Gimp Lesson 2 | Getting Started & Interface Basics

welcome to this tutorial series in this series we'll be learning how to use from a very basic very beginner level if you don't already have installed you can get it for free on windows linux and mac check out my other video where I show how to download and get it installed on your computer but once it's installed and you open it up for the first time it'll probably look like this you've got separate windows so it brings up three different windows with tools in them we have a toolbox over here with some different tool icons we can click on as we click on those it shows options for the tool at the bottom of this dialog and then to the right side there's some different tools too that actually have different tabs we can click on and it changes the different tool we're on like channels and layer and our undo history all of this stuff can be customized how you like it so you could move this to a different part of your screen for example if you have multiple monitors you could move it to a different monitor but for the purposes of this video I'm going to use a different window mode and to do that we're just gonna click on Windows and go down to this single window mode and check this box and what that will do is throw all the tools into one window and so if we resize this it's going to have everything in one window we don't have to worry about accidentally closing a tool box or anything everything's just in one big window so again to do that it's under windows and check this box called single window mode I'm gonna be in single window mode this entire tutorial series to get started with a project we can come up here to the top left hand corner and click on file and there's a bunch of different options we have we can create a new project or we can open an existing image on our computer and apply some changes to it let's click on new and it brings up this dialog here it lets us create a new blank image that's gonna have a width of 2000 and a height of 1984 that's in pixels which is a little dots on your screen we can change this unit if you're feeling more comfortable using inches or maybe millimeters or centimeters we can change to whatever unit we want if we want to do inches then that's about six and a half by six and a half inches but we could do it we can maybe change this and do an 8 by 10 so we have 8 inches wide by 10 inches tall now there's also Advanced Options here but let's not worry about these right now but if we click on Advanced Options it brings in some more options for creating our document for now let's just click OK it really doesn't matter what size you're working with and so we have a nice eight we see there's a ruler across the top here starting at 0 and going over to 8 so this is 8 inches wide and then the height is 10 inches we see over here is a zero and if we scroll down it's to about 10 inches so we have a nice 8 by 10 almost like a page right here and we can select some of these tools maybe we come over here there's this brush tool this paintbrush if we left click on that we now have the paintbrush tool selected we know that because our mouse cursor changes to have a little paintbrush on it now if we left click and hold it kind of creates some different shapes here or some different that drawing whatever we want to draw and so we can draw on here if we want to undo you can hit control Z on your keyboard and it'll undo the last stroke you did ctrl Z on your keyboard does that you can also go up here to the top left under edit and click on edit and just go to undo paintbrush and it'll undo what we've done a stroke by stroke so now we're back to blank and maybe we want to click on this pencil instead if we hover over this pencil tool it says pencil hard edge painting using a brush capital n that means if we click on it we can use the paintbrush or if we're if we're on a different tool we can always hit the N key on our keyboard to quickly get back to the paintbrush I mean I'm sorry the pencil tool if we hover over a paintbrush it also has a shortcut P so press P on the keyboard we're now using our paintbrush and on the keyboard we're now using our pencil tool and those are actually customizable if you don't like those shortcuts you can change them you don't have to use the shortcuts hover over this tool right here is called the eraser tool if we left click on eraser we can now erase different things here but we see we're erasing kind of small if we want our eraser to be bigger we can change the size all the different settings for these tools are found right below these tools in this little dialogue here it's a little bit cramped in here right now if we want to see this differently we can hover over in between right next to the ruler and this toolbox over here left click and hold and we can drag this out so it's larger we get it as large as we want and it's sort of reset rearranges these columns and rows for the different tools maybe that's a good one there so that we can read more what's happening with these so let's see eraser tool if you want to change the size we can click plus over here or - to change the size we can also just double click within the number and type in a value so if we click in here and then we can erase that and type in like 100 for example now the size is going to be 100 I think that's in pixels anyway and so we can now erase this we can also scroll our mouse wheel in here I'm just using the scroll wheel on my mouse to increase the size so now it's even larger and we can erase much larger and as another way to change this we can just click in here click and hold our left mouse button and move our mouse from right to left and that'll also change the size so now our erase is very very large and we can come in here and erase this if we accidentally erase something we didn't want to erase we can hit ctrl Z on the keyboard to bring it back or if we wanted to redo that erase we can go up to edit and we can do redo erase or it's control Y is the shortcut for that but redo will rearrange the and control Y we can toggle back and forth between undo and redo our history keeps track of our history and we can find it over here we see our different history and we can look through this history and see all the different changes we've made and we can jump to certain points in our history but don't pay much attention to that now other than knowing there's layers and history