我将grokking the gimp的序言译了出来，有不当之处，敬请翻译高手赐教

yangshijian

原文：
Preface
The title of this book, Grokking the GIMP, is drawn from Robert A. Heinlein's classic science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. His story is about Valentine Michael Smith, the only survivor of the first human expedition to Mars and raised from infancy by Martians. The rescue mission arrives twenty years later to bring a young man knowing nothing of his own kind back to earth. The story recounts his repatriation and his adventures as he comes to grok the human race and his place in it. Grok, a word he often uses, is the Martian word meaning ``to drink,'' but which also serves as a quasi-religious metaphor in the Martian culture for having a profound appreciation and understanding for something.
  Heinlein's book, published in 1961, drew immediate acclaim in the science-fiction world, and the story became a part of the iconoclastic cultural sentiment of the 60s in the United States. Today, the word grok is a part of the U.S. computer hacker vocabulary, and its definition can be found in The New Hacker's Dictionary (see [1]).
So, do you want to grok the GIMP? When I first came across it in 1996, I did. I was writing an article and had some photographs of poor quality I wanted to touch up and enhance before including them. I had heard about the GIMP so I downloaded it from the Internet and compiled it. When I ran the program, it popped up a small toolbox. Without too much trouble, I discovered how to open image files and access the image menu containing all the GIMP functions and filters. Wow! It looked very cool...and powerful! But, I didn't have a clue how to use it to solve my photo problems.
  I didn't know which functions to use and I didn't even really know what was wrong with my photos. I just knew they looked flat and washed out. I wanted them to look better, and that's what got me interested in the GIMP. I felt compelled to learn about it!
I started to look for help. I searched the Web, checked out books from the library, and little by little discovered useful things about the digital touchup and enhancement of photos. It was a slow and frustrating process, and it seemed like there was no unified, conceptual treatment of what I wanted to learn.
The most annoying thing was that almost every book I picked up was full of tips and tricks. Tips and tricks? I felt like I was getting advice on betting the ponies. I didn't want tricks; I wanted the ideas. What is photo touchup and enhancement? Where's the beef? How could I work on my photos if I didn't understand the basic concepts? Moreover, I wanted to learn the practical techniques used by the master artisans of digital image manipulation. Out of the hundreds of functions and filters in the GIMP, which were the right ones to use, and why?
After a lot of detective work and filling in the blanks myself I finally felt I was beginning to grok what the touchup and enhancement of digital images was about. What's more, I was getting to know the GIMP tools more intimately. To share what I had learned, I wrote a tutorial called Photo Touchup and Enhancement with the GIMP and put it out on the Internet (see http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Haven/5179).
That's the story of this book's beginnings and that explains the rationale for its underlying approach and philosophy. Working with digital images requires some understanding of what needs to be done. It's not a ``choose the right tool, one click, and you're done'' subject. Most books on digital image manipulation would have you believe the contrary...and perhaps they're right. However, that is not what this book is about. It is not about tips and tricks, and it's not a collection of recipes for solving someone's favorite image manipulation problems. It is first about understanding image manipulation concepts, second about knowing which GIMP tools are most effective, and third about the savvy use of these tools.
Many factors have contributed to the style and content of the material presented in this book. My educational training in signal processing, my professional work in various areas of imaging and image processing, the research I've done on colorspaces and image manipulation, and lots of experimentation with the GIMP. The result is a book that covers many areas of working with digital images, including touchup and enhancement, compositing, 3D rendering, and the pre sentation of graphics on the World Wide Web. This book also gives a unified and in-depth introduction to layers, selections, masks, colorspaces, and the use of blending modes.
This book is released under an Open Publication license. Please read the license agreement carefully. In a nutshell the license permits the book to be redistributed freely in all electronic forms including CD and for commercial profit. It may not, however, be commercially printed and distributed in paper form without permission from the author and publisher. It can be printed for personal use and for non-commercial distribution. Modified versions of the book must also adhere to the licensing agreement. Now, let's learn the GIMP, and, as Valentine Michael Smith might have said, ``May you grok it in fullness!''

