Hello and welcome back to another video, my name is Mike Davies, and
in today's tutorial I'll be showing you how to create an Instagram carousel using GIMP.
I'll be using GIMP version 2.10.22 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial.
Before I get into that don't forget to check out my website at DaviesMediaDesign.com. As always
I have tons of GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable tutorials on here. You can get more by becoming
a DMD Premium Member, and I have tons of free software Help Articles so definitely check that
out. You can enroll in my GIMP 2.10 Masterclass: From Beginner to Pro Photo Editing on Udemy,
and as I mentioned you can get more with a Premium Membership to Davies Media Design, and I'll
include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the
video. So here is the final composition we'll be creating for today's tutorial. I'll also be
showing you how to upload the result to Instagram and get that carousel effect. So this is a pretty
easy effect to create. Let's dive right in. I'll start by opening up the original image
here. So I can do that by going to File>Open and search on my computer, or in my case I'll go to
Open Recent. And here is that image. There's a couple of things you're going to want to figure
out first. So number one: how many images do you want to split this up into? And then secondly:
what size do you want these images to be? So in my case I know I want this to be a 1080 by
1080 pixel square, and I want there to be three images, so that's how we're going to divide this
up. So for starters I'll come over here and grab my crop tool, and I'll make sure this is set to
"fixed aspect ratio," and that it is checked. And I'm going to set the aspect ratio to 3:1
because we're going to split this up into three even images. And now I'm going to click on my
composition and click and drag my mouse. That will draw this crop area. And I do have my
guides here set to "rule of thirds," and I'm just going to center this up. So you can see because
we have this split into thirds, it is telling us exactly where our image is going to be broken up.
Once I'm ready I'll click inside the crop. Next I need to scale this image down because it's too
big, so I'm going to scale this so that the height is set to 1080. So I'll go to Image>Scale Image,
and I'm going to set this to 1080, hit the tab key because we already cropped this with a three
to one aspect ratio and we have this little chain link icon locked - that's going to automatically
update this to the width we need - and also the interpolation here is set to "No halo," which is
going to give us pretty much the best quality. So I'll hit "Scale." Alright so our image is at
3240 by 1080. I'll hold ctrl and zoom in with my mouse wheel. Next we need to split our image
up into three equal parts, and we're going to do that using the guides. So grab my move tool here
and just click two random guides from the rulers - it doesn't matter where you place them at first.
Hit the "q" key to grab the alignment tool. I'm gonna set this relative to "image," and what I
need to do is offset this at one third and two thirds of the way. And because we know that each
one of our images is going to be 1080 pixels wide, because remember this is a 1080 by 1080
pixel square, that means I can offset one of these guides at 1080 and then the second one at 1080x2.
So let's click on the first guide here, and you can tell the guide is selected with the
alignment tool because it'll have these little squares. And I'll come over here to "Offset x,"
and I'm going to set this to 1080, and then I'm going to click the "distribute left" button.
That's going to distribute this so that it is now located at exactly 1080.
So let me come over here click on the second image - 1080x2 is 2160,
and once again we're going to left align it. So there is our second guide. And that's going
to divvy up our image into three equal images. If you wanted to add text or graphics to your various
images now is the time to do that. So if I come back over here to the original image, this is what
my original graphics look like - so we are going to create these. I'll start by coming over here to
the arrow. I'm not going to go over in detail how I made this for this tutorial just for the sake
of time, but basically I just used the paths tool and I also placed some guides to draw a triangle.
I will make this available for download on my website. But let's come over here and grab the
arrow layer, and just click and drag this over to our composition, make sure we hover our mouse over
the image or the canvas, and release. So there's our arrow. It's a bit too big right now, so I'll
hit shift+s on the keyboard to grab my scale tool. And I can either scale this down using the handles
or just come over here and manually type in the size I want. So let's go with 100x100 and hit
scale. I'll hit the m key on my keyboard, and I'm just going to move this down here. And there's a
little cross hair in the middle of this layer, so I'm going to have that snap to the guide there.
What I want to do is now create that sort of train of arrows I had going on. So I think
I had five different arrows - so to do that I'll come over here, and I'm going to copy this layer.
So right now we have one of these - we need five. So I'll hit the duplicate icon four times.
So that'll give us five different arrow layers. Now what I'll do is come over here and grab my
rectangle select tool, and I'm just going to randomly draw a rectangle here. And I'm going
to have this around 630. You can see the size over here - so the width I did for this is 630,
and what I'll do is just drag this until it snaps to that same guide so it's nice and centered.
