February 19, 2011
I previously mentioned that I was playing with Gimp 2.7.2 after having compiled it without any Windows resource file utilization.
Well, now I have finally decided to take the plunge and see if I could work with Gimp 2.7.2 that I compiled myself. So far, I am not having any problems other than some slowness that is probably a result of the fact that I did not optimize the build. Well, c'est la vie. Considering that I have 8 gigs of RAM, I am OK with the slight lag that I am experiencing. However, it will be nice when I am fully optimized.
In the meantime, I decided to play with compiling the Gimp plugins that I use most often. I am happy to report that I was able to compile the wavelet family of plugins. These are my favorites given that they are so handy for portraits.
One point to note: The new version of Gimp has a new application programming interface (API).
Gimp 2.7.2 Plugins
As promised before, I have now compiled some plugins for Gimp 2.7.2 which you may find useful. Please note that these are made available without any warranty or guarantees. They work for me but it is not certain that they will work for you. If you find them useful and they do work for you, please consider mentioning it in the Gimp registry forum so others can benefit from your experience, or drop me a line.
Note that these have been compiled with x86_64-w64-mingw32 gcc 4.4.5 on a system running Msys with Gimp version 2.7.2.
Liquid Scaling
You can download the Gimp Liquid plugin from the left sidebar. This plugin is version 1.0.4 which requires the included liquid rescale library. You will need to unzip this somewhere. Then for installation do the following: Copy the DLL liblqr-1-0.dll to the main Gimp bin directory. On Windows 7 64-bit, if you have used the standard location for installation, this should be C:\Program Files\Gimp 2.7\bin. Next copy the file gimp-lqr-plugin.exe into the plugin directory. This would be C:\Program Files\Gimp 2.7\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins. You will need to find the appropriate locations in your system if the above are not your default locations.
You will need to restart Gimp and you should find the liquid plugin under the Layer menu heading.
Wavelet Related
One of the most useful plugins that I end up using repeatedly is the wavelet family of plugins. They are made available by user Marcor here. The wavelet family consist of 3 very useful plugins: Decompose, Sharpen, and Denoise.
As I mentioned above, Gimp has a new API.so, I had to modify wavelet-decompose to accomodate the new API. Fortunately, it is the only that need to be modified. The other 2 compiled fine. Well, here are the new compiled plugins as I promised (see sidebar). The installation is the same as before. Simply unzip the file somewhere and copy the exe files to your local plugin directory. Usually, this would be C:\Users\yourhomedirectory\.gimp2.7\plug-ins\ or to the main Gimp plug-in which is usually C:\Program Files\Gimp 2.7\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins.
