This tutorial will begin to get you familiar with the Gimp, or Gnu Image Manipulation Program.
The Gimp is a powerful, free image editing program, which is available for Unix, Windows, or Macintosh computers.
This tutorial will use the Windows version but the Unix and Macintosh versions are very similar.
I'm going to start by downloading the Gimp and installing it on this computer and to do that I've gone to the Gimp's website which is at
www.gimp.org/.
Now I'm going to scroll down and I'm going to follow this link to Gimp for Windows.
Now the Gimp website provides downloads for Unix and for the source code for the Gimp program and provides links to downloads for installers for Windows or Macintosh.
So I'm going to follow the first link here, which links to a site which provides downloads for Windows.
And now that I'm at this site I'm going to choose stable version.
Now, I actually need to download two things here. I need to download the Gimp and I need to download GTK+, which is a runtime environment that the Gimp requires to run.
So the first thing I need to do is download GTK+, so let me scroll down to that. I'm going to click download on one of the sites that I can download GTK+ from, and I'm going to save it on the desktop.
Now that GTK has been downloaded, I'm going to close this window and I'm going to scroll down again.
Now I'm going to download the Gimp itself and so I'll click on one of the links to download it, and again I'm going to save it on the desktop.
Now that the Gimp has been downloaded, I'm going to close this and I'm going to close Explorer.
And the first thing I'm going to do is install GTK+, so I'll double click on the zip file and then start the installer.
And I'll go through the installer process and I'll click next here.
The first thing I need to do is accept the license agreement, and I'm going to let it install in it's default location and I'm going to choose a full installation.
Now here it's telling me what it's going to do and I'm going to click install.
So now the GTK+ 2 installer has finished, and so I'll move on to the Gimp.
Open it's zip file, and start the installer.
So again, I have to accept the license agreement.
And I'm going to let it install in it's default location.
And I'm going to choose "Typical Installation," which will skip some translations.
And here I'm allowing it to create a shortcut in the start menu.
Now on this page you can choose to have various file types associated with the Gimp, so when you double-click on them they'll open in the Gimp, but I am going to not do that.
On this page the installer is telling me that in order to read Postscript files, I need to download another piece of software called Ghostscript, but I don't need to do that immediately, so I'm going to click next and not worry about it for now.
And here I can choose to create a desktop icon, which I'd rather not do, so I'll uncheck that and click "next."
Now here it's telling me what it's going to do, and I will click "install."
Now the Gimp has been installed and I need to configure it to run on this computer, so I have this box checked here to launch the Gimp when I click "finish," to get out of the installer.
And now I'm going to begin the Gimp user installation, which is just going to configure the Gimp to run on this computer.
So the first thing I'll do is click "continue."
And it's telling me that it's going to create some configuration files, and I'll just click "continue" and let it do that.
Which it just did, so I'll click "continue" again.
On this page, we set the size of the tile cache, which covers the amount of memory that the Gimp uses when it runs.
So I'm going to leave it now at the default of 64 megabytes, but if you had a computer with a very large amount of RAM, you could set this higher and get better performance out of the Gimp.
And if you had a computer with a small amount of RAM, or you needed to run a lot of programs at once, you might want to set this lower.
This page also contains a place to set where the swap file is, where the Gimp stores undo information and data that's in excess of what will fit in the tile cache.
I'm just going to leave that in its default location.
On this page we tell the Gimp what our screen resolution is, and you can either check "get resolution from windowing system," which basically allows the system to tell the Gimp what its resolution is,
or if you uncheck that you could set the resolution manually, or you can click this button and go into a calibration setup, which will let you calibrate your screen with a ruler.
But what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose this automatic process, and get resolution from windowing system.
So now we're done configuring the Gimp and it's starting up.
And we have succeeded in installing the Gimp on this computer.
When the Gimp starts it displays a "tip," to give you a little pointer about how to use the Gimp. You can make it stop doing that by unchecking this box,
but when you first start using it, it's a good idea to let it keep doing that. I'm going to close that, and actually now I'm going to quit the program by choosing "quit" from the "file" menu.
And we have now completed installing the Gimp on this computer.
In this portion of the tutorial I'm going to show you the Gimp's user interface and also show you how to open an image, resize it, crop it and save it as a jpeg.
Let's began by starting the Gimp. I'm going to go to the start menu and choose Gimp 2. It's in this portion of the menu because I've opened it recently but is also available from the list under "all programs," although you cannot see it in this capture window.
So I'll just choose it from here.
And the Gimp is starting up.
The first thing I'm going to do is close the Gimp "tip of the day," although these are good to read.
And when the Gimp starts up at first there are two windows, one of which is a toolbar that contains icons for a number of tools at the top, tools for selecting colors, and also a group of options for the currently selected tool.
The other window contains different panes for working with layers, channels, and paths, and later in this tutorial I'm going to give you an introduction to working with layers.