译文：
前言

    本书书名为《Grokking the GIMP》,取材于罗伯特A.黑恩莱恩的经典科幻小说《陌生土地上的陌生人》。小说讲述的是人类首次火星探险队的唯一幸存者瓦兰蒂.米切尔的离奇故事。瓦兰蒂被火星人从小养大，而二十年后开始的搭救任务则要将这位对自己人类一无所知的青年带回地球。小说详细描述了他返回地球的历程，以及他仔细品味和设身处地的故事。他经常使用Grok这个词。在火星人的词汇里，Grok的意思是啜饮，但在火星文化里还有另外的准宗教的隐喻，值得深入赏析与体会。
    黑恩莱恩的著作出版于1961年，出版伊始，科幻小说界就立刻交口称赞。书中讲述的故事也成为60年代的美国反传统情绪的一部分。今天，Grok成为美国计算机黑客用语。新黑客字典给出了Grok的定义。
    那么，你想认真品味GIMP吗？当我1996年第一次接触GIMP时，我也是这么想的。当时，我正在撰写一篇文章，而一些图片质量很差，因此我想在使用这些图片之前，润色、改善一下。我听说过GIMP，我从互联网上下载下来，做了编译。当GIMP运行时，一个小工具箱弹了出来。没费多大劲，我就知道如何打开图像文件，怎样进入包括所有GIMP功能与滤镜的菜单。哇，看起来非常酷，功能也很强大。但我对如何用它来解决我的问题一筹莫展。
我不知道应当使用哪项功能，甚至不知道图片问题出在什么地方。我只知道它们显得有些单调，好象被洗得褪了颜色。我想它们能更好看一些。这是我在GIMP里想琢磨的东西，我决定学习它。
    我开始寻找帮助。我在Web里搜索，从图书馆借书，逐渐地，我找到了一些有关照片数字化修饰与美化的有用东西。当然，这是一个非常缓慢、令人沮丧的过程，而且，我想学的好象也没有什么统一的概念上的办法。
    令我最困惑的莫过于几乎每本我挑选的书都充斥着提示和技巧。提示和技巧？我感到获得提示好象在赌赛马。我不想要技巧，我想要的是办法。什么是照片润色与美化？牛肉在哪里？如果我不能理解基本概念，又如何处理我的照片？而且，我想学到从事数字图片处理的娴熟工匠所实际使用的技术。对于GIMP的上百功能和滤镜，哪个值得用，又为什么呢？
    经过大量的侦探式工作和自我填空，我最终觉得该开始仔细品味数字图片修饰与美化究竟为何物。更重要的，我该进一步了解GIMP工具。为了分享我的所得，我写了一本名为用GMIP润色与美化照片的教程，并放到Internet上。
    这就是我着手写作本书的由来，它解释了本书基本方法与哲学上的原理。处理数字图片时，需要了解一些什么是应当做的。这不是选择正确的工具、一点就成那么简单。大多数有关数字图片处理的书籍将会让你相信相反的东西，也许他们是对的。然而，这并非本书要讲的，它不是罗列提示与技巧，也不是收集解决某人图片处理问题的秘诀。本书首先是关于理解图片处理的概念，其次，讲述了GIMP的哪项功能最为有效，第三，说明了对使用这些工具的领悟。
    对书中提供的材料的风格与内容贡献良多的因素很多。比如，我在信号处理上的教育和培训、在成像与图像处理各个方面的专业研究工作、我所做的着色与图像处理研究以及用GIMP所做的大量试验。总之，本书内容涵盖了处理数字图片的许多方面，包括润色与美化、混合、三维渲染以及在万维网上给出图解。同时，本书一致、深入地介绍了图层、选择、着色以及混合模式的使用。
    本书依照开放出版许可予以发行。请仔细阅读许可协议。概括地说，许可协议使本书能够以包括CD在内的所有电子形式自由分发，也可用于商业用途。但是，未经作者和出版商许可，不得以纸式印刷、发行，如果仅作个人使用以及非商业性发行的此类印刷发行是允许的。对本书的修改也必须遵守许可协议。现在，让我们学习GIMP吧，就象瓦兰蒂.史密斯所说的：“希望你充分挖掘它”。