10 Hidden Features in GIMP To Improve Your Workflow

[Music] is a photo editing powerhouse that allows you to manipulate your images in virtually any way possible and for a free piece of software the amount of features it has to offer really is quite impressive in this video I'll be going over ten of the more obscure features that you may not know about and once you do know about them it'll surely improve your workflow and before we get started if you'd like to learn more about how works be sure to check out my series it's a collection of over 60 videos where I go over all of the major tools and features in and I explain what they are and demonstrate how they work I'll have a link in the description of the video if you want to check that out let's say you want to cut out a piece of an image and move it to a layer of its own you can do that by creating a selection over the area you'd like to extract using any number of tools then right-click your selection and navigate to select flow this will move the selection to a floating layer simply click the green icon labeled create a new layer and it will add that selection to a new layer of its own the paths tool in is excellent for creating selections with exact precision but one thing you may not have known is that you can export your pads as vectors in SVG format and then work on them later on an a vector graphics editor like Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator to do so navigate to your paths menu locate the path that you'd like to export then right-click it and navigate to export when naming your file make sure to manually add the dot SVG extension otherwise windows won't recognize the file format then you should be able to open that file with Inkscape and work on it the same way you would any other vector path when using the rectangle select tool in the rectangles you generate will automatically have squared corners you may already know that you can give your rectangles rounded corners by ticking the rounded corners box in the tool settings then you can adjust the radius of those rounded corners as well one thing you may not have known though is that you can give that rectangle a concave corner where the rounded edges flow inward rather than outward to do that simply right click on your selection and navigate to select rounded rectangle and tick the box that says concave you can manually adjust the radius slider beforehand if you'd like then once you're finished click OK and your rectangle will now have a concave corner the unified transform tool allows you to scale rotate shear and alter the perspective of the images you're working on it also allows you to transform pads though which is a really powerful and useful feature to transform your pads first navigate to the pads menu and click the eyeball icon to make your path visible on the canvas it should be indicated by a red outline then grab your unified transform tool and in the transform settings at the top of the menu click on the icon on the right labeled path this will make it so that the tool only functions on pads and not on the image itself all you have to do now is click on your path and you'll be able to transform it the same way you would for any other image just to make sure to change the setting back to layer once you're finished otherwise it's easy to forget that you left it on pads last time you used it I've made that mistake more times than I care to admit myself another feature you may find to be really useful in is having the ability to temporarily toggle the visibility of your tool menus off and on this can be done by simply pressing tab on your keyboard once toggled all you'll be left with is the standard menu options at the top of the page and the rulers on the X and y-axis of your canvas to get your menus back all you have to do is press tab on your keyboard again this feature can really come in handy when you're working on some kind of large sketch or painting where you're not constantly switching back and forth between tools it's also good if you already have all of your keyboard shortcuts memorized and would rather not have those menus taking up screen space another handy feature in is having the ability to convert your selections to pads let's say you create a selection on your image using the select by color tool you can correct any imperfections in that selection by going to the Select menu and clicking on to path you can now navigate to the pads menu turn on the visibility of your newly created path then you can make whatever adjustments you'd like using the pads tool once you're finished you can create a new selection with it by pressing enter on your keyboard within the Edit menu there's a feature that allows you to add a stroke around a path if you expand the line style options within the stroke selection menu you'll see a variety of different dash presets to choose from including dotted lines dashed lines and a combination of both dotted and dashed lines you can even adjust other properties of the lines like the spacing between the dashes the miter limit and the cap style once your properties are set go ahead and click stroke and a dotted line will be generated around your selection when creating images for the web it's important to be mindful of your file sizes images with large file sizes take up a lot of disk space and can slow down your website leading to a poor and user experience for those with slower internet connections allows you to compress the file size of your images by up to 70% to do so go to image mode and select index this will bring up the indexed color conversion menu choose generate optimum palette and make sure the maximum number of colors is set to 255 then click convert as you can see I was able to reduce the size of the thumbnail I used for this video from 108 kilobytes to 34 nearly a 70% reduction I do have to warn you though that whenever you reduce the file size of an image you are doing so at the expense of image quality so make sure to save a high-resolution copy before doing so makes it easy to take your text and flow it along a path to do so first create a path on your document and then generate some text all you have to do now is right-click the text layer and select apply text to path this will create a new path with your text flowing along the contours of the path simply navigate to your paths menu right-click your text path and click path to selection you can now fill your text in with whatever colors or patterns you'd like the final trick I'll be sharing with you today is having the ability to edit and export animated gifs with when you open your gif file with you'll notice that each frame has been separated and placed on its own layer you can now make basic modifications to your gift like cropping it resizing it flipping and rotating in and changing the color mode once you're finished you can export your gift by navigating to file export as and choosing gift from the extensions list once you're in the gift export menu make sure to tick the box that says as animation before exporting this feature can also be used to design your own animated gifts all you have to do is place each individual frame on its own layer and then export it as an animated gif that should do it for today's video about some of my favorite hidden features in leave a comment below to let me know if you knew of any of these features already and if you have any features you'd like to share yourself as always thanks for watching you

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 33,176

Keywords: gimp features, hidden features in gimp, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: gCiT62Uy7yg

Length: 7min 52sec (472 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2020