A Beginner's Guide To Gimp

one of my favorite pieces of software is which is the new image manipulation program what this is this is a free and open source alternative to something like adobe photoshop so it's great for raster based images it's great for touching up photos and it's great for creating video thumbnails such as my youtube thumbnails all my thumbnails have been created using yep all of the artwork on the channel the channel header i do everything and it's a fantastic piece of free and open source software it's cross-platform meaning it's available on windows mac and linux and today i wanted to show you some of the basics of using the so let me switch over to my desktop where i've got open and let's talk about some of the basics now one of the confusing things if you're new to is what is going on with all of the stuff on the screen here obviously you have this empty space in the center where an image will be placed whether you create a new image or you import an image into but what is going on here these are all your tools and there's not very many here there's only about i don't know 15 16 tools well they're grouped so you see that each of the tools has a little uh arrow in the bottom right that is letting you know there's more tools in there if you right click on it you have more selections so this tool right here the unified transform tool if i hover over it it'll actually tell me all the other tools that are in that group if i right click on it i can choose one of the other tools in that group maybe i want the rotate tool instead of the unified transform tool so that is one of the first things you need to know because if you didn't know that these menus were here then you don't know you know eighty percent of the tools that are available in you'll never find them the next thing you need to know is the two colors here is the foreground color and the background color that's currently selected and if you want to swap between these there is a hotkey for it just hit x on the keyboard and you can quickly swap the foreground and background colors and that is very useful get used to learning some of the key bindings the key bindings really speed up your workflow in then you have this group of tabs here and what these are is typically displaying some information about the tool that you've currently got selected for example if i click the text tool here it will allow me to select a font uh set the size of the font the justification of the font whether it's right left center i could adjust the width between the characters i could just adjust the line height etc we could turn on and off anti-aliasing so this is where you get information about whatever tool you currently have selected now you've got another column over here on the far right now honestly i don't typically use this particular group of tabs here these are well by default you've got brushes you've got patterns you've got fonts but typically if i'm going to do something with fonts i'm going to do it over here and then you also have just some of my recent history here now again i typically don't use this group of tabs by the way you can actually add and remove things from the group of tabs you can actually click here and you could go to add tab and you could add anything you want yeah you can add gradients palettes fonts tool presets buffers anything that you you can have displayed here in can be a tab in any of these groups you could actually add things to this group over here as well then you have a second group of tabs here on the far right now this one you will use all the time because the main tab here is the layers tab so when you have layers upon layers on an image you know how do you tell which layer is which which layer is active well you're going to get some information displayed right here so let's go ahead and do something here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on file and we can create a new image and by default it's going to choose a 1920x1080 resolution here because that's the resolution of my monitor i'm okay with that if you want some advanced options here you can play with some of this such as what you want the background color to be whether you want a transparent background etc i'm just going to do the default because by default the background color is going to be the background color of these two colors here now if i wanted to swap that what i would do is i would i've already got black as the foreground color we could use this tool here called the bucket fuel tool now you see that you do have a hot key for shift b capital b so let's do that i'm going to do shift b and i've selected the bucket fill tool now if i do a click of the mouse it actually feels that white color because that was this area of selection we actually had focus on the whole image there it filled that whole image with the black color that we had selected now maybe i didn't want solid black maybe i wanted a gradient well if i right click on the bucket fill tool you see there is another tool here in that particular group called gradient and if i wanted to we could do a gradient of black and white so i just click and drag with the mouse and i can create whatever kind of gradient i want here now if i wanted to i could adjust the style of the gradient i can also use some of these preset gradients they're already preset with colors for example that one there so that could be useful i'm going to go back to the custom gradient that i'd set here and when i'm done here i can just click the rectangle tool here and now i've selected the whole area again now let's go ahead and create a new layer so let me hide my face and you can create a new layer one of two ways at least you can right click over here in the layer tabs and just choose new layer and i'm just going to use the default so this will just be a new transparent layer you could have also went up here to the layer menu here and chose new layer it works out the same way and now i think i want to add an image to this new layer so you can actually drag and drop from your file manager so what i would do is i'm just going to go add a random photo here from my wallpapers directory it really doesn't matter which one i choose i'm just going to drag it into that new layer and now the layer that i just drug into the new layer is actually its own layer so it's a floating layer until i go to layer and i choose merge down and now we have this picture layer and you see it's active because it's got the