Get to Know mtPaint image editor

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mikeslr
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Get to Know mtPaint image editor

Post by mikeslr »

AFAIK, mtPaint is 'builtin' to all Puppys. I wondered why. don570 has long advocated its use and even provided a tutorial, https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtop ... =94018&i=1. Dingo has called it "a little gem". Little, indeed. The fossapup's 64-bit version is a 360 Kilobyte pet.
But I always installed/SFS-Loaded gimp. Gimp is now available as a 161 Mb AppImage. [FYI, Krita @ 184]. Packaged otherwise they may be slightly smaller.

I can't draw my way into a bath. But if someone else provides the pieces I can do a little cutting, erasing, color correction, resizing, and pasting and end up with IMHO a nice 'patch-work quilt' such as fossapups* in the madagasgan jungle:

madagasgan-jungle2.jpg
madagasgan-jungle2.jpg (73.69 KiB) Viewed 1084 times

Gimp has 'upgraded' to qt5, added some 'bells & whistles' by --I think only-- providing two slightly different versions of the same modules; and somewhere along the way lost sight of the main purpose of any application: usability. Erasing has become more tedious. Saving an 'erased' image doesn't always work. Pasting doesn't always work as expected. Eventually, to produce the above wallpaper, I gave up using Fossapup (where older versions of gimp wouldn't function) and booted into Bionicpup64 where they would.
And during respites from that torturous journey, I started looking for an alternative graphic editor. There are others; you'll find them on the Forum's Additional Software Graphics. And I also discovered mtPaint. And why I've avoided it. Like Puppy, itself, it has it's own way of doing things. For example, it doesn't use tabs, or even separate windows running under the same Application. But, like rox, you can run multiple instances of the same application.
[I don't know if that's been mentioned anywhere. I discovered it almost by chance. While perusing documentation I came across the fact that mtPaint can create animated gifs. To do that you have to be able to combine several graphics within/under a 'master'].
There may be other, simpler, ways. I have yet a lot to learn and will have to follow the advice given as the title of this post. But hopefully, perhaps mtPaints' documentation is now a little easier to access. viewtopic.php?p=30750#p30750

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* I don't know what fossa young are actually called. While 'cat-like' in appearance, it's closely related to the mongoose family Herpestidae. fossagosling? :roll: Well, a baby mongoose is called a Pup. :D

Last edited by mikeslr on Sun Jul 11, 2021 5:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Grey
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Re: Get to Know mtPaint image editor

Post by Grey »

The main problem is that people perceive such programs as mtPaint and AzPainter differently from the way they are positioned by the authors. Some consider them to be full-fledged editors, while others, on the contrary, consider them light and not complete.
Meanwhile, they have the word "paint" in their name - that is, programs are designed for drawing (editing is an additional function) - but people stubbornly ignore it :)
GIMP clearly indicates in its name - Image Manipulation.

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Re: Get to Know mtPaint image editor

Post by HerrBert »

IMHO mtpaint is a very powerful image editor. It may have a high learning curve, but the big players do so even more. It's kind of a habit to use and depends on what you want to do. For basic pixel manipulation and some filters it is very adequat to me. But in Puppy Linux by default it lacks recent documentation and in most Puppies it is compiled without internationalization.

This is an example of what can be done with mtpaint. It is a set of 2 wallpapers i made for me. One for daylight time and the other for night. It was a poor scan of a ~30 year old photo. I have replaced the background(s) with other images and edited the DOTclipboard files for colors.

night+day.jpg
night+day.jpg (105.87 KiB) Viewed 1079 times

Original scan (scaled down for posting...)

out002.jpg
out002.jpg (101.46 KiB) Viewed 1079 times
wjaguar
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Re: Get to Know mtPaint image editor

Post by wjaguar »

As to mtPaint not having tabs, it is because of a neater alternative, the undoable loading:
http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/handbook ... .html#SEC8
When I need some part from another image, I load that image over my current one, copy the part, undo the load operation, and paste. Same result, and no need to manipulate tabs.
When I actually need to keep two images open at once (once in a blue moon), then I either put them into layers, or run two instances of mtPaint. mtPaint starts instantly and does not use that much extra memory in addition to the image itself, therefore no actual need to stuff all the images into one single instance.

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