More or less given up now, but one last shot.

**Didz** · June 01, 2009, 05:27 AM

I thought I might help out a bit with the uniform corrections for ETW. I have quite a lot of military reference books and other sources for the Seven Years War and AWI so I figured I'd give it a go.

I foolishly thought it would be reasonably straight forward, I'm not a complete dunce when it comes to computers and I've been using PSP8 for several years. But I must admit this has defeated me.

I've expended hours and hours reading tutorials, reading online references, and downloading and fiddling with various tools and plug-ins and so far I've got nowhere. I gave up trying to get a DDS file to open in PSP8. I downloaded the recommended plug-in and it simply doesn't do anything 'File format not recognised'. I've discovered its 'a known problem' according to the PSP8 forums, they recommended using the Photoshop plug-in but that didn't seem to make any difference either.

Finally, decided that I was flogging a dead horse trying to get PSP8 working. I did ask if anyone else had managed it and got no reply so I assume its not going to work.

I notice that a lot of you use GIMP, which I've dabbled with in the past, and figured it best to go with the path of least resistance and follow your lead.

So, downloaded GIMP, after a bit of a phaff trying to work out which download was actually the product (why do university websites have to clutter there download folders with two tons of junk alongside what you actually need

.). Anyway GIMP is working fine but when I downloaded the DDS plug-in 'gimp-dds-2.0.7.tar.bz2' I found I had nothing that volunteered to access the package, and putting the package itself in the plug-in folder achieved nothing.

In the end I did a search for programs willing to open a .bz2 file and was recommended WinZip, which I actually have installed on my PC already, but which didn't volunteer itself for the task

.

I actually managed to open it with WinRaR and extracted the content in to the Gimp plug in folder. Except that its not an application like all the other plug-ins but it appears as a folder containing a lot of other documents including textfiles and files of unrecognised format. Thnking it might need to be installed I clicked on file marked INSTAL but was asked if I wanted to search the web for a file capable of opening it. It appears not to be an .exe file.

So, another 3 hours wasted and it looks like I'm heading down another blind-alley trying to use GIMP.

Ironically, what I thought would be a small investment of effort has become a major research project, and I haven't even got to the point yet where I can begin editing a uniform, which I foolishly thought would be the real challenge. I'm still trying to get the box open.

**Tobler75** · June 01, 2009, 05:36 AM

C:\Programme\GIMP-2.0\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins

the file has to be in this folder, for vista i don't know, hope it works

**Bladerunner** · June 01, 2009, 11:47 AM

Gimp is originally a linux programm, so what you Dl'ed is the plug-in version for linux. the Dos version is in normal zip format.

http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidiu...ormalmap-win32

I don't know about PS8, but since PS CS2 the plug-in should run without problems. Best to DL the plug-in is at http://developer.nvidia.com/page/tools.html

**Didz** · June 01, 2009, 02:13 PM

Originally Posted by Bladerunner

Gimp is originally a linux programm, so what you Dl'ed is the plug-in version for linux. the Dos version is in normal zip format.

http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/download.php?filename=gimp-normalmap-win32

Ok! tried that and it seemed to go ok!

The plug-in folder has an new application called normalmap, and the three .dll files included in the .zip file are in the Bin folder as instructed in the Readme file.

Tried to open the DDS file and got file format not recognised. So, I thought I'd try and run the plug-in just in case you need to specifically convert the file using the plug-in and import it into GIMP or something.

Got an Error Message claiming that that Normalmap could not be run because it could not find libgdk-win32-2.0.0.dll. This was not one of the .dll's included in the download but I checked the bin folder anyway and found it sitting there quite happily.

Sooo! what have I done wrong this time?

**Tobler75** · June 01, 2009, 02:41 PM

As much as i can remember installing gimp, i seperatly had to put the dds.exe file in the plug in folder of the screen shown earlier, i almost got the .exe on my drive, but i can't remember where i downloaded it

**33orion77** · June 01, 2009, 03:28 PM

Originally Posted by Bladerunner

Gimp is originally a linux programm, so what you Dl'ed is the plug-in version for linux. the Dos version is in normal zip format.

http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/download.php?filename=gimp-normalmap-win32

I don't know about PS8, but since PS CS2 the plug-in should run without problems. Best to DL the plug-in is at http://developer.nvidia.com/page/tools.html

Hmmm... it's quite normal that you can't open dds files with this pluggin, it is the normal map filter ( still very usefull) here's the link for both pluggin:http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/