Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Open Source Santa



This program has been around for awhile, and I've been meaning to blog about it since I discovered it, but with school out for two weeks and a great need to keep the kids occupied after all those plastic Christmas toys from Wal-mart break into ten thousand pieces, I figured the timing was good.

It's called Tux Paint, and it's basically free, open source Photoshop for kids. Incredibly intuitive interface: my kids got on and just went nuts, including discovering lots of stuff I didn't know was on there. You can draw and paint with the mouse, distort, add ripples and bubbles and blurs and smudges and shapes and patterns. The coolest bit is the stamps: pre-built images of ducks and planets and hats and spiders that you can put on a picture by just clicking on it. And if you save a photo as a .bmp, knock it down to 600-ish pixels wide, and save it in the stamps directory of the program, you can import your own photos! Which is what I've done below.

Did I mention it's free? Get it here.







I can't recommend this program enough. Big Fun.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, but, I don't have a cute little girl in a pink tutu as my source photo so what good will it do me?