How to Make a Kubrick

I’ve sorta settled on Random Image as my WP1.5 theme, at least for now. This theme randomly rotates the top images, called Kubricks, after the movie director of the same name. So, I spent last night trying to figure out how to make my own Kubricks out of the images I have. I found some instructions for how to do it in Photoshop, and some sorta instructions for how to do it in Gimp with python, but neither of those work for me since I don’t have Photoshop and my windows version of Gimp doesn’t include Python. So, I adapted the instructions for Photoshop for Gimp.

First I made my own Kubrick template. It took a while and it took me a while to realize that everytime I saved it to Jpeg it was hosing the corner edges. Bah! So finally I got it right, or as near as I can at this time. My Gimp Kubrick template is here. Here are the instructions for using it.

1. First, Open the image you want to make a Kubrick of in Gimp (preferably Gimp 2.0 or later).
2. Scale your Image down if necessary (in Gimp this is done by selecting Image, Scale Image), I usually scale to 1024×768 since the Kubrick is 720×182
3. Select File, Open as Layer, kubricktemplate.tif
4. Select Dialogs, Layers – To bring up the layer control panel
5. Select the kubrick layer and change opacity to 50% in the layer dialog slider, so you can see through it to what is in your image
6. Select Move tool (or press m)
7. Move kubrick layer over the area you want to keep as your kubrick
8. In the layer dialog, raise the opacity back to 100% on the kubrick template to assure the autoselector will be able to grab the kubrick correctly
9. Use the magic wand/select continuous regions button to select the kubrick template in the image
10. In the layer dialog, click on the Background
11. Hit cntl-C to copy the kubricked image from the background
12. Press Edit, paste New to get your new kubricked image by itself in a window
13. Now you have your Kubrick. Hit File, Save As, give it a name (probably kubrickheaderX (where X is some number) and save it and you are done! [IMPORTANT NOTE: DO NOT SAVE YOUR ORIGINAL IMAGE FILE, as it now has this Kubrick template over top of it. Just close THAT file without saving.]

Ta da!

For a more visual description of this, see the Photoshop instructions, which include some nice pics, and use essentially the same method.

One more note: If you are going to use these Kubricks with Random Image, you will need to change header.php to increase the number of random images it displays. At the top, find the part that says

$num=rand(0,14);

or something similar and change the last number to the number of kubrick headers you have. Remember to save your Kubricked images as kubrickheaderxx.jpg, where xx is some number0-99 (in numerical order – I don’t know what would happen if the random generator went to headerimage file it couldn’t find, but it might not be pretty). Feel free to email me if you have any questions.