The bottom of this window contains panes for working with brushes, patterns, and gradients.
So the first thing I'm going to do now is open the file we're going to work with, so on the toolbar I'm going to go to the "file" menu and choose "open."
And then I have to navigate to the file I want,
which is on the desktop, and I'm going to choose this one.
Now as you can see, this picture is much too big to view on the screen with these other windows, so I'm going to resize it.
And now that it's been resized, I'm going to resize our view of the image so it will be able to fit in this area.
So in the "view" menu, let me move this so you'll be able to see the menu, move it a little more, I'll choose "zoom to fit window,"
So I went to "view," "zoom," "zoom to fit window."
And now, the image fits in the window. Now I haven't actually changed the size of the image, I've simply changed the amount of zoom, so that it will fit where we can see it.
So the first thing I'm going to do is crop this extra white space out from around the image, and there are two ways of doing that here.
I can choose this tool, the "crop" tool, and select an area with the mouse, and click "crop" on the pop-up, which crops the image down.
Now there's another way to do it, too, so let me go to the "edit" menu, and let me again move this to where you'll be able to see.
I'll choose "undo crop image" from the "edit" menu.
And another way to do this is to go under the "image" menu, choose "transform," and, again, let me move this to where you can see it.
I'm going to go under the "image" menu, choose "transform," and "autocrop,"
which automatically removes excessive space around the image; it removed all of that white.
So the next thing that I want to do is resize the image, so under the "image" menu, I'm going to choose "scale image."
And I'm going to enter a new width, I'm going to choose 250 pixels.
And now because the ratio of X and Y has been linked, you can see that with this chain, when I change the width, the height will automatically change.
The next thing to do is I'm going to go down here to "resolution" and change the resolution to 72 pixels per inch, and again because these are linked it's going to stay together.
So I'll click "ok," and the image will resize.
So now it looks very tiny because the zoom is still where we left it before, so I'm going to zoom to see it in full size.
So I'm going to choose under the "view" menu, "zoom," "100%."
And now this is the actual size of the image we're going to save.
The last thing I'm going to do in this part of the tutorial is save this as a jpeg, which would be appropriate for use on a website.
So, under the "file" menu on the image, I'm going to choose "save as,"
And the next thing to do is navigate to where you want to save it, and it's still on the desktop from when I opened the previous image, and so I'll just leave it there.
Now you can choose the kind of file you want to save it as by this pull-down menu, which shows a variety of file types.
And the other thing you can do is leave it on "by extension," which means if I change the extension from ".tiff" to ".jpg," then it will automatically choose to save as a jpeg.
So I'm also going to change the name of the file to "little-wilber.jpg" and click "ok,"
Which opens the "save as jpeg" options window. In this pop-up I can choose among different options for saving the file.
Now if I click this box, "preview in image window," I will be able to see the effects of the settings that I'm using on the image, so you'll see as I slide the "quality" slider,
you can see the image being reduced greatly in quality as I reduce the "quality" setting.
And so what I'm trying to do here is find a good tradeoff between size and quality, and I think if I set it at about 80, the image looks pretty good, there are a few little artifacts you can see around the eyes, and around the edges,
but that looks good enough, and it's only 5.5 kilobytes, so that seems like a pretty good size for use on a website, so I'm going to save it like that.
For now, I'm just going to leave all the other options on the page in their default settings.
So click "ok," and now we have succeeded in resizing, cropping, and making a jpeg from this image, and that ends this part of the tutorial.
In this part of the tutorial, I'm going to show you how to add text to an image, and we're also going to start using layers.
Let's begin by adding text to an image. I have already opened this image, which is a tiff image, and I would like to add a text label to it.
So the first thing to do is to select the text tool, which is represented in the toolbar by a capital "T,"
And you can see now that once I've selected this tool, the options for the tool open below.
So here's where I can choose the font, the font size, and the color. Let's choose a color for our text.
When I click the color button, I get a color selection pop-up, which gives me several methods for choosing color, and I'll just go with this one and select this nice yellow.
And I'm going to leave everything else as it is for now.
Now if I click in the image, I get another pop-up, the Gimp text editor.
And if I type in this box, you can see that the text I'm typing is appearing over here in the image window.
Now you'll see that it's actually going over the edge of the image, and I'm going to be able to fix that in a minute.
So if I close this box, and look over here at the "layers" list, you can see that when I've created this text it's automatically made a new layer.
And what layers do is give you the ability to work with different sections of the image that can be on top of one another and work with them independently.
So what I want to do now is take this text layer that I've just created and move it to where it's fully within the frame of the image.
So in order to do that I'm going to select the "move layers" tool, bring it over here, and hold it over the text that I just wrote, and move it here.
You can see when I moved that it did not move the background image.
Now I'm going to add another layer.
