TraceOver Suite

Plugins in this suite were updated July 2013.
These versions are better; replace older versions.

It is a common practice for artists to make a rough drawing and then
improve or tighten it. A light box is often used to help with this.
Comic book inkers also find this useful. Some comic book inkers use
a Photoshop work flow using "Adjustment" layers. Gimp does not have
these, and something similar is rather awkward and time consuming to
do by hand. So I have written these scripts to make a
light-box-like-tracing work-flow easier. (A script by someone else,
more suitable for animation, is available by searching for
"Lightbox". This script is, instead, mainly for Improving Rough
Drawings.)

Start with a rough RGB drawing or image as the bottom layer. Go to
<image>/Layer/ menu and run one of these three scripts. You can use
a different one of the three scripts at every run. Use the new top
layer to trace over, or ink over and improve, the older rougher
drawing. Repeat as many times as necessary. Older drawings become
more and more obscured. You can, of course, go to the layers dialog
to change the opacity of any of the new layers that were created, or
you can make them visible or invisible.

Because a dialog slows work flow, TraceOver and TraceOverBlueLines
use no setting dialogs. If you want a different color or opacity,
modify the plugin -- a fine exercise for anyone wanting to learn how
to write plugins -- or use TraceOverSet.

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TraceOver inserts a blue simi-opaque layer between your old artwork
and the new traceing layer.
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TraceOverBlueLines: This is much like TraceOver, but the
simi-opaque layer is a blue-color-exchanged copy of your original
drawing. (Warnings that applied in earlier versions of this plugin
no longer apply.) These first two plugins have no dialogs to slow
your work flow.
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TraceOverSet: This is much like TraceOverBlueLines, but a dialog is
presented on each run; it allows you to set color and opacity of
the obscuration layer.

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INSTALL: These are Python-fu plugins, so the Python programming
environment must be on your computer. Linux distributions already
have it, and it can be gotten from Python.org for Windows and Mac.
Place the plugin files in your ~/.gimp-2.8/plug-ins folder. (You can
find where this is in GIMP by going to
<Image>/Edit/Preferences/Folders/Plugins. Remove the ".txt"
extension that the Registry adds to the files; they should end with
".py". Be sure that the file is executable. (On most systems this
can be done by right clicking on the file, choosing Properties, and
editing the information under the security or permissions tab.
Restart GIMP. The plugins should appear under the <Images>/Layers
menu.