As you may be aware that a team of enthusiatic people is working on bringing out the first GIMP magazine. We spoke with Steve Czajka, the founder and Managing Editor of GIMP Magazine. Here is a quick interview of Steve.

Swapnil: What will be the highlight of the first issue of GIMP?
Steve: Primarily photography, we connected with a few key photographers that do outstanding work and are exclusive to open source image editing tools.  Issue one also has an incredible digital artist who did a master class tutorial for us.  Outstanding work.  And we also have a great gallery for both digital art and photography.

The focus of issue #2 will be digital art.  We are working with a few outstanding artists who are willing to share their art and their process.  I am blown away with what I see coming in issue #2, movie quality digital art!

Swapnil: Since now you can see what kind of content is coming for the magazine, can you tell us who is the target audience?
Steve: Content is based on user submissions, so it is a great time for up and coming photographers to get on board to feature their works.  The magazine is also intended not only for “creatives” who use the software, but for developers who write the software and amazing extensions that are connected to GIMP.  We are also looking for reviews on hardware that is relevant for graphics people (monitors / rigs / pen tablets etc).  We are working on a GIMP book review with a publisher for issue #2.  And we are open to new suggestions from the user community.  This is a magazine for the users, so we need user input.

Swapnil: HDR is becoming popular again. Will the magazine be covering the high-end techniques used by photographers?
Steve: We have an interesting story from an HDR photographer that works with GIMP and related HDR tools.  His story will be explored.  We hope to have more submissions like this in the future.  We would also love to have articles from Macro photographers as this is also a current trend, and I personally have a softspot for macro photography (http://steveczajka.posterous.com)

Swapnil: Is there any plans for printer magazine, if yes please tell more in detail?
Steve: We have been researching the printed magazine avenue.  At this point it will be digital (for free), and we will see how this goes, and possibly get into print in issue #3.  It depends on demand.  I am torn (no pun intended), i like the experience of opening a glossy printed magazine… Dropping it on the coffee table for others to browse through.  But i also like the convience and free aspect of a digital copy.  The digital copy also has advantages of click through articles / links / and possibly ads down the road.  We are working on an ePub version that should be ready for Issue #1.

Swapnil: Can you tell us about the staff of GIMP magazine?
Steve: We are all hardcore users of GIMP, and I can genuinely say that everyone on my team absolutely loves GIMP.  Many of us use other packages as well, but there is a special place for GIMP.  We have a well rounded team:
Jorden, All things Editing / Submissions
Rod, All things Internal Forums
Dave, Contributing Writer / Editing Assistance
Oma, Editing Assistance
Rolf, All things Web
And me Steve, Managing Editor / Design & Publishing / Coordination / Social Media / etc…

Swapnil: Which OS and which applications did you use to compile the magazine?
Steve: We used Scribus for publishing, quite a bit of Inkscape for graphics preparation, and of course GIMP 2.6 and 2.8 for all bitmap image manipulation, and background creations.  We kept true to open source as possible.

We used various linux and windows platforms as this is a multi team member project.  Many of us have more than one machine.