I just recently purchased Wacom Intuos4 drawing pad and played around it with GIMP (Xubuntu 9.1). There were some quirks and such to get it somewhat work (well, the table is recognized out-of-box, but to set buttons, pressure and such to make something sensible was a totally different question), but that's another story.
There are some missing features, and - umh - interestingly working features in GIMp with drawing pad, so I downloaded the sources and I'm going to look, if I can correct some things by myself. First question is, of course, do you know if anyone else has worked with GIMP w/ drawing pad tools?
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GIMP tools have "pressure" checkboxes, by which you can change what attribute is changed by pressure level. Well, there are some things:
- Many times the pressure setting is just too little. For example, if you set pressure to enlarge paintbrush size, you get almost nothing (just a little bit larger spot when pressing harder). There is a need for setting paintbrush pressure so that when you press lightly, you get very thin line (like in real paintbrush), and pressing a little bit harder makes it heavily "oversized". The normal level (matching the brush size you selected) would be used when you are pressing the pen "normally"
- You definitely need a pressure curve to a tool. Paintbrushes have different shapes, and for example airbrush would be better with inversed "cone-shape", so that the lighter you press, the larger (and lighter) is the brush, and pressing harder makes the brush smaller and the color thinner.
- Tying pressure to color is broken, it works upside-down; the more you press, the lighter is the color :)
Do you know, if anything like that is under development? I probably mess around with GIMP sources and pressure things for awhile, but if there are some others playing around with the same subject, I would appreciate to hear it :)
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The another annoying feature with GIMp and drawing pad is that is just much too hard to make tool sets for various purposes.
I first explain how I draw with paper and colored pens, crayons, water and oil colors. When I'm drawing with color pens, I have a set of pens in my left hand to change them quickly. The situation is the same with crayons. With lead pencils, I usually have a set of them (harder and softer) in my left hand. With oil paints, I usually make a "palette" to a canvas, by bursting paint to some areas and tipping the paintbrush (or knife) in those spots; when finishing the painting, I just smear those colors to background.
I was thinking that I could implement something like that to GIMP, too, some kind of a "quick tool box" for storing predefined tool settings, and with a palette to tip a color.
GIMP tool option saving does not work how I think it should work. I saved tool settings one-by-one, with names like "ink", "crayon", "watercolor", but whenever I'm drawing and I change the tool, I need to revert it to the same set I'm drawing with.
Furthermore, tool setting reverts too much (for me), since it stores brush size and color, and whenever I change the set or tool, I need to change those.
The question is that do you know, if anyone has made some plugins or modifications for GIMP with drawing pad? What would you think, could I do those changes as plugin, or do I need to modify the GIMP core code?
Any suggestions and comments are highly welcome, thanks in advance!
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