This tutorial composes five lessons each broken up into particular areas of gimp expertise. The tutorials are designed for newcomers to the gimp, and indeed newcomers to Linux, so don't expect advanced techniques, neither can I promise that the methods illustrated are the quickest or best practice. If you have suggestions, please email me with comments on how the tutorial could be improved or where my technique is weak!
If you're unsure what the gimp is, or where to get it, or what platforms it runs on, go straight to the gimp's own home page. But briefly the gimp is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, similar to Photoshop in many ways and with equal complexity, but with the astonishing advantage of being absolutely free. This tutorial uses GIMP version 1.1.18 (the celebrated 'Valentine' edition) throughout. If you have an older version, some of the tools and dialogue boxes may not be available to you.
The lessons cover the making of a very simple poster (and not particularly beautiful) to ask folk on our street (that's in York, England), to bring us charcoal for the annual street party, or failing that, to give us money and to let us buy it for them. Nota bene, while the street party is a real event, the poster is an imaginary request for the purposes of teaching some aspects of using the gimp, nothing more!
Interested in seeing the finished poster (83k) before you begin? Then get it here.Before beginning, you should know the basics of working with the gimp. Make sure you always save your work in the xcf format, which as the gimp's native file format will ensure that all information about layers and so on is preserved each time you save. You need to be familiar with the basic concept of layers, and to understand how to open / close files, create new layers, and how to use short cuts and make simple selections using the mouse. Some shortcut notations are employed, the main one to remember is RMC (Right Mouse Click). This is always over your image window. As already mentioned, the lessons are intended for beginners and should be very easy to follow.
You may want to ensure your preferences for using the gimp are set up nicely before beginning, as the defaults aren't as user-friendly as they might be. To look at your preferences, start the gimp and go to File -> Preferences. The first thing to look out for if you're a beginner, is to increase the levels of undo (press Ctrl + Z to undo any action using the gimp, a very important command to learn!). Highlight the Environment section and increase the levels of undo to what you feel happy with. I have mine set at over 30, but this isn't a good idea if you don't have much memory! But for a beginner, on an average system, I don't think there's any harm in setting it to around 20 or so. Like this, you've a nice cushion to fall back on if you've found you've gone a long way down a road you didn't want to take...
The next preference is not as important, but you may want to do it anyway to make it easier to work with large images. Increasing your tile cache size lets you put as much as possible of your image into memory. As a rough estimate, you can increase the tile cache size to about 32MB if you have 128MB of RAM, 16MB if you have 64MB of RAM and so on. If you don't know how much RAM you have, go to a terminal window, and type
free -mo
the total + free on the 'Mem:' line is how much RAM you have. Adjust your tile cache size accordingly. Now click Save. You can now begin!If you're interested only in a particular lesson, you can jump straight to the following pages:
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Kester Clegg Last modified: Mon Dec 4 23:12:05 GMT 2000 |