white background behind it now if i wanted to i could drag this layer underneath the background layer and the background layer was the black and white gradient and i think that's what i want to do and now i want to highlight the background gradient here this black to white and a really neat effect that i sometimes use in my thumbnails is i go to colors and i go to color to alpha and by default the color is set to white that's what i'm going to use i'm going to choose ok and you remember the black to white gradient well it what this does color to alpha it makes white transparent fully transparent and as you get closer to black it becomes fully opaque so that gradient really adds a nice effect where this is kind of like the photo was but as we get closer to this edge you see it gets darker and darker and darker and that sometimes is nice especially sometimes when i'm creating thumbnails you know sometimes the text that i'm trying to put on a background is the same kind of color or this the same lightness and i want to darken a certain section of a photo and that's typically how i do it i do a black and white gradient and then i use color to alpha so this was just a very simple demonstration to show you that in you use layers now let's do something a little more complicated so what i'm going to do is let's go ahead and import some images and i've got a whole bunch of images for demonstration purposes here and what i'm going to do is i'm going to drag them into now if you drag these images into it's going to put it on top of the image you're currently working in it assumes you're importing it as a layer on the image you're working in if you want each of these images to be their own image inside of what you need to do is drag it to the little logo right here in the top left so i'm going to drag all of these images and just drop it right there and all of those images i just imported are now their own tabs here in yum for us to work with and the very first thing i want to work with is this transparent jar so i imported this transparent jar and this picture of some water and a pitcher of a goldfish and what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back to this image that was 1920 by 1080. i'm going to hit x on the keyboard to get the foreground color back to white and then i'm going to do shift b to get the bucket fill tool and then i'm going to fill that in with white of course it didn't fill up the whole thing in let me click on that because we still had the weird uh gradient going on so i had to hit it a couple of times in the darker areas and now let me go back to the transparent jar and what i'm gonna do is the transparent jar let's see what the size is because we're going to import it into a 1920x1080 picture and it's 835 pixels so it should fit rather nicely so let me go ahead and import that and what i'm going to do here actually before i import it let's create a new layer i'd rather go ahead and import this into its own layer because we're going to have to manipulate all three of these images that i add here as their own layers so right now picture one was the new layer i created and the floating section is its own layer until i merge that down or anchor it uh anchor layer here and now we've anchored the jar into picture number one here now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to the water photo here and i'm going to go ahead and do ctrl c to copy that and let's go ahead and go ahead and add a new layer once again and this will be called i guess we should call this picture number two since the jar was picture number one and add that and what i want to do is actually get this exactly where i want it in the jar what i want to do is i want the water inside the jar so once i get that kind of where i want it i'm going to anchor the layer and then i'm going to have picture number two actually that layer below picture number one now one thing with these layers you do have modes we have the normal mode uh dissolve and like 38 different modes so one of the most useful ones is the multiply mode where it kind of blends the two images together it kind of merges some of the pixels together so if you're adding something like water inside a transparent jar it makes it a little smoother now obviously we need to get rid of all the water that is outside the jar so one of the things i would do is i would go to the water layer the pitcher number two layer here i'm gonna right click on that and i'm going to add layer mask and click enter by default it is white which is full opacity you could also choose black which is full transparency typically you want white full opacity and that adds a fully opaque layer meaning you can see everything as far as the water layer because that's where we added the mask and what this is a layer mask it's a way to remove certain parts of the layer or it's basically well let me show you so you want to use white and black with a layer mask and if i grab a paint brush tool let me go to paint brush and i just start drawing with a white paint paintbrush nothing happens but let me hit x to reverse the foreground and background colors now i'm drawing with black and black on the layer mask removes the sections there let me get to a bigger brush how about a 50 point brush here you see that is the beauty of a layer mask now if i was drawing with black let me switch black brings the image back it unmask it so white mask it black unmask it so to make this really simple i'm actually going to grab the rectangle tool because most of this i could just create a rectangle section here and go to the bucket fill tool and then fill that in which we need to fill that in with black not white so let me go to black and now we've got that and then i'm going to go ahead and create another rectangle over here get it kind of close we'll clean it up with one of the paint tools and then of course i need to do the same thing at the bottom here of the image i don't want to take off part of the jar there so i want to get it closed but not too close and then to really fine tune this what i need to do is go in with a paint brush or even an airbrush and go around the edges of the jar to get rid of that excess water let me go ahead and zoom in a little bit i'm going to zoom in 200 percent let me go ahead and grab the paint brush tool now i don't need something that is 56 point font or 56 pixels wide anymore i need a smaller brush here let's try 22. yeah that looks pretty good and what you'd want to do here