GIMP Tutorial: 5 Things You Didn't Know GIMP Could Do

hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and today I'll be showing you five things you didn't know you could do with [Music] so some of the tools I'll be going over in today's tutorial are actually pretty common but they have hidden features that I bet you guys didn't know about for example there's the eraser tool there's the bucket fill tool and the clone tool and we'll be going over those as well as some brand new tools that are coming out and give 2.10 that are already available in game 2 point 9 point 8 which is the development version or the version I'll be using in today's tutorial but before we get into that of course I want to show you guys my website Davies media design.com slash tutorials there's tons of video and text tutorials on here so definitely check it out I'll include a link to that in the description you can also enroll in our udemy photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher and I'll include a link to that as well as links to our social media and other pertinent links in the description all right so let's go ahead and get started here I'm gonna use one of the brand new tools found in two point nine point eight if you guys don't have this version you can download it for free on the website and to point 10 is coming out soon that'll be the stable version of what I'm using here but this new tool is called the unified transform tool right here and this is basically as I mentioned before an all-in-one transform tool super useful there's something similar to it in Photoshop that you guys have probably used if you've ever used Photoshop but I'm going to show you guys how this works by I have an image open here and by the way I got this image on pixabay and I'll include all the links to the images I use today in the description and I just opened this image in begin by going to file open and selecting the file from my computer and clicking open but just go to edit copy and that will copy this image and so in my example I'm gonna use replacing the image of a computer here and I'll go to edit paste and this is gonna paste my mousse photo in here and it's gonna add this as a floating selection layer so I'll go ahead and click to create a new layer here and you can double click and rename this mousse if you want but in the past you would have to use the various transform tools to get this to fit inside that computer screen scale this down change the perspective maybe do some other things to it but with this unified transform tool it's all in one place so all you got to do is click on this image here and you'll see now that I've got a variety of different shapes and boxes over here and see if I can zoom actually so grab my zoom tool and hold ctrl to zoom out and I'll grab my unified transform tool again so I'll click on that layer and by the way make sure you're on your layer that you're adjusting here that you're wanting to transform so usually when you use the transform tool you'll only see one set of boxes but here you've got a box and then you've got a diamond and this diamond is transparent and this one is a bit opaque and then you've got this box up here and you'll notice that when I hover my mouse over these areas my mouse pointer turns into the mouse pointer that you'll usually find in other tools so for example right now you can see this is the scale tool and my mouse pointer looks like the scale tool mouse pointer and that's because this is telling me that this is the scale tool now when I hover over this other diamond right here you'll see that my mouse pointer now looks like the perspective tool and that's because this box here controls the perspective of the image when I hover over this one you'll see that my mouse pointer changes to the shear tool right here and that's because this adjusts shearing in the image and then again this one is the scale tool so as I hover over each box you'll see which tool the box corresponds to so I'll start by scaling the image down because I want the image to be about the size of the laptop screen so I'll go ahead and hover my mouse over this corner here and drag and you'll notice that if I don't hold anything on my keyboard this kind of drags all over the place and it's stretching my image out if I hold shift while I drag it will scale it proportionately and so also you'll notice right there when I hover my mouse over the middle of the image here it turned into the move tool and that allows me to move my image and so I'm gonna scale this down a little more until it's about the size we need and just for times sake I'm not going to make this completely perfect so now we've got this about the size we need and now I want to change their perspective so that the corners of this image fit in the corners of the laptop screen so I'll just hover over one of these diamonds here and drag this to the corner and hover over here drag it to the corner and do the same here and now we've changed the perspective of this image so that it fits into the screen and there's also again the shear tool if you guys need to you know basically share this image so that it fits into whatever perspective or whatever object you're trying to fit this into but just know that this is basically combining multiple transform tools into one in that way it saves you a bunch of steps and it makes a lot more flexible when you're trying to do projects like this so I'll go ahead and hit transform and now that's applied the unified transform and obviously we would need to add the reflection to this laptop screen in order for it to look more realistic but you can see that now the image is the right size and the right perspective here and we only had to use one tool to accomplish that so the next feature I'll show you guys is called the transform lock and a lot of people mistake this for something that it's not they think that it's used to lock layers so right now I'm on my space/time poster here that I made in one of my other tutorials on how to make a movie poster and I've got a bunch of layers here and you'll see that these layers have locks on them and in other programs these locks usually indicate you know locking a layer so you can't edit on it but what these are are transform locks and when I have certain layers locks so for instance I have all these four layers locked and these all correspond to the black hole here I'll go ahead and hide my astronaut so you can see and if I hide all these you'll see that it hides all the black hole elements so go ahead and show these again so what this transform lock does is when I'm on an active layer and I come over here to a transform tool such as the scale tool when I scale down this one layer so I'll click on it hold shift scale it down where I can actually scale it up too and go ahead and recenter it so I scaled this up now when I hit scale you'll notice that it's going to apply this transform to all of the layers that have the icon locked right here and you can click on this next to the eye icon to add the transform lock or remove the transform lock but I'll go ahead and hit scale and you'll see that it performs the scale multiple times the scale operation