Develop a simple calendar with GIMP

Develop a simple calendar with GIMP

We all love calendars, well, many of us do. In this digital age, when everything is about lightning-fast speed and flexibility, one may not see an immediate need to hang a hard calendar from a wall, but when we can simply print one that suits our tastes, it's satisfying to stay creative. And when we have the power of GIMP aiding us, it's laughing easy and fast if you'd like to brew a stylish, sleek and cool calendar from one of your photos. 

Why should I make my own calendar? 

Well, that's a good question. Answers can be many, as usual. The simplest reason I can find is to show off your style! And it's a cool thing to get creative nonetheless. In one of Satyajit Ray's famous stories, the protagonist Prof. Shanku is seen to remark "Everything made by Shanku, except my co-passenger Abinash Chandra Majumdar" (Swapnadwip). 

Even if we don't print it, it's always cool to share calendars with our friends on social media. Besides, we can always use one as the desktop wallpaper. That does remind me of my days using Webshots. 

First steps 

GIMP is vastly extensible, and as usual, we have some great plugins and scripts to aid us in the process of designing the calendar. My favourite in this case is Calendar Maker, which can be downloaded from HERE. Simply open the site, and right-click on sg-calendar.scm under 'Attachment', and select 'Save target as' or 'Save target as' to download. Now that it is downloaded somewhere (the file is tiny, as you can see), we need to add it to GIMP. For this, simply open your respective GIMP folder. If you're using Windows, this must be inside Program Files in C: drive. In the case of Linux, simply open your /home folder and press Ctrl+H to make hidden folders visible. Now enter .gimp-2.8 (2.8 is the version here, and will change if you're using another version), open Scripts folder inside it and simply move the .scm file here. 

Once you restart GIMP, you'll have calendar maker installed. 

A tutorial to get going 

Nothing is better than a hands-on tutorial when you're learning to use something new. So, below is a photo I shot day before yesterday, at Kolkata Maidan, with my Nikon Coolpix P510 (using telephoto mode, obviously). As you can see, the photo is of the sunlit western sky, just before sunset. I guess we can use it for demonstration. 

First, open GIMP and select the respective photo. I'd suggest using a high-resolution photo or image, for getting better results. Also, you can always get your final yield 'distilled' using resize tool, to get a smaller and crisper calendar. Ok, so we first select a rectangular portion in the top-right portion of the photo, as shown in the screenshot below. 

Now, to invoke the script we just downloaded, just go to Filter=>Render=>Calendar, and the menu comes into effect. Simply select your preferences, such as the particular month for which the calendar is to be printed, the year, text and fonts, border colour (if any) and so on. Everything is self-explanatory, as shown below. 

Now once you've selected our preferences, simply hit 'Ok' and you're done. Now we'll need to add the name of the month manually, since under 'Calendar' mode, it isn't done automatically. However, in 'Calendar year' mode, it's automatic. For adding the name of the month, I'd simply make use of the text tool. Then, we can use Move tool from the toolbox to shift the title above the calendar. After adding the title, it looks like this: 

Ok, so optionally we can add a message, or copyright notice. I'd go with the former, and once again use text tool to add anything I like. And after that, simply merge down all the layers. We're done! Now we can add additional decorative stuff, such as a golden border in this case. Likewise, I've added a small png image of Tux, our beloved penguin. And then, after spicing things up a bit more with Lens Flare effects, we have the result below: 

Obviously, as you can see, this is only a month-calendar. What about calendars depicting whole years? For that, you simply need to select 'Calendar year' from Filters=>Render menu, and everything will be taken care of. 

Final words 

The versatile nature and might of open-source allows us to be creative without spending even a single penny. This is what I really love about open-source and software freedom. Rightly has it been said, "From freedom, comes elegance", my favourite quote from the Linux Mint community. So, let us continue to decorate the world with creative insight and the flexibility of software freedom, because sharing is caring. :)