Framing anything on screen

[houghi]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2010 at 12:41:20PM -0300, John Coppens wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> I regularly make 'tutorials' for students, and sometimes for putting on
> the 'web, where I like to 'enhance' part of an image by lowering the
> contrast/intensity of the rest. 
> 
> I've done that a lot of times using the GIMP, in many cases after doing
> a screenshot. But I've been thinking... it would be nice to be able to do
> that _before_ taking a screenshot (or just without taking a screenshot -
> just to make part of the screen more important while explaining it).
> 
> I particularly like the style of the 'clip' action of the GIMP.
> 
> Is there any app that does this, if not, is there a way to do this?
> (i.e., generate an all-encompassing mask over the screen, including
> panel, etc). One interesting solution would be to build it into the
> screenshooter.

The issue is that the place what you want to mask will be different each
time. Depending of the amount of screenshots, it might be easier to do it
one by one. Select the part you want to keep enhanced, reverse your
selection and then use the bucket in gimp to fill the rest with a mask
colour.

I am sure you could make GIMP do it in a much easier way so that you only
need to select and the rest happens automagically.

What I do if I want to edit a lot of images (several hunred) I use a loop
like: for I in *.jpg;do gimp $I;done
Disadvanatage is that you need to close gimp after each time and it
reopens again.

If the place that you want to mask is at the same place each time, you
could look at ImageMagick which is pretty good for editing images from the
prompt. Much faster.

houghi
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