is take your time and go through here and well i messed that up but you can always control z to undo or you could uh switch the foreground and background colors again if you erase something and you want to bring it back black would erase it white would bring it back so let me quickly and roughly just clean this up what i'm going to do is instead of doing the paintbrush another cool tool you could use you could actually use the free select tool here it's got the lasso icon and because this jar has such straight lines this actually makes this very easy what i'm going to do is i'm going to click and then i'm going to draw a straight line along the edge of that jar and we'll go all the way down here and then i'm going to click again click again i'm going to draw a box essentially and then now that the box has been selected what i could do is use the bucket fuel tool with black again and we just got rid of all of that water that was on the outside of that side of the jar i'm just going to keep doing that around the image now i did that rather quickly and crudely i could clean that up a little more there's still some parts where the water is too far outside the jar or too far inside the jar but for now i think that looks pretty good by the way you can see the pitcher number two layer that we had over here we've got two different things we've got the picture itself of the water and then we have the layer mask and you can see the layer mask is white and black and of course black is where the image was hidden where it was masked now i i want to add some saturation to that water because that water looks rather pale and lifeless so what i'm going to do is i'm going to click the water layer not the mass layer but the water and what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to colors i'm going to go to the hue saturation tool i'm just going to add a ton of saturation to that water so it really makes it pop you see added some blue and if you wanted the water to have more of an aquamarine kind of a green tint you could actually adjust the hue go down a little bit and you know add some some green to the color so it's not so blue yeah i don't mind that i think i could work with that now let's go ahead and add a new layer let's add a new layer for the goldfish i'll call it goldfish for the new layer and then go to my goldfish image and that goldfish image is rather large he will not fit in that jar at the size i'm going to go to image scale image and let's make him 400 pixels wide 400 by 253 will probably be okay and then ctrl c to copy and let's go back to this picture and we created a new layer let's paste it into that new layer and right now he is not positioned very well so i'm going to go to the move tool here where i can just drag him around if i wanted to remember the unified transform tool and the rotate tool let's choose the rotate tool and let's actually rotate the fish because he looks rather odd at that 45 degree angle let's make him more horizontal there and i think that looks pretty good there what we could do now is anchor the floating section to the goldfish layer and then i'm going to drag the goldfish layer to the top layer and that looks pretty good but it doesn't really blend in with the water because in actuality the water and the goldfish i mean there should be water around him remember the modes though what we could do is choose the multiply mode on that layer and now you see how it kind of blended some of the water pixels and the fish pixels so it looks more natural like the fish is actually in the jar and once again we can play with hue and saturation so go to colors hue saturation and i could turn up the saturation a lot to make him a little more colorful because he lost a little color when i chose the multiply mode we can actually change the color of the fish i mean if i wanted to play with the u i could make him yellow that actually looks pretty good green doesn't quite stand out in that water probably a red color or a yellow color makes the most sense i'm going to go with that and that is a rather simple demonstration of how you can use layers and layer masks inside it's one of the things you really have to master is layers and layer masks especially once you get into more complicated images so let me create a new image and play around with some other tools i'm going to create a new image 1920x1080 this time i'm going to do a black background and we're going to do some white text i'm going to click on the text tool and i'm just going to type something i'm going to do learn the basics of and we can adjust the size the the font size you can adjust what font right here if you wanted a different font i've purposely chosen antonio light ultra condensed because that looks pretty good if you want to you can adjust the line height you know the spacing between the lines for this i think that looks pretty good maybe adjust it a little bit yeah i'm okay with that now i want to actually uh adjust where this is in the screen what i could do is actually i could just make the text box perfect for this and then i could center it it is centered but it's not centered vertically let me adjust that yeah i think that's fine for that what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go to layer i'm going to choose new from visible now we have three layers we have the background layer which is just the black background we have the learn the basics of the layer which is the text and then we have the new visible layer here and you see that's the one we're currently in it's got the white uh border around it now in this new visible layer i'm going to go to filters i'm going to go to blur i'm going to choose gaussian blur this is a tool i use all the time it has some nice blurring effects and i'm just going to up the blur here i just want to add a little blur to the text 4.50 yeah that looks pretty good there now i want to create a new layer so i'm going to create a new layer i'm going to call this layer plasma and you'll see why i'm going to call it plasma in just a second i'm going to go to filters and then i'm going to go to render and then noise and i'm going to add some plasma noise to this plasma layer we created now what i want to do is i want to use the text we created earlier to generate a fake 3d shape on top of this plasma noise layer the process we use for this is known as bump mapping so i'm going to go to filters and i'm going to go to map and the first selection is a bump map i'm going