Once I've done that I'll come over here and click on my image layer - that way we have the
full selection - now I'll hit the "q" key on my keyboard to grab the alignment tool. And I'm going
to click and drag my alignment tool over all five arrows, and then I'll come over here - "relative
to:" and change this to "selection." And then under "distribute" I'm going to "distribute
targets evenly" in the horizontal - and I'm going to hit ctrl+z. The reason that didn't work out is
I need to come over here and change the offset back to 0, and then once I've done that I can
come over here and distribute this once again. And now we have these five arrows. So once we
have that we can hit ctrl+shift+a to deselect the selection area. You can also go to Select>none.
So now let's put all these on the same layer. I'm going to come up top here and just merge all of
the arrow layers together using this merge icon until we have a single layer, and we can rename
this - so I'll go with "arrows" - hit the enter key. We're going to duplicate this - so now we
have two of these layers. And we are going to move these in a bit. But first what we'll do is add our
text. So I'll come over here, grab my text tool. The font I have is Henrik - that is a free font.
I do have an entire tutorial on how to download and install free fonts for GIMP, I'll link it to
this video. The size is set to 100 here, and you'll see my letter spacing is set to 25.
So once I have all my settings I'm just gonna click on my composition, and with the caps lock
key on I'll type "TRAIN," and I'm going to click to create another text box - "WITHOUT" - and then
click over here - "LIMITS." Next what I want to do is move the text and the arrows into place.
So I'll come over here to my toolbox and grab the move tool. I'm going to place a guide where
I want all of these elements - so probably about right there. And now I can click and drag this
up top here. Make sure you're hovered over the actual text - the pixels in the text. So we'll
place that about right there, and now we'll move the arrows like so. And we can adjust
these so that nothing's overlapping. Make sure you're on the actual pixels of the text.
And finally if you wanted to make sure that everything was center aligned on the page,
you can come over here to Image>Guides>New guide by percent. "Direction" will be "Vertical,"
"Position" "50," and click ok. And we'll come over here and click the little transform lock icon
on all of these - everything except for the main image layer.
And with the move tool still selected we can now move this until that center area snaps there
to that center guide. And now we can move this guide off the page as well as this guide here.
So now I'm just going to click and drag my logo onto here, and this is just a fictitious company.
I actually designed this logo in another tutorial which I will link to this video. But what we'll
do is we'll scale this logo down. So I'll hit shift+s on my keyboard, scale this down a bit,
drag it over here to this corner, and hit "scale." And the last thing I did before I split everything
up is I just added a layer mode to these. So all of them have the same layer mode -
so they were all set to "grain merge." So I'm just going to do that for all of these.
Now we're going to split this composition up into three different images and then upload those to
Instagram. So to do that we're going to come over here to "Image," and then "Slice using guides."
So that's just going to slice the image into three different images exactly at the guides positions.
So you can see here now we have three different compositions. You want to make sure up top here
that all of these are exactly the same - so all these should be 1080 by 1080. And once you've
confirmed that now we can export each one of these - so I'll go to File>Export as. So navigate here
to the folder where I want to save these, and just name this one "slice one," hit the enter key.
And the quality is fine here. Instagram is going to automatically compress this anyway,
but you'll see I am exporting this as a jpeg. Do the same for this one - File>Export as.
Alright, once we've exported all of our images out of GIMP, now we need to upload them to Instagram.
So you can use whatever device you usually use to upload your projects to Instagram. I'm going
to use my phone. I typically email myself the photos and then upload them through my phone.
Alright once you have your images uploaded to whatever device you're using to post to Instagram,
again in this case I'm using my phone, once you're logged into Instagram you're gonna add a post the
way you usually would. So click that little "+" sign. We're gonna click on "Post," and in my case
I've limited what Instagram can see on my phone. So I'll come over here to "Manage" to select more
photos. So click "Select more photos," and here I can select the photos I want to use. So I want to
add these three that we just designed. I'll click "done." So now you can see the three photos we're
trying to use here. We have1, 2, 3. So I'm gonna click this little icon to upload multiple photos,
and the order of these does matter. So you can see by default mine has a 1 right here - that
is actually the very first photo we want in the order here for the carousel. So the middle image
is going to be number 2, and then the far right image will be number 3. And that just happens
to be the order these are in right here. But once you're ready hit "Next." If I start swiping over
it's going to be basically one continuous image. I can make additional edits to this but I'll just
hit "next." And I can write something here - I'm going to delete this when I'm done with
this tutorial, but I'll just hit share. And now you'll see here when I scroll over to the
right this is going to scroll as one continuous image. Alright so that's it for this tutorial,
hopefully you liked it. If you did, don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon to
be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial. You can check out any of the links to my resources
in the description of the video, but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.