In order to do that, I go to the image, and in the "layer" menu choose "new layer,"
And I'm given a pop-up that gives me some choices,
So I'm going to name the new layer "Red Fill."
It automatically chose the width and height of the image, and i'm going to leave it that way for the size.
And I'm going to leave the fill type as "transparent."
So when I close this, you can see in the layers list that a new layer has been created, and now I'm going to fill it with a red color.
Here I select the foreground color, and you can see that we get the same interface to select color that I had earlier when I was selecting the text color.
And I'll use this to choose a red.
Now if I take this fill tool, which looks like a paint bucket pouring, select it, and go over to my image, and click,
You can see that the image is now completely filled with red.
Now, you can see here in the layers list that the red fill is above the other two layers, and I can actually move that down by clicking this button.
I select the layer by clicking it, and then lower it, and now you can see the text is above the red layer.
Now while you're working you can also hide layers by clicking on this eye that's next to each one, and now I can't see the text layer and it's still there but I've just hidden it.
And you can see now I can bring it back.
Another thing you can do is change the opacity of layers, so you can see through beneath them.
If I select the red fill layer and drag this slider, you can see that you can now see the underlying image, but sort of through a red haze.
Now I'm going to save my progress. When you save a file where you've been working with layers, you need to remember to save it in a format where all of the layer information is preserved.
In the Gimp you would save it as a Gimp file, which uses the three letter extension, "xcf."
So to save our image as a Gimp file, we go to the "file" menu on our image, choose "save as," and I'm going to call it "aaron.xcf."
And under "determine file type," I can say "by extension," and because I said ".xcf" it will automatically be a Gimp image.
Or, I can select "xcf" in the list in the pull-down menu.
And now I'll click "ok,"
You can see that I've been working on this before, and I saved it earlier, so I'm going to choose "yes" to overwrite my previous image.
You can also use the Gimp to select areas within layers to work on.
For example, if I choose this tool on the toolbar, which is the rectangular selection tool, and click an drag inside the image, and you can see also that I have the "Red Fill" layer selected,
And in the "edit" menu, I choose "cut,"
then the area that I selected has the red fill cut out of it, and you can see that it did not affect the background layer underneath.
If I choose the background layer, and choose the elliptical selection tool, and click and drag in the image, and do the same thing,
choose "cut," and you can see it cut out of the background photograph.
With the lasso tool, I can choose freeform areas and select them so I'm going to outline the person,
go around the person.
And now what I'm going to do is go to the "select" menu and choose "invert."
And now what I've done is that everything outside of this area is selected.
And an interesting thing I can do now is go choose the paintbrush tool.
And choose another color.
And make it blue.
And then choose a brush from the brushes selection area down here.
Then if I go, and I begin painting with the brush, you'll notice that it's only allowing me to paint in the selected area, which is now the outside of those boundaries.
I can remove my selection by going to the "select" menu and choosing "none," and you can see that my selection outline is gone.
The Gimp also provides methods to automatically select areas.
For example, if I choose this "magic wand" tool, it selects continuous regions of color.
So if I select the magic wand tool and then click in this blue painting I just did, you can see that it automatically selects that.
And you can see that it left some edges here, so what you need to do when you're doing that is to work with the options.
So if I go and undo this selection, by going to "select," "none,"
And increase the threshold for this magic wand tool, and click again, you can see that it selected more and that it actually sort of expanded beyond the borders.
So in order to get a good setting with that tool you need to experiment.
Also, this tool allows you to select by color, not necessarily continuously, so if I choose a green in the background,
and actually I'll hide the red fill layer to make this easier to see.
If I choose a green in the background, it selected every area in the layer that was the same color green.
If I choose this gray, it changes the selection to everywhere in the image, or rather, in the layer, that has that color.
The Gimp includes a large number of filters that allow you to transform the images that you're working on in different ways.
And these filters are located in the image window, under the "filters" menu.
Let's say, for example, that I want to sharpen the background picture in this image.
The first thing I do is to make sure that that layer is selected in the layers pane.
and then I go back to the image window, and go to the "filters" menu, and under that I go to the "enhance" submenu,
and choose "sharpen."
When I choose "sharpen" a popup appears that has a small preview window and a slider that I can use to set the level of sharpness I want to have applied to my picture.
And see if I slide it too far it gets really grainy and weird looking, so I'm going to move it back, so it's just a little subtle increase here,
and click "ok," and you can see that the filter has been applied to the image.
The Gimp includes a very large number of filters that allow you to do many, many different things with images, so it's really worth taking the time to explore them on your own.
If you'd like to get more information about using the Gimp, you can go to the gimp website at
www.gimp.org.
By following the link to "Documentation," you can get a list of links to the Gimp user manual in various languages.
By following the link to "Tutorials," you're given a large number of tutorials that show you different things you can do with the Gimp that are divided into different levels of expertise and also different areas of interest.