- The Book of GIMP: A Complete Guide to Nearly Everything
- Introduction
- I. Learning GIMP
- 1. Getting Started
- 2. Photograph Retouching
- 2.1 Tutorial: Enhancing Badly Taken Photographs
- 2.2 Global Transformations
- 2.3 Local Transformations
- 2.4 Retouching a Scanned Photograph
- 2.5 Advanced Techniques
- 2.6 Exercises
- 3. Drawing and Illustration
- 3.4 Dodging, Burning, and Smudging
- 3.5 The Digital Painting Process
- 3.6 Drawing Shapes
- 3.7 Exercises
- 4. Logos and Textures
- 5. Composite Photography
- 6. Animation
- 7.1 Tutorial: Extracting Information from a Picture
- 7.2 The Principles of Preprocessing
- 7.3 Filtering
- 7.4 Edge Detection
- 8. Designing a Website
- 8.5 Exercises
- II. Reference
- 9. The GIMP Interface
- 10. Display
- 11. Layers
- 12. Color
- 13. Selections
- 14. Masks
- 15. Drawing Tools
- 16. Transformation Tools
- 17. Filters
- 17.1 Common Properties
- 17.2 The Blur Filters
- 17.3 The Enhance Filters
- 17.4 The Distorts Filters
- 17.5 The Light and Shadow Filters
- 17.6 The Noise Filters
- 17.7 The Edge-Detect Filters
- 17.8 The Generic Filters
- 17.9 The Combine Filters
- 17.10 The Artistic Filters
- 17.11 The Decor Filters
- 17.12 The Map Filters
- 17.13 The Render Filters
- 18. Animation Tools
- 19. Obtaining and Printing Images
- 20. Image Formats
- 21. Scripts and Plug-ins
- 22. Customizing GIMP
- III. Appendices
- A. Vision and Image Representation
- B. Tips and Hints for Selected Exercises
- C. Resources
- D. Frequently Asked Questions
- D.1 What Does the Future Hold?
- D.2 How...?
- How can I draw a straight line?
- How can I draw a circle?
- How can I create an outline around text?
- How do I save a selection within an image to a file?
- How do I merge an image from another file with the current image?
- How do I get small fonts to look as nice as large fonts?
- How do I set keyboard shortcuts?
- How do I set up GIMP so a layer becomes active when I click an element in that layer?
- How do I fill a layer or selection with transparency?
- How do I draw in a different color?
- How do I add a blur to my image?
- How can I paint along the outline of a rectangle?
- How do I move existing guides?
- How do I get rid of a floating selection?
- How do I paint in a transparent area?
- How can I see the marching ants and know whether my selection has been made?
- How can I add color to a black and white image?
- How do I resize my photo to a precise size, say 5 × 7 cm?
- How do I set the foreground color to a color in my image?
- How can I keep text sharp when scaling it down?
- How do I copy a layer mask to another layer mask?
- How can I search for a specific font, brush, or pattern?
- How do I erase with a tool other than the Eraser?
- How can I use the Scale tool to enlarge an image?
- How can I find a dialog I closed by accident?
- How can I invert grayscale values without changing the colors?
- How do I crop with a defined aspect ratio?
- D.3 Why...?
- Why are some of the filter names grayed out?
- Why is nothing happening?
- Why doesn’t anything happen when I try to cut, paste, or apply a filter to a selection?
- Why can’t I modify the channel I built by saving a selection?
- Why can’t I change my image after I saved a selection to a channel?
- Why do my paint strokes appear on the image when I try painting on a layer mask?
- Why did the size of my file increase when I exported it to JPEG with 100% quality?
- Why can’t I draw in the color I chose?
- E. Installing GIMP
- F. Batch Processing
- Index
- About the Authors
- Copyright
GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and it is one of the most successful applications in the world of free software. The name GNU is a recursive acronym: GNU’s Not Unix, coined in 1983 by the celebrated Richard M. Stallman as a name for his pet project—a free software, Unix-like operating system.
Free software is a term used to describe software that can be used, studied, modified, and redistributed by anyone with only one, very reasonable restriction: that other users enjoy the same freedom to use the software and to examine and modify the software’s code. Free software is generally available without charge, but sometimes there is a fee.
The word free must be understood as in “free speech” rather than “free beer.” The term software libre is gaining some popularity, as it negates this ambiguity. The French word libre means free in the sense of liberty, whereas the word gratuit means free of charge.
GIMP is freely distributed to (and by) anybody, and anybody can look at its contents and its source code and can add features or fix problems. The only restriction is that, if you make any change to GIMP and want to redistribute it to other people, you must do it in a way that grants the recipients exactly the same freedom that you enjoyed.
GIMP began in 1995 as the school project of two university students; now GIMP is a full-fledged application, available on all distributions of GNU/Linux and on recent versions of Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Installing GIMP is fairly easy, and if you haven’t already done so, take a minute and install GIMP now (see Appendix E for installation instructions).
Compared to the dominant commercial image-manipulation application, which is developed by an army of well-paid programmers, GIMP is currently developed by a very small team of unpaid, but enthusiastic, volunteer programmers. Keep this in mind if (read: when) you run into glitches in the program or when a feature you’d like to have isn’t available. Remember the GIMP credo: “If you want it so badly, make it, and share it with the rest of us!” Welcome to the world of free software!
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