8 appears to be the Unicode variant recommended for most purposes (anybody disagree?).
• PDF. An open standard developed by Adobe Systems. It's often called "Adobe Acrobat format", which creates the misleading impression that proprietary software is required to use it, so please avoid that term. Where in the past it would have been possible to recommend the use of PDF without reservation, it appears that Adobe is up to something with regards to licensing either non-standard extensions to PDF, or ideas in the standard PDF specification which may or may not be covered by patents.

A good selection of tutorials for photographers.

The Official GIMP User Manual (PDF format).

Learn the GIMP from the basics to advanced techniques.