Photos and Inkscape

[click here to see a higher resolution version on Flickr]

A quick note to the Inkscape mailing list today gave me a couple of quick ways to trim imported bitmaps to the shape of any arbitrary boundary:

1. Select both objects and then choose Object->Clip->Set

or

2. Create a pattern fill based on a bitmap using Object->Pattern->Objects To Pattern, and then fill the object with that pattern.

This proved to be quite fun, so I put together the little collage you see above. It was probably easier to create this in Inkscape than in a bitmap editor like GIMP or Photoshop since you could easily create, rotate and modify each 'snapshot' throughout the process and modify gradients etc..

You can do quite a few neat things with a bitmap photo imported into a vector based editor like Inkscape. There are a few neat demo video's over on the Xara site. One of them shows some interesting things about photo editing on a vector graphics editor. Good stuff.