so there's three and it did a fourth one there and so now that's actually perform the transfer on all of these layers all four of these layers not just that black hole layer so that's what the transform lock is for so it's not there to lock the layers and ensure that you can't edit that layer anymore what it's there for is to lock layers together so that you can transform them all at once to not have to go in individually and perform the transform and now I'll go back and unhide my astronaut here and now we have a larger black hole so that's the transform lock very useful feature in my opinion and it's something that not a lot of people know about so the next feature I'm going to show you guys involves a very commonly used tool the bucket fill tool you guys are probably very familiar with this if you've used for any period of time and the bucket fill tool has a couple hidden features in there mainly in the tool options that allow you to enhance the tool and do a couple things that you didn't know you could do and get better results so we'll start by creating a rectangle select area and I'll go ahead and draw this I clicked and drag to draw this on my artboard here or on my canvas and now I'll grab my bucket fill tool and go ahead and fill this in and go to select none and so this is how a bucket fill tool is usually used you know you just fill in the shape now let's say I changed my color to a different color like a blue and I have my bucket fill tool selected and I go ahead and try to fill this in and you'll notice that it fills everything around the square and something that a lot of people don't know about the bucket fill tool is that by default the affected area over here is set to fill similar colors and basically what that's saying is that any color you click on this is going to fill so I'll undo this if I click on this rectangle it's gonna fill the rectangle in here otherwise if I click on the white area it's gonna fill in that white area and so what it's doing is its choosing similar colors and it's filling those colors in now if I hold shift and click it's gonna fill in the entire thing and it's not just gonna fill in one color so that's one thing about the bucket fill tool that a lot of people don't know about now there's also some other features here that are really cool in my opinion and so I'll name this square and I'll create another layer and name this square too now let's say that you want to draw a square on this layer for whatever reason and overlaps with this square here and so I'll grab my bucket fill tool and fill this in and then we come up here to another layer and we draw another square over here and we go ahead and fill this in with another color call it red select none' so now we have squares on three different layers and there's a cool feature here with the bucket fill tool where if I come over here to my background layer so this is the bottom layer of all three layers that we're using here I can come over here to sample merged and check that and make sure that this is still set to fill similar colors which is the default setting there now if I come over and click on this black rectangle here instead of filling in the entire black rectangle like it would usually do if I didn't have sample merge checked instead what it does is it only fills in the parts of the square that don't overlap with the other two squares so it's basically taking into account the other two squares on the other two layers and that's what sample merge does it takes information from all layers in the composition not just the active layer that you're on and it combines them to produce whatever effect it is you're trying to produce so another cool thing about this I can and I'm still on this bottom layer remember I can click on this square which is on the square to layer or I can click on this square which is on the first square layer here but it's not actually filling in the square on this layer it's all filling in what's on that bottom layer here and that's what sample merge does it takes the shape from the other layers above and it allows you to interact with them in this case it's allowed us to fill in squares in the shape of the squares in the layers above and now we've got this sort of combination of squares here but it's only four squares or shapes or anything that's overlapping the original shape that you're trying to fill in or overlapping the original item on the layer so this is just a cool way to combine shapes for multiple layers on a one layer without having to do a bunch of steps like add alpha to selection and then coming back to your original active layer you can just do it all on the original layer so long as you have sample merge checked and it's the bottom layer now one last thing with the bucket fill tool that I want to show you guys so I'll go ahead and grab my ellipse select tool and draw an ellipse here and go ahead and fill this in with like a red color and go to select none now let's say that we want to change the color of this ellipse area here and so we're gonna come over here and change our color to black and when I go to fill this in there's a faint trace of the red below here that you can see still and it's not too bad actually on here but if i zoom in you can see there's a bunch of red in here and this is a problem that a lot of people have had in all versions of which is that when you try to fill over an existing area you still get remnants of what was the original color before well if I hit control Z and I go back to my bucket fill tool I can turn up the threshold here and basically what that's doing is that it wants to not be as discriminatory towards some of these pixels here so I cranked the threshold up quite a bit here and there's still some of the red pixels showing but basically what's happening if I hit control Z these pixels are all very red whereas the pixels up here you can see they're sort of fading out a little bit they're a bit more transparent than the original pixels or the pixels in the center here so by turning the threshold up basically what I'm saying is that I want to be able to fill in some of these more transparent pixels and you do have to adjust the threshold amount to try to get more of these pixels covered without overdoing it or doing too much because it will start to spill over outside of here but you'll notice that as I'm turning up the threshold it's covering more and more of these red pixels these blurry red pixels along the outside edge here so the point where right around here I'm starting to basically get all those red pixels covered so you can see that now pretty much all those red pixels are covered and you get a better overlapping fill so just keep that in mind when you're using the bucket fill tool if you're trying to fill over an existing object in the image but you're getting a lot of spillover from the color underneath just turn the threshold up and that's gonna do a better job of filling in some of those outer edge pixels now the next thing I'm gonna show you involves the eraser tool and a lot of you guys have used this tool obviously you know anytime you're drawing something and you want to get rid of it you're