Working with images

Working with digital images is a topic worthy of its own book, but Scratch has some built-in image editing capabilities that we can use, and we've seen some of those limited capabilities as we created sprites throughout Chapter 3, Creating an Animated Birthday Card. Basically, we can change colors, draw rectangles and circles, insert lines, type text, duplicate areas, and resize, reshape, rotate, and flip images. I'll editorialize for a moment and just say that I think that's an awesome feature set for Scratch to include by default. However, if we want more advanced editing capabilities, we need a more advanced editor. Examples of third-party graphics editors include the following:

• GIMP: This is an open source, cross-platform editor available at http://www.gimp.org

• Adobe Photoshop: This is a sophisticated editor offered by Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html

• MS Paint: This comes installed with Microsoft Windows

• Pixelmator: This is a full-featured app...