and different things we can toggle on these different toolbars and that's just going to be something very similar on every different dialog there's these little icons we can click to get to different points of them so just be aware of that these are all customizable we can move them around and change them but for now let's just ignore everything over here to the right and let's only play with clicking on different tools here and then looking at the settings they have below another good setting we can look at or another good tool is this magnification this is zoom this magnifier glass when this is selected we can click and left-click and zoom either out or zoom in so we can zoom in very far here and I've zoomed in really far so I'm just seeing white so if I want to zoom out I can come over to the options for this tool and click the zoom out with my left mouse button and now I can left-click and we'll slowly start to zoom out and see get to a certain part if this is how sumed and we want to be we can stay at this point select maybe our pencil tool and left-click and draw with it and we see it's taking on the brush settings that we apply it to the eraser so if we want to make this smaller we can come over to the size and left-click and change it to small or we can reset it to the default by clicking this little icon here if we hover over it tells us what this does reset the aspect ratio reset the spacing so we can reset the size and now it's small again if we want to get to a different portion of our drawing we can use these sliders over here we can left-click and slide up and down to get to a lower part then we can keep drawing and then slide down and there's also a slider across the bottom as well so we didn't slide from left to right another way to do that is just hold down the the control wheel on your mouse and it creates this sort of hand grab icon it's like grabbing the entire canvas and just moving to a certain point and there's lots of different shortcuts we'll learn but for now it's good to get familiar with just using the different tools we can zoom out here and left-click and quickly zoom out we're going to talk about changing the color in the next video that's just right here we click and we can change our color but we'll learn more about this it gets a little bit complex and will sort of take that apart and learn it in the next video for now I just want to show you if we get something drawn like this and we want to save our project we can go to the top left hand corner again and go to file and this time we can go to save or we can go to export it depends on what we want to do with this picture if we want to save it and work on it later we click save that brings up this dialog box that lets us save the project on our computer we see that last three letters is a dot xcf file which is a project file so we just changed the first part of this to my project or whatever you want to call it and then it will save it in documents is where I'm saved that you can change put it in pictures maybe or a certain folder on your computer and I'll click Save and then that will save it to the documents in my computer but again it's a project file so where's my documents right here so here's this file that we've created that Sadaat xcf it's not going to be really compatible people can't open this with just everyday software they have to have a or a program that can open this type of file so we don't want to send this to someone in an email or upload it to a blog or a web page we can't really print this very easily without using we want to convert this if we want to share this what we would do is export this image instead so to do that we go file and we go to export and that's sort of like developing the picture as it's sort of like when it's set in stone and we're done making changes to it then we go to export and you can export and save it's a good idea to save your project and then also export and so again now we see under the export options it's a dot PNG which is an image file we can change that as well but we'll just leave it call it whatever you want to make sure it's a dot PNG file and hit export and then it brings up this dialog with some more advanced options just leave everything how it is here and hit export and then it exports this image don't get overwhelmed in settings is very well organized from the beginning to just leave everything at default and then as you get more comfortable and more advanced I'm using it you can maybe play with and tweak some of those advanced settings and so now we can minimize this and go to the location on our computer that we've saved I saved it in My Documents and we see we have to now a project file which is dot xcf if we click on this it'll open it up in and then we also have an image file they look the same but the image file is a more compatible format we can send we can upload to our blog or a website or we can print this take it to like Walgreens or summer and have it printed and be like what but this is just like a PNG image okay and it's just being displayed we can't make changes to it right here it's just an image file and you can learn if you're not familiar with that this may be outside the scope of this is learning about different image formats but just know there's two different ways in we do file save to save our project and work on it in the future and then export exports a final finished image and you can make changes and export it as many times as you want we could now export and call it something different but we'll play with that more in the future too so play with these brushes play with the eraser tool learn how to go ahead and play with some of these different things like spacing and hardness and see how it affects your brush and in the next video we'll be learning about color and some more of different tools that we can use in leave your questions or comments below if you have any and I'll catch you in the next video

Channel: TJ FREE

Views: 43,204

Rating: 4.9839358 out of 5

Keywords: free, tjfree, free software, open source, gimp, learn gimp, gimp lesson 1, gimp basics, gimp ui, gimp interface, photoshop alternative, free photoshop alternative, photoshop opensource alternative, open source photoshop, photoshop vs, gimp tools, gimp basic tools, gimp new project, gimp new, gimp save, gimp export, gimp xfc

Id: F4vf2pIC0q0

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 06 2019