Common Mistakes New GIMP Users Make

whenever you're using a piece of software for the first time there's always going to be somewhat of a learning curve involved but you can speed the learning process up just by learning from the mistakes of others and making an effort to avoid making them yourself in this video i'll be going over five of the most common mistakes that new users make and how you can avoid them yourself getting these misunderstandings out of the way early will hopefully make your learning experience a little easier and more enjoyable this is nick with logosbynic.com and in this video i'll be going over the top five common mistakes that users make when they're new to but 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 tools and features in and i explain what they are and demonstrate how they work i'll put a link in the description of the video if you want to check that out the most common mistake that you'll probably make as a new user is editing the wrong layer this is a mistake that i even make myself sometimes when i'm not paying attention to what i'm doing documents that you create in exist on a series of layers even if you're just editing a single image it's going to exist on its own single layer that will be selected by default if you're doing any kind of extensive editing or maybe even just adding text to an image you're probably going to end up with multiple layers this can create confusion for a new user because you can only have one layer selected at a time and whatever tool or effect that you're trying to apply will only be applied to the layer that you have selected in most cases anyway this means that if you're trying to erase portions of your image for example and it's not erasing the problem could be that you have the wrong layer selected in order to erase your image you'll have to select the layer that the image is located on first and this is true for most of the other tools and effects in as well so make sure to always be mindful of your layers when you're working a few years ago i wrote an article about why the eraser tool in might not be erasing to transparency and to this day it's one of the most popular articles i've written this just goes to show that this is a really common problem that users run into and the biggest reason why you may not be able to erase the transparency in is because you don't have an alpha channel added every document that you open in consists of three color channels and depending on the type of image you're editing a fourth channel known as the alpha channel this channel represents transparency if you've opened a jpeg image with then chances are you won't have an alpha channel because the jpeg format doesn't support transparency like the png or gif formats do this means that when you try erasing your image it's not going to erase to transparency it's going to use white as the default background instead to add an alpha channel to your image just right click the layer and select add alpha channel from the menu once added you'll be able to erase your image to transparency another common mistake that new users might make is trying to transform an image more than once and when i say transform i'm referring to things like scaling rotating shearing and altering the perspective is a raster image editor meaning you'll be editing digital images that are made of pixels and whenever you transform a raster image there's always going to be some kind of unavoidable artifacting that results a good example of this would be when you rotate an image if you rotate an image in then you may notice that there's a slight reduction in quality and resolution once applied and rotating the image again will result in even more quality loss this means that if you must transform an image it's best to only do so once if you rotate your image and realize you didn't rotate it far enough don't rotate it even more you're better off undoing the previous rotation and trying again another mistake you may run into as a new user is forgetting about a selection that you may have created earlier and is still active selections allow you to manually define a specific area of your image to manipulate further any alteration made to an active selection will be localized to that specific area only and the rest of the image will be unaffected a good example of this would be blurring with no selections enabled on your document you can blur your entire image but if you have a selection enabled the blur will only be applied to the selection area this can be problematic if you're trying to draw sketch paint or do anything else and you've forgotten that you have a selection enabled on your document or maybe your selection isn't visible because it's disguised by your image's composition in some way in this instance your tools may not be working the way you expect and it could be frustrating in order to continue on with editing your image you'll have to clear your selection first by navigating to select none the final most common mistake new users make is neglecting to acknowledge the tool settings menu this is a problem because a lot of times you'll run into an issue where a tool isn't working the way it used to and the reason why is because some kind of setting has been changed a good example of this would be the eraser tool if you have the opacity setting turned down it'll only erase your image partially or maybe there's too much spacing between your brush strokes because the spacing setting is turned up a little higher than it should be this is why it's important to familiarize yourself with the tool settings menu so that when something goes wrong you'll have a good starting point for your troubleshooting and that should do it for today's video about some of the more common mistakes that new users make if you have any questions leave a comment below and as always thanks for [Music] watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 29,284

Keywords: gimp, gimp mistakes, common gimp mistakes, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: JQj7uUGl6Sk

Length: 6min 2sec (362 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020