so i have no idea what to put in my journal half the time so i thought maybe now and then a tip or something i have found out about apo. one thing i found out recently, and this was after i wrote my basic colours tutorial, is that one can quite easily get apo to create really nice random gradients just by making some selections in the options.
f you open the option panal and then click on gradients, select 'random' and then, to the right hand side where it says minimun and maximum, play around with the settings. i have minimum set to 6 and maximum to 58, but im sure it doesn't really matter to be that exact, every time then when you chose to run a random batch you will also get a fresh and new set of random gradients, which is cool. also, if you double click on the coloured gradient bar (adjust/gradients), this will generate more random gradients according to the settings you have in the options. hope that makes sense. this min tut shows what i mean with double clicking;
, hope that link works.
i can't run all those fancy make a gradient thing under linux, so that option is quite useful, also useful is to simply scan in a picture as described in my colour tutorial, or to quickly make a picture, say in the gimp, with coloured bars, save that as jpeg and then get apo to scan it.
what is very nice in the new apo is its ability to drag gradient colours, its a bit tricky to do but worth exploring. click on the actual gradient in the gradient window and hold the mouse button down to drag the colour. to be honest though i havent found much use for it yet but i'm sure it'd be useful for when you want a bit of a flame blanked or blacked out, for instance.