Better Scientific Presentations

In the previous post I showed some examples that used this typee of "comic book dots". The technique is  called halftones. In this post I want to show how to do this background using Gimp 2.10. Thee background is made of three parts: A grayscale gradient, halftones, and the coloring.   The halftones are the result of applying the distort filter newsprint in Gimp. Note that the application of this filter on either white (#FFFFFF) or black (#000000) does not yield any dots. The resulting dots of a gradient between light greys are back on white background. Below thee gradient goes from 100% white to 85% white: Note the offset and the starting point at the middle of the image. Now for the halftones. The default on my Gimp is lines, so I had to change it to circles. Also note that the dot size is worth playing with: And finally the coloring. This is done by a second layer with the layer mode set to Addition. All this gives this: If you want a stronger dots make the gradient ru...

Before After Sometimes scientific presentations include screeshots and text is highlighted by drawing box around it and either filling it it blank or a semi transparent fill. In fact, yesterday I was just about to do that but then I decided to open Gimp and  apply some layering techniq ue . The results? For black text the natural option is the Addition Layer. For the blue text HSL Color works best. Here is a quick run down. 1. File > Create > From Clipboard 2. If the layers dialog isn't showing press Ctrl + L  or in Mac Command + L.  3. Create a new transparent layer Shift + Ctrl + N or in Mac Shift + Command + N. 4. If the toolbox dialog isn't showing press Ctrl +  B and click on the rectangular select tool or press R. 5. Make sure the newly create layer is selected. In it draw a box over the text you want to highlight. You don't  need to be so precise. 6. Open the color picker dialog and select the highligh color. After you are happy with your selectio...

Slideware doesn't always offer the right features to visualize presentations. In this post I present  Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender, 3 free multi-platform applications to take your visuals to the next level.   Slideware offers limited features to create that diagram that you want, or to manipulate that image in the way you want.  But you don't have to settle for that ugly looking diagram or unwanted photo effect, let the multi-platform Open Source Software help you. Maybe you have heard about The GIMP, which is a similar application to Adobe Photoshop. If you haven't, take a look here .  Gimp is free and runs in Windows, Linux, and Mac ... and it is powerful. It is so powerful that it can be intimidating. From all of the free resource to learn how to use it, or to bring it to the next level I recommend these two sites: Grokking the GIMP is a book available online and can be downloaded. Meet the GIMP is an excellent blog on GIMP with tutorials and articles. ...