this article is intended for people who are new to The GIMP or like to know more about it...
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The GIMP is a very nice and powerful software-application for digital image-processing. Just to show you its power: the image above was entirely created using The GIMP. I mainly use the Windows-version which has been ported by Tor Lillqvist (tml) from Finland (Suomi). I designed quite some websites already and am using The GIMP for the web-graphics that are displayed on them. I must admit I am not a graphics-artist or know much about graphics. I am just a regular user with interest in web-graphics. I learned The GIMP just by using it and by being part of the GimpWin-mailinglist and the GimpImages-mailinglist. Of course all the images on the page have been created and edited with The GIMP (Windows-version). |
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While The GIMP is such a powerful application, doesn't it have any drawbacks ?!? - Oh, yes, it has...
I am writing this article just to show you some of these. I hope that it will make you're life with The GIMP more easy.
This article is the result of about one year of experience with using the Windows-version of The GIMP (almost on a daily basis).
Just remember that The GIMP clearly focuses on functionality (which is good) instead of user-friendlyness.
Therefore some things just aren't that obvious, just until you get the hang of it...
So just take your time to read through this article and you'll make yourself an immediate GIMP-crack.
For your convenience I created a list with pointers to the items in this article:
I just opened an image with The GIMP, but how do I edit it ?
Clicking on the image using the right-mousebutton will bring up a menu with a lot of functions. It's quite easy, but not obvious at first...
When you read GIMP-tutorials it also comes in handy to know that this menu is referred to as <Image>.
So the menu's are addressed like <Image>/Filters/Blur/Anti-alias.
If you do not like accessing this rightclick-menu each time you can also make a window out of it. Just rightclick on the image and click on the little dotted line above the image. Then a normal window showing the menu will appear for your convenience. BTW, this trick works for each GIMP-menu, so check it out...
Update for GIMP 2: in GIMP 2 each image window has its own menu on top. That is more convenient and one does not have to use the rightclick menu all the time. However, I am still used to the old way of accessing the menu.
This menu uses the Dutch language. After the installation my GIMP is (at least partly) in Dutch.
Update: thanks to Branko Collin, the guy who made the Dutch translation, for pointing me out how to change the language back to English. This can be done by setting the LANG-environmentvariable to "en". I just did so on WindowsNT (system-controlpanel) and it worked out fine.
The GIMP does support images in the GIF-format. However, there is an annoying patent from Unisys on this image-format. The GIMP-developers should get a license from Unisys that allows them to distribute GIF-plugins with the software. Because The GIMP is an opensource-application, there is not much money available. Therefore the plugins are available as a seperate download. So just download them once and install them in the folder called plug-ins.
When you open an image (it mostly happens with GIF-images) lots of GIMP-functions are unavailable (grayed out) in the menu. This is because GIF-images are indexed and most of the GIMP-functions work on images with the RGB-colorpallette. But do not fear, you can easily change the image to RGB. Use <Image>/Image/Mode/RGB for this. After that you will see that a lot more options are available... Isn't this cool ?
For this reason a dialog called Plugin Details was invented:
You can access this by using the GIMP-Xtns-menu:
In the "Plugin Details"-dialog you see the "Image Types"-colum. There you see acronyms like RGB, RGBA, INDEXED, GRAY, etcetera. Below are the descriptions of these acronyms:
| Image Type | Description |
| RGB | this works on images with a RGB-pallette |
| RGB* | I'm sorry but I do not yet know what this means |
| RGBA | this works on images with a RGB-pallette and an Alpha-channel |
| INDEXED | this works on images with an indexed pallette |
| GRAY | this works on grayscale images |
Tips:
- you can easily search this list by filling in the name and clicking "Search by Name"
- by selecting a plugin and clicking Details you see a more elaborate description for the plugin
- by clicking "Tree View" you see a graphical overview of where you can find the plugin within the GIMP-menustructure
It took me quite some time to figure this out, but here it is:
There is also an ColorToAlpha-plugin which takes one color and makes all parts of the image with that color transparent. Which is quite convenient...
Beware: not all graphics-formats support transparency. Well-known formats that support transparency are GIF and PNG.
Sometimes you want to get rid of the transparency-information in your image.
Of course you can save the image to a format that does not support transparency, close the image and open it again.
But that's not a very nice method.
You'd better just flatten the image: <Image>/Layers/Flatten Image.
You can change the size of your image by using <Image>/Image/Scale Image.... Most of the times I want to scale an image down by some percentage. To do this, select % (see below; default is number of pixels (px)). In the inputboxes for new width and height appears 100. You can adjust this to the percentage by which you want your image to shrink or grow.
You can extend The GIMP's functionality even more by adding Photoshop-filters to your GIMP-installation.
You can just copy these plugins to your userfilter-directory. For your convenience The GIMP already ships with quite some Photoshop-filters installed.
Other plugins can be found on the Internet.
Not all Photoshop-plugins work with The GIMP. The userfilter-plugin only recognizes FilterFactory (FFL)-type plugins.
There are also 8BF-type plugins, but you are on your own with these. They might just work, but it's not guaranteed.
For more information, visit these sites:
© 2001-2005 ~ Martijn Weisbeek (to show your support for this page, please send me an e-mail if it has helped you...)