to choose that and then we need some kind of input you see the question mark here click on that and choose an image or a layer for the input i'm going to choose the visible layer here so i'm going to double click that and you see learn the basics of we got a like a 3d outline now appearing inside that plasma noise layer i'm going to click ok on that now what i want to do is i want to add a layer mask to the plasma layer because i don't want all this plasma noise i just want plasma noise inside the text itself so what we need to do is we need to play with a layer mask so i'm going to add a layer mask here once again white full opacity is the default that's what we want so now i'm going to copy this visible layer which is that white text with the gaussian blur on a black background the black background is very important for the mask i'm going to ctrl c to copy the visible layer then i'm going to click on the plasma mask the white mask here and i'm going to paste with ctrl v and watch what happens we got rid of all that extra noise and now we just have the plasma actually being displayed inside the text itself with some of the gaussian blur now remember when you do a copy and paste the floating selection that has a visible copy layer here what you need to do is anchor that floating layer because technically that uh plasma mask layer we had a layer floating on top of it yet we want to anchor that down now another common technique people use in thumbnails is they take a picture of themselves some goofy picture like in this one here which i used in a thumbnail of mine a couple of weeks back people really responded rather positively to this thumbnail i created this isn't the thumbnail this was just the picture i took for the thumbnail and remember the free select tool what i could do is i could just go around myself and cut myself out and that's what i'm going to do right now i'm going to zoom in a little bit and i'm going to go around with the free select tool here now that i've completely circled myself with the free select tool one neat tool that you need to know about and this is why i was doing the free select tool one more time is because sometimes you want to select everything other than what you actually selected with the free select tool so what you need to do is inside select there is invert which means actually select everything other than what i drew around so if i do invert now i'm really selecting everything but me so if i did the black color here for the foreground and i went to bucket field you know and i just did a shift uh click instead of just a regular click shift click will fill in that entire region that's selected which was the inverse selection there and now what i want to do is i want to scale this image because it's was taken with a cell phone so the resolution is very large let's do the height of 1080 because that's what our other picture is and then what i could do is i could try to paste myself into this image here now you got to be careful which layer you paste yourself in because if i pasted myself into the background layer nothing happens right let me undo that if i paste myself in the visible layer though watch what happens so that actually works and i could move myself around and of course ideally what i should have done and of course i'm affecting the mask too because i have the black background so this actually would not work oh look at the edges around my head i didn't do a very good job of the cut and paste but anyway this was just a little bit of the free select tool and how you do an inverse selection there some other interesting tools you need to know about let's go ahead and create a new image and because honestly you need to know about some of the text tools let's do a black background and let's do white text and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to do gnu slash linux and let's change the font i'm going to do impact this is typically the font i use for my thumbnails and i'm going to go to filters and i'm going to go to light and shadow because probably one of the most common questions people ask about text in yemp is how to do a drop shadow well there is light and shadow drop shadow so go to filters light and shadow drop shadow and then choose the color for the drop shadow so if i wanted to i could use like a a light red there if i hit ok of course you can play with the opacity and the x and y coordinates and all of that but that is how you would get a drop shadow now let me ctrl z to undo let me show you another cool light and shadow filter here called long shadow and of course that adds a long shadow and once again we need to adjust this and use a color that can actually be seen here so drop shadow long shadow that's probably two of the most common text effects people add some other cool effects you can do let me click on the background layer here and we're going to do some stuff with this solid black background i'm going to go to filters i'm going to go to render and to pattern and i'm going to choose the checkerboard pattern here and what this does is it gives you two colors and you can set these to to be anything let's make these two slightly different colors so i'm going to do red and orange and that is an extremely annoying checkerboard background right that thing is very gaudy and garish and let's cancel that another cool filter we could use is filters render pattern grid i often use this one here and what this does is the background was already black it just draws a grid on top of that black background what do we want to use for a color by default it's white i could choose something else such as a shade of gray here and of course you could adjust the the size of the grid as well and hit ok on that we'll just leave that for now so let me import a photograph because i want to show you some other cool things you could do so this is just a random picture here i'm going to go to filters and i'm going to go to artistic and you could apply canvas and it's almost like it's been painted onto a canvas a really cool effect let me control z to undo another cool artistic effect i sometimes use is i use the cartoon effect where it basically cartoonifies it right it's like it's been drawn as a cartoon let me undo that another one that i sometimes use if i'm just creating some random abstract art is i'll take a a picture of anything and i'll run it through cubism what cubism does is it basically rearranges things as these random blocks these cubes and some of