Hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies Media Design, my name
is Michael Davies, and in today's tutorial I'll be going over GIMP in 10
minutes what beginners want to know. if you're looking for a more in-depth look
at GIMP I recommend watching my two hour GIMP 2.10 basics video which is on our
channel, and of course I'll link that in the description, but let's get started.
So GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a powerful
raster based open-source software that is developed by a small community of
developers. This software, which is primarily used for photo editing, but is
also used for graphic design, is available completely for free at
gimp.org. Despite having a relatively small team of part-time developers
behind it, GIMP is actually a very powerful program and it rivals and is
most similar to Photoshop - which is another raster based progra. The main
difference, of course, between GIMP and Photoshop is that Photoshop can cost
between $10 and $60 dollars a month if you have the subscription program,
whereas GIMP of course is absolutely free. So GIMP rivaling Photoshop has
become even more true over the past year because it recently updated GIMP with
its first major update in over six years and that was GIMP version 2.10. At the time
of this tutorial GIMP 2.10.6 is the most up-to-date version of GIMP and
the GIMP team says that GIMP 3.0, which may completely change the game and
possibly break the Internet, is supposed to come out either later this year or in
early 2019. So let's get a little bit into how to use GIMP, and, as I mentioned
earlier in this tutorial, I do have a full two-hour length video that shows a
little bit more in-depth look at the GIMP basics. But of course before we get
into all that I want to direct you guys over to my website at DaviesMediaDesign.com
as always we have tons of GIMP video and text tutorials on here as
well as Project Translate. You can watch one of our GIMP playlists, support us on
Patreon, or view our Poll of the Week results - so definitely check those items
out. You can enroll in our GIMP Photo Editing Course: From Beginner to Pro
Photo Retoucher on Udemy, and you can support our channel and help us grow by
becoming a Patron on Patreon - and you'll get some really awesome rewards in
return. I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this
tutorial in the description of the video. Once you've installed GIMP on your
Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, open it up and go to File>New to create a new
composition. Here you can set your new image dimensions or expand your options
to set things like the resolution, precision, or background color of your
image. Click OK to create the new image. The GIMP layout looks complex at first
but can be understood as five main sections. The "Toolbox" contains all your
tools, the "Tool Options" contains the settings for the tool you have selected,
the "Canvas" will display your image or composition, the "Layers, Channels, Paths,
Undo" panel will display the items mentioned in its name - displaying the
layers panel first by default - and the "Brushes, Patterns, and Gradient" panel will
display those items mentioned in its name. Starting with the Toolbox - GIMP's
tools are broken up into four main groups - Selection Tools, Paint Tools,
Transform Tools, and Other Tools. Selection Tools allow you to select an
area of your image using various methods, and you can then make edits to those
isolated items that are in the selection area you specified. Paint Tools allow you
to freely draw or paint on your image or composition, and you can use colors,
patterns, or transparency to paint or erase with these tools.
Transform Tools allow you to transform an active layer, selection area, or path -
for example you can scale something up or down, or change its perspective, among
other transformations. The Other Tools allow you to perform various functions
such as zooming in and out of your image, selecting your foreground and background
colors, drawing curves, and adding text. Above the five main areas of GIMP is
your main menu. This menu allows you to access everything within GIMP. However, if
you want to look for something a little bit more quickly, simply hit the forward
slash ("/") key on your keyboard to bring up the search feature and type what you're
looking for. You can then click on the item to jump to it if it's a file or use it on your
composition - for example, if it's an effect. Going back to our main menu, I'll
highlight the two most important menu items, in my opinion. These are the "Colors"
menu and the "Filters" menu. The Colors menu allows you to access important
image adjustment tools. These tools are great for photo editing and include
common image adjustment tools such as color balance, hue/saturation, shadows-
highlights, brightness-contrast, levels, and curves - to name just a few.
I use these image adjustment tools often throughout my tutorials and in my GIMP
Photo Editing Course. Unfortunately, unlike Photoshop, GIMP currently does not
contain adjustment layers, which means your image adjustments are typically
made directly on your image layer. However, the GIMP team says they have
made steps towards making this feature available in the near future. Lower in
the Colors menu are some auto adjustments and adjustment filters that
aim to speed up your photo editing - though I do not typically recommend
using these except in specific cases. The filters menu contains many important
filters that you can use throughout your compositions. Some of them will apply to
the entire image, while others will only apply to a selected layer or are
overlaid on top of your compositions as a separate layer. The most popular
filters in my experience include Blur>Gaussian Blur; Enhance >Sharpen (Unsharp
Mask), Light and Shadow - and there's a few popular filters in here - including, Drop
Shadow, Long Shadow, and Vignette; Map>Little Planet;
and Animation>Playback when working with animated GIFs. So these are just a few of
many useful filters found in this program. Heading back to the layers panel,
note that everything you do in GIMP will be on a layer. When creating a new
composition. like we did earlier, you're going to start with a background layer.
You could then add or remove layers as you work with layers containing things
like text, transparency, graphics, or images. You can also change the modes of
layers, which allow the layers to blend and interact with other layers in the
Layers panel.
I have an entire tutorial dedicated to layers, which I recommend you watch to
learn more about the layers concept. You can open new images into GIMP by going
to File>Open, which will open images into their own new composition. Simply
navigate to the folder where your file is located and click on the file to
select that file. Click the Open button to open the file into GIMP.
You can also go to File>Open as Layers to open your file into your current
composition as a layer.
You can also go to File>Open Recent to open an image file you recently opened
into GIMP. You can save your work at any time by
going to File>Save or File>Save As using the native .XCF file format in GIMP.
I'll rename my file,
then select the location where I want to save it.
Saving your file as a .XCF will preserve the layers in your composition,
allowing you to come back and work on your project at a later time. You can
also export files to other common file formats by going to File>Export As. Here,
you can click the Select File Type (by extension) drop down and choose from file
types such as GIF, JPEG, PSD or PDF. I'll select JPEG as my file
type since this is the most common file type to export images to. You'll see the
file extension after the name of my file will automatically update to ".jpg"
once I click this. I'll then click "Export" to export my file, select the quality of
my JPEG, and will click "Export" again. I'll delete my active layer that contains the
image we opened as a layer into the composition by clicking the "Delete this
Layer icon. So that's it for this tutorial - hopefully you guys liked it. If
you did, please subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube.com/DaviesMediaDesign
On there you can check out our to our GIMP 2.10 Basics video. You
can also visit our website at DaviesMediaDesign.com. You can enroll in our
GIMP Photo Editing Course: From Beginner to Pro Photo Retoucher on Udemy, and you
can support our channel and help us grow by becoming a Patron on Patreon - and I'll
include a link to those items as well as all the relevant links from this
tutorial in the description of the video. So thanks for watching, and we'll see you
next time!!!