Gimp News – A Peek into GIMP's New Cage Transform Tool
Introducing GIMP is not a difficult task because it is such a fabulous piece of freeware that I could write so many pages about it, but to make a long story short I can simply tell you that GIMP is the best free image manipulation program you can find, a really solid and professional fully functioning alternative to other really expensive programs like Adobe's Photoshop.
In our last news article about GIMP I've been telling you about the most outstanding novelties to come with GIMP's new version 2.8, Which is said to be ready for release after Xmas this year it will include: Single Window Mode, text edition enhancements and tool labeling capabilities, all those improvements are really interesting and to my humble opinion very useful.
Today I'm going to tell you about another new feature that has been confirmed not long ago as to be a part of GIMP's upcoming version, what we are talking about is the Cage Transform tool, this new tool is really similar in its aspect and behavior to the Free Transform tool you can find in Adobe's Photoshop and it will allow GIMP users to do selective deformation of objects right on canvas, it uses a polygon shape instead of a rectangle to perform transformations on parts of any image. This handy tool was developed last summer during Google's Summer of Code 2010 by student Michael Muré who did an tremendous job making the tool work really well.
Unfortunately we could not put our hands onto the real thing because it is not yet integrated in the available versions of GIMP, nevertheless I can briefly tell you how this new tool will work:
First open the image that is going to be want to deformed, select the new Cage-Tool and draw a polygon in the same way you draw it with the paths tool over the section of the image, close the polygon by joining the first and last point, now the tool switches to the transform mode. You can drag the points of the polygon and the section of the image is transformed following these movements. Simple, easy and straightforward, couldn't ask for more!!
Here is a YouTube video of the new tool in action by gimpusers