them are rotated in various ways you can adjust the tile size the saturation the background color etc i think what i want to do is i want to go ahead and create a thumbnail for this video so what i'm going to do is i've already got this here let me see what this image is it's 1920x1080 typically i want my thumbnails uploaded to youtube as 1280x720 so i'm going to adjust the size and now let me zoom in to 100 now that we've got that 1280 by 720 and now what i want to do is i want to create a new layer so i'm going to do new layer i'm going to call this text and let's create the text for my thumbnail so what i'm going to do i'm going to go ahead and use impact condensed for the font at 126 point font and this is typically what i use for my thumbnails and i'm going to do learn the basics of and make sure the line spacing is correct that looks pretty good and let me put it where i want it before i close out the text tool one thing i do want to do is i want to highlight the second line and i do want to change the color to my purple color there and now what i want to do is i want to create a new layer and this time it's going to be text background although i didn't spell background correctly but close enough and now this is a new empty layer and now what i want to do is i want to draw some boxes on this new empty layer this will not affect the text because the text was on a different layer so i'm going to do the bucket fill tool i'm going to fill this with white but i really wanted that to be black so i'm going to go to colors and invert and then the next box is actually one i do want to be white so let me draw a box around the text get it to the proper size that i want once that looks good i will use the bucket fill tool once again to fill that in then x on the keyboard to reverse the foreground and background colors because the next box of course is going to be a purple color so let me draw a box around the third line adjust that until it's just the way we want it and then once again do the shift b for the bucket fill and then fill that in and now through the magic of layers if i drag the learn the basics of layer above the text background layer watch what happens so that is very cool there now because this is about learning the basics of i wanted some artistic elements in the thumbnail so i found this image here which is uh the splashes of color with some paint brushes here i thought that would add a nice touch to the thumbnail but it's a very large image so i'm going to scale the image because by default it's 2300 pixels in height and i'm doing a 720 pixel thumbnail so i'm actually going to scale that down to 720 pixels i'm going to copy that with ctrl c and then what i want to do is i'm going to choose the very first layer the background layer let's choose a new layer above that and then i'm going to call that brushes and i'm going to paste that with ctrl v and i could put that right there and that doesn't look too bad i could actually go with that right there that's not a horrible thumbnail for something very quick but i i think i want to undo this because let me go get rid of that paste there on the new brushes layer i'm still going to leave that new layer there empty layer but i'm going to go back to this image and what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to image and i'm going to transform and we can flip vertically or horizontally i'm going to flip it horizontally so the paint brushes are on the other side and then come back to the brushes layer the empty layer we created and then paste it on this side i want to go to the text background layer we've got to anchor the floating layer first though because we did a copy and paste so let's anchor that layer then i'm going to go to the text background layer here and i'm going to do control x to cut everything control v to paste it and i'm actually just going to move it because i'm going to move it slightly over that way we see the brushes and also that visually i think it would make sense to do that and then i'm going to anchor that layer because we did a copy and paste and of course i need to do the same thing on the learn the basics of layer control x then ctrl v and then let's move that into position and that's looking pretty good there one thing we could play with the colors i could click on the background layer i could go to hue saturation and we could actually bump up the saturation or we could adjust the hue depending on what we wanted to do there actually i don't mind adjusting it that way i think the colors make a little more sense that way it kind of blends in with the brushes yeah i don't know i think that was a little too much there so let me undo that well i'll play around a little bit with the the colors the saturation the brightness and contrast because one of the real tricks that you want to do anytime you're doing thumbnails you want to up the saturation anytime you do an image of yourself pump up the saturation you know give yourself a little bit more color because you stand out in the image you want images that stand out you want a lot of high contrast high saturation images that way people are much more likely to click on your images now that was a whole lot of me just creating random images and text inside of but one of the things other than it was fun for me playing around with this stuff is hopefully i showed you a lot of the tools inside of we covered a lot of interesting things there but the main things that i think new to users need to learn they need to learn about layering and especially layer masks especially when you get into again some of the more advanced things that you want to do with creating images now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of this episode i need to thank absie gabe james mitchell paul west tommy allen chuck curt david dilling gregory heiko mike eryan alexander peace archan fedor polytech raver red prophet scott stephen and willie these guys they're my highest tier patrons without these guys this learning the basics of video would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors i just have you guys the community if you want to help support my work look for distrotube over on patreon all right guys peace who needs photoshop

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 17,650

Rating: 4.9790106 out of 5

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Id: YHwnlgD18kE

Length: 32min 34sec (1954 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 19 2021