I have my kids to blame, that is certain. There I was, last Christmas, in this auditorium, listening to the crunching of popcorn from my son on my left, and the slurping of soda from my daughter on the right, trying to behave like a responsible father. The lights had dimmed and we were being inflicted with the inevitable advertisements and trailers. When, at last, the fan fair that accompanied the main feature at the cinema trumpeted out of the speakers an anticipating hush spread around the audience. Even my daughter took a break from her munching. The opening titles burst on the screen announcing the continuing adventures of a big green troll and his donkey friend. Shrek 2 had begun!

Filmmakers use of free software

I confess—I enjoyed it. Films that promote escapism in a professional and enjoyable way always go down with me, but this film also gave me satisfaction knowing that it epitomises the successful model of free software. It is a well-documented fact that Dreamworks used Linux machines to produce the IT power to render the film, and they built on free software to create the products to do so. Many other animation film studios in California have gone down the same route. This is an example of free software at work. The benefit to the studios is obvious—to be able to produce higher quality work for lower price. The benefit to my kids is also evident in their enjoyment of their evening’s entertainment and—yes I admit it—mine too.

However, the studios can only do this because they have the millions to spend on developing the free software to produce the high quality animations. Also, as they do not distribute the software, they have no obligation to publish their enhancements to the world. It is their right under the license to do so, and I for one, do not have a problem with that. This does mean, however, that mere mortals like you and me are denied the opportunity to create a masterpiece of fantasy filming with wonderful characters of the same high standards, though being honest, apart from the lack of software there’s still the possibility I could lack the cinematic skills to pull such a project off. Whatever the reason I (and probably you) need to set our sights lower as far as computer generated art is concerned.

Horses for courses

There are those in this world who have enormous amounts of expertise in image manipulation, who live to adjusting their photographs so all unwanted flaws are eliminated and all slightly off colours are corrected, even to such detail that is not distinguishable to the naked eye, just so someone glancing at their work would find their life subconsciously enhanced by examining something so pleasing to the eye. These people, in the free software world, talk about “3D imaging in blender” and “gimp scripting” and other mysteries. Then you have people like me. When these image experts go on about the various detailed attributes of pictures you can witness my eyes glaze over and then you can watch the conversation soar above my head. Should a photograph be taken of me at that point the print would almost certainly show my eyes to be red, though in that case it is unlikely to be the “Red Eye Effect” photographers like to talk about but rather that they are simply bloodshot.

Detailed image manipulation and expert minutia picture enhancements is beyond the scope of this article. I am instead focusing on a simpler art. The ability to produce simple charts, diagrams and pictures in documents, or creating simple logos to cheer up an otherwise dull article. It is worth emphasizing that cheering it up is what it does. Almost every article in this magazine is punctuated by small pictures and diagrams, and in fact, I believe I would not be letting out any secrets by informing you the editors of this magazine are unhappy accepting articles unless they have sufficient artwork scattered throughout them. A magazine that simply presents pages of tightly typed words may have rich content but it is a struggle to read. Pictures and diagrams, even irrelevant ones, break the monotony of a page and make the intake by the reader a more enjoyable experience.

Pictures and diagrams, even irrelevant ones, break the monotony of a page and make the intake by the reader a more enjoyable experience

An unrelated picture placed here makes this article nicer to look at

Art programs for the non-expert

This leads to questions like “What free software products are out there for me?” and “Which one is best for what I want to do?”. To contribute an answer to these questions, I would like to go through some of the products I have used to generate pictures, leaflets and illustrations sharing my experiences of them with you.

OpenOffice.org Draw

I surprisingly use this a lot. Although not a drawing tool as such—more of a desktop publisher—it’s often all I need to produce my materials. For most of the artwork I need to produce, the photos or pictures already exist and all that is needed is for them to be arranged with appropriate arrows, lines and captions. OpenOffice.org Draw is more than up to this task, and I find it both intuitive and simple to use. It can also handle the creation of simple charts and diagrams, which can also be integrated into a document. Where OpenOffice.org Draw scores very well though is when a number of images, diagrams and charts from different sources need to be combined to create an overall picture.

Spreadsheet applications like Gnumeric and OpenOffice.org Calc are ideal for quickly generating graphs and charts from data. It is a relatively trivial exercise to enter headings and a figure into a table, select it and click on the chart icon, then after playing about with a few settings in a pop up box you can create an eye-catching method of making your point.