Scalable Brushes In GIMP 2.4

October 28, 2007 in Tools by Vyoma | 1 comment

The major grief with GIMP has been that you cannot scale the brushes. And that meant that when you created custom brushes for GIMP, you had to create them for various sizes – depending on what image resolution and sizes you were working on. Such a feature was only available in other commercial software like Photoshop or Painter.

Scalable Brushes in GIMP 2.4Not any more. The latest release, GIMP 2.4 has scalable brushes. That means that you just need to create a brush in one size, and as you use it you would be able to scale it to any size on the fly.

The tool options now include a brush size slider that affects both the parametric and bitmap brushes. This has been an oft-requested feature from both digital painters and photo editors.

Unlike previous versions of GIMP, regardless of whether you’re using a bitmap brush, parametric brush or even a picture tube (mutiple bitmaps), you can easily set the brush size with either the tool options dock slider or an external device such as a MIDI slider or knob or a USB device like the Griffin Powermate.

Read about all the other features included in the release notes of GIMP 2.4.

This is a major feature that I am very happy about. I have been experimenting a lot on custom brushes lately for digital painting, and this ’scratches a lot of itches’.This feature will save you the hassle of creating custom brushes at various sizes. For example, if I had to make a leaf brush, I would earlier do it at various sizes like 30 px, 40 px, 50 px, 70 px and up – depending on how large a canvas I was working on. Now, I guess I will just have to make one and sliding the ‘Scale’ option of the brush, I can adjust it to whatever I want during the painting process.

I guess, I would be exploring a bit more on custom brushes – so expect some write up here soon.

(Credit goes to Arun Sasidharan for getting this news to me first).