How to Transform Selections and Paths in GIMP | Beginners Tutorial

hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by davies media design my name is michael davies and in today's tutorial i'll be showing you how to transform selections and paths using i'll be using gym version 2.10.20 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial [Music] before i get into that don't forget to check out my website at daviesmediadesign.com as always i have tons of video tutorials on here my book of layers and free software help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy you can enroll in any my skillshare classes by visiting gimpschool.com and you can get more with a premium membership to davie's media design i'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so here is the photo i'll be using for today's tutorial and i'll be using both the 1280 1280x853 and the 1920x1280 version so i definitely recommend downloading both of those so in this tutorial today i'll be showing you how to transform paths and selections in many of you are already aware you can transform a layer or the entire composition in but you can also transform paths and selections and there are a number of use cases for something like this a number of scenarios where this comes in handy so i'll go through some scenarios today so here i am inside of 2.10.20 and first off you're going to need to actually draw your path so hit the b key on your keyboard that will grab your paths tool from your toolbox but i do want to mention i'm using the 1280x853 image so this is the smaller version of the image but i'll hold ctrl and zoom in with my mouse wheel and i'm just going to click to quickly draw a path around this hourglass shape i'm not going to do a perfect job here so of course i just click and hold to draw a curve and for those of you who are not familiar with drawing paths in i do recommend checking out my master the paths tool tutorial on this subject so i'll just continue drawing this path and i'll hold ctrl and create a union between the first path and the last path i drew hold ctrl zoom in let me just hold ctrl click and drag to create a handle and that way i can curve this note a bit more the segments here at the node hold ctrl zoom out with my mouse wheel so again not a perfect shape that i drew here around our object so let's say now that we've drawn our path inside of the smaller image we've actually decided we want this path to be drawn around the object in the larger image so what we need to do is copy the path here from this composition and bring it over into the larger composition and then scale it up so what i'll do is i'll navigate from my layers panel over to my paths tab so here you'll see our path and i can double click on this and rename this hourglass hit the enter key then i'm going to right click on here and go to copy path and i'll come over here to our larger composition and we're still in the paths tab so i'll right click and go to paste path and now if i show my hourglass path you could see this is way too small so it doesn't line up with the larger object we're going to have to fix that next what i'll need to do is move this path into place and i'll do that by first hitting the m key on my keyboard to grab the move tool and here in the tool options which in this case for me is going to be under my toolbox right now you have an option called move and usually this is set to layers which is going to be the first one by default but we're actually going to set this to path and you can either toggle this between pick a path which is just going to move whatever path you are hovered over or move the active path if you have multiple paths and you only want to move the path that you're currently on which in this case we only have one path but it is our active path as well i'll just go with pick a path and then i can click and drag this into place next let's say i want to scale this up so that it matches up with the size of the object here in our larger photo so to do that i'll hit shift s on my keyboard but right now my scale tools transform mode is set to layer so what i'll have to do is come over here and change it to path and then i'll come over here and click on the path and now we can scale this so i'm just going to click and drag this if i hold ctrl it'll drag from the center and if i hold the shift key it'll maintain the original aspect ratio so this isn't totally aligned right now so what i'll do is just use these four boxes in the center to move this over like so and i can always hold ctrl zoom in with my mouse wheel and just double check that this is lining up the way i wanted to and again i could have spent more time drawing the actual path but that's all right so once we're ready i'm going to click the scale button and i'll hit ctrl shift j that's going to center of my image inside the image window all right so that is in a nutshell how you transform a path in and this is going to work for pretty much all of the transform tools in so long as it does have a path mode here in the tool options but we can also do this with selections so let me show you an example using a selection so we have our path drawn here if i come over to my paths tab and convert this path to a selection by hitting path to selection now you see we have a selection around our object here so i'll hit the m key let's say i want to move this selection i'll come over here and change the mode of the move tool to selection instead of path and now i can come over here and just click and drag this selection over i'm holding the ctrl key to drag it in straight line mode so the reason this is useful right now is let's say i want to fill this in with a color but then have the original hourglass object obstructing that color so it looks like the color is behind the object this allows me to move the selection over without having to move the original path so let me come over here to my layers panel if i come over and click to create a new layer i've already got this named hourglass shape which i want to keep this named as and i'll fill it with transparency and click ok now let's say i want to fill this in so i'll come over here and let's just go with the blue color and i'll click and drag my blue color over into my selection area there so there is our blue color i'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that now once again let's say i want to erase the original shape from it i'll come back over to the paths tab and just click to convert that back to a selection and then if i hit the delete key now it looks like that color object is behind the main object so let me also demonstrate another example using a different transform tool so i'll come over here and let's just click and hold and come over here to the share tool which is another transform tool i'll change the mode to selection again and i'm just going to use this selection that we already have active here let me come over to my layers and create a new layer and we'll name this hourglass shape skewed hit the enter key so now what i'll do is just click on the selection and you'll see this will skew the selection area like so and i'll click shear hit the m key on my keyboard and we still have the move tool set to the selection mode so i'm just going to click and drag this over here so it almost looks like some kind of shadow or something obviously it's a bit more abstract than that but now let's say we want to fill that in with the color so we'll change the color here to red this is just an arbitrary red i'm going with and i'll click and drag this inside of the selection area and once again since we still have our original path here i can convert that to a selection and delete this area so i'll come over here to the paths tab click to convert the path to a selection area hit the delete key and that will delete everything in front of this shape so i'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that the last thing i'll mention is that it is a good idea to go back to these tools that you've used and reset them back to the default modes that way later on when you are going back to trying to scale a layer or perform some sort of transformation on a layer you don't accidentally get stuck because you'll see here if i hold ctrl zoom out let's say i wanted to scale the layer right now shift s on my keyboard and let's say you try to click on the layer you'll see it's trying to scale the path instead of the actual layer that can be confusing especially if you don't have any paths in your composition so let me come over here delete that path now let's say you're trying to scale the layer and you go to your layers panel you come over click on that layer try to scale it it's just going to give you an error message down here in the status bar so i recommend coming over changing the transform mode back to the layer mode and that way next time you open up you can transform the layer which is probably what you guys are used to so let's come to the move tool change that come back to the shear tool change that back to the layer transform mode and there you go all right so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did you could check out my youtube channel at youtube.com daviesmediadesign don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon to be notified each time i have a brand new tutorial you can also check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 10,495

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2020, transform paths, transform selections, scale path, scale selection, move path, move selection

Id: llPbsDrcKPQ

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020