Neon Sign

At the risk of causing a flood of gaudy, bandwidth-hogging, flashing gif images on the web, I've written neon-sign.scm, a Script-Fu script for the GIMP that will turn (almost) any image into a flashing or pulsating neon sign. The image produced is savable as an animated gif.

The script creates three menu entries under Gimp's Script-Fu menu:

Alchemy->Neon Sign -- Creates a neon sign
Animators->Flashing neon sign -- Creates a two-layer, flashing neon sign
Animators->Pulsating neon sign -- Creates a multi-layer neon sign that pulsates

Notes on using the script:

The source image should have a transparent background
The image should ideally be drawn with a sharp-edged brush
If you want to save the image as an animated gif, make sure that you convert it to an indexed palette first.
The GFig plugin is very useful for generating images to turn into neon signs

The neon sign script is freely distributable. If you use it to create web graphics, it would be cool if you put a link somewhere to this page: http://www.nostatic.org/gimp/gimp-neon.shtml

The script can be downloaded here. This version has been updated to work with Gimp 2.0 by Kevin Cozens.

The sign at the top of this page was generated by combining two neon signs. First I generated the text and made a non-flashing sign with it, then I drew the martini glass in GFig, painted it into an image, and created a flashing sign. I did some fiddling to put the bits together. I reduced the size of the resulting animated gif by using the very cool animation optimize plugin. To make the hilighted image stay on longer, I added a blank frame. If you'd like the GFig file for the martini glass, you can get it here.

Some neon dock icons that I designed with the script can be found here.

Here is an example of using the script to design a sign using text. We open up a new transparent image and enter some text:

Now we run the script. I use red as the color, and desaturate it slightly:

This gives me a two-layer image. The first layer is the image of the lit sign, and the second layer is the image of the unlit sign.:

To save this as an animated gif, I just quantize the palette to 256 colors (Image->Indexed) and save it as a gif. Selecting a frame delay of 800 ms results in the following image: