Xara Photo Editor

I've never heard of this program, so I wanted to see what it had to access. I personally thought it was more difficult to figure out compared with programs like Google Draw, Photoshop, and Gimp. However, I really liked that it had templates. For example, there were templates to make calendars, scrapbook pages, etc. After playing around with some of the tools, I decided to explore the templates.

I wanted to make a DVD for my family's vacation, so I chose the DVD template. The bottom one is the one I'll actually use. I used the top one just to mess around and explore. On the bottom one all I had to do was change the picture, font, color, and edit the text. It was simple to use. On the top one I tried changing colors, adding shapes, and I tried to make it fun.

Google SketchUp 8

For my activity I used a 3-D modeling application called SketchUp 8.  This was the first time I had ever used anything like this so it was quite challenging, but also fairly easy to pick up on.  For the most part the features of the house are basic shapes.  You could add just about any type of detail into your work. One aspect that took some time getting acquainted with was rotating the house to see all areas.  This would be a worthwhile application, but definitely takes some practice and exploring.

Unit Assignment: Inkscape

This image was created in Inkscape. Inkscape is consistently rated as one of the top open-source SVG editor (Scalable Vector Graphics).

Not surprisingly, I had difficulties since I immediately jumped into the program without a plan, just the intent to play around with the software. Do not take this as an indication of the uses of the application. Turns out there are tons of tutorials (go figure!) and I could have accomplished a lot more in the some amount of time, minus a lot of frustration.

one major source of my frustration came from my computer. It's 6 years old and struggling hard to make it through my JMU career; with limited memory and the download of Inkscape, it was at its processing limits. I had a lot of lag, and things took 3x longer than they should have. Nevertheless, here a few functions that I experimented with, some can be seen in the image above, while some were scrapped:

- Shapes
- Overlapping Transparencies
- Filters such as feathering, beveling, shadow, sketch (standard filters also found in Photoshop, Illustrator, and the such)
- Combining Filters, Opacity, Trasparency illusions
- Masks
- Layers
- Fonts (largely unsuccessful)

Inkscape is a popular alternative to Adobe Illustrator, and therefore has many (if not most) of the same functions as the Adobe editing software.

Perusal of blogs addressing Inkscape and offering tutorials turned up several references of accomplishing an effect using Inkscape AND the GIMP. The full power of this combination will need to be explored.


Moral of the post: I did not use the software to its full potential.  If you so desire to, check out the following link as a starting point ("10 best Inkscape tutorials": I will be going through these myself as a do-over for my Inkscape experience): http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/10-of-the-best-inkscape-tutorials/#more-273

And here is the link to an entire blog dedicated to the Inkscape cause:
http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/