gonna go ahead and grab your eraser tool but sometimes you erase something and then later on you want to bring it back and that can be a problem because usually the method for bringing back colors that you've already erased is you have to just undo until you get back to that thing that you erased but there might be a couple of things ahead of that that you've been working on that you want to keep and you don't want to have to undo all that and erase all that progress well I'm going to show you guys a feature called the UM erase feature and basically what this is is a feature that allows you to paint back the colors that you've erased with the eraser tool so one really important thing to note is that this feature isn't gonna work unless you have an alpha channel on your image which means that you have a transparency channel on here so if I click on my main image and I right click on here I can come down to add alpha Channel and that's going to add a transparency channel to this image and if you don't do that this isn't gonna work so make sure you do that before you're editing any image you're working on and now if I paint on here and I say I want to erase this Fox here for whatever reason it's a pretty damn cute fox so I don't know why you would want to erase it but let's say hypothetically you do so now I've erased this fox it's totally gone and let's say now in a later step I've got my paintbrush tool here and I'm decreasing the size with my bracket keys on my keyboard and let's say you paint a bunch of stuff in here for whatever reason and then you realize all of a sudden that you didn't want to erase that fox but you don't want to undo everything because if you hit undo it's gonna undo all those beautiful squiggles that you just drew on the picture so I'll go ahead and hit control y to redo all that so one way to take care of this is you grab your eraser tool and I'll go ahead and use the brackets on my keyboard to increase the size of the brush all you have to do is hold the Alt key on your keyboard and you'll see a little minus sign above your eraser tool and now I can actually just paint all that back in all the Fox that I erased before and it's just painting all those colors that I erased back in without having to go back and undo everything that I did here so super useful feature really quick feature but really potent really powerful especially for people who you know have raised something on accident and need to go back and paint that back in so a really cool feature there and the last feature I'm going to show you guys involves the clone tool and I'm gonna show you a couple things about the clone tool that are really cool that maybe you guys didn't know okay so here's the hypothetical scenario I've drawn these four squiggles here on this Fox image but I want to erase one of these squiggles and I've drawn them all directly on to the canvas here so I can't just use my eraser tool it's gonna create a transparency but I also can't just come to my undo history over here and come back to one of my previous steps because it undoes one of my squiggles in the wrong order let's say you know so I painted this squiggle second and then this one third and this one fourth well let's say I want to get rid of the second squiggle but I want to keep the third and the fourth I can't just go back and hit on do because again it's gonna undo these two squiggles and for whatever reason I want to keep these on here and also I didn't paint these on a layer which by the way you always want to paint stuff on another layer but I there could be some cases where you can't do that but if you can always try to create a new layer before you're painting on your canvas but let's say hypothetically you didn't you painted directly on this layer here and you want to undo some of this what I can do is I can go ahead and go to file export as and I can export this photo here I'll just call it Fox photo 2 because I already saved this when I was testing this out earlier so I'll hit export set the quality to 100 and you can also just go to file save as and save this as an XC F if you want to keep this as the native xcf file and so go ahead and go to file open now and I'm gonna come over to these files that we save so here's the JPEG version here or you can also do the xcf version so I'll go ahead and try out the xcf version for now so here's what we're working on now but there's no undo history here but I can come over here to our original and I can go back to basically when there were no squiggles here or I can really go back to any undo point that we've been working on here so I can go here if I wanted or I can go here or I can just go back to before we did any of the squiggles and now what I want to do is grab my clone tool and go ahead and hold ctrl and I can click anywhere on this image here and I'll come over to my tool options just make sure that the alignment is set to register it otherwise this isn't gonna work and then I'll come over here to my duplicate that I created and again let's say we wanted to erase only the second squiggle here and none of the other ones now I can go ahead and paint over this squiggle here and it's going going to erase only that second one and none of the other ones and so I'm also not erasing anything from the original layer I'm not erasing this and showing transparency behind it so this is a really effective tool in Photoshop they call it a history brush and so says that this is sort of that workaround to creating your own history brush and it just allows a little bit more flexibility on a project and I can do whatever I want I can also erase this squiggle if I wanted to and it'll get rid of that and I'll just mention one more time you have to set the alignment to register just the way the clone tool works when it sets a register the clone tool on this image is matching the mouse location of the clone tool on the image you're working on so for instance I'm right here on the image you'll see that was where I left off with my mouse and if I come over here you'll see that that's exactly where the clone tool brush is alright guys so those are five things you didn't know you could do in if you know of any other hidden features or cool things you can do in please leave them in the comments below I'd love to hear them otherwise if you liked this tutorial please subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Davey's media design you can also visit our website at Davey's media designed.com slash tutorials or enroll in our photo editing course on udemy and of course I'll include a link to that as well as a link to our social media pages in the description thanks for watching and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 121,170

Rating: 4.8960629 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp 2.9.8, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2018, unified transform, unified transform tool, undo history brush, GIMP 2.10, clone tool, unerase tool, unerase, bucket fill tool, transform lock, hidden gimp, gimp features, gimps tools, gimp basics, photo editing, gimp tutorials photo editing

Id: oxUMtv07Sys

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 22 2018