How to Use GIMP (Beginners Guide)

today I'll be showing you how to use which is an image manipulation program and a great free alternative to photoshop in another video I did a top five list of the best free Photoshop alternatives I'll put a link to that video in the description if you'd like to check that out is my personal favorite from that list but one of those other programs may fit your needs better this video will be just a basic beginners guide for new users to get started using if you're new to our channel welcome to tech gumbo if you like to stay up to date with the latest and greatest in technology make sure to click the subscribe button below this video so you don't miss anything okay with that out of the way let's get to the tutorial to download you'll want to go to gimp.org I will provide a direct link in the description of this video once you're here click on the download button now you'll see different options based on your operating system here you see one for Windows and one for OSX if you're a Linux user may already come with your particular distro so check that first before downloading from here you should choose the option to download directly if you're familiar with torrents then downloading via BitTorrent may be best for you once you have downloaded and installed open up once you have opened up you should see a layout that looks a lot like this with the primary window in the center with the toolbox on the left and the layers window on the right if you don't select tools and then find the option that you're missing to add it to your desktop in the main window here you have several options which include file edit select View image and so on and so forth and the left pane is your toolbox which we'll be using quite a bit it contains the usual suspects like on how to move an image put that there's an icon for a creating text the tool for scaling an image and several others here in the right pane is the layers box which I'll show you how to use later on now I'm going to go through some of the basics of using if you feel I'm moving too quickly pause the video to try out what I'm showing you first let's open up a new project so go up here click on file and then click new it's gonna ask you for your image size I'll scale this down a little bit let's do 1600 by 900 under Advanced Options you actually have several options properly one here including fill width which includes foreground color background color white transparency if you're working with PNG images you may want to select the transparency option for this exercise we'll leave it as background color and when you're done click OK to change the background color select the bucket fill tool from the tool box and then go down here and click on background foreground colors option select the color you want you can select from one of the options here if you have them or you can pick your own color I actually prefer the off grays they provide a nice contrast once you're done with that click OK position your mouse anywhere on the background and then left click to apply your color I like to expand the window out a little bit by dragging the lower right corner this won't change the size of your image though works with layers this works great to not ruin anything you've previously done in your image and to easily come back to a layer to make changes to create a layer go to the right pane and select create a new layer leave the options as they are and click OK you can create as many layers as you need with this new layer let's create some text so go back to the Left pane the toolbox select the text tool go into your image and just drag out a text bar for you go down to the lower part of the text tool right here and select a different color because I don't think Graham gray is gonna work very well let's select white click OK and let's increase the size to 18 is a little small just go over here to size you can put in a number randomly or you can use the up/down arrows here to change the font size and then just type in whatever you want and if you find that text is a little too small for you just go back here to the size tool and just up the size a little bit now it's a little bit too big for this text box and you'll see options on here to resize the text box so just go to the lower left far right lower in the upper 4 here let's do the lower click and drag it down if you decide to want to go with something other than white let's go back to the color window here let's do it off blue well you know that just go back to the layers options here click in the white space for background so you can see what you just did without all the lines around it to move the layer in your image first let's go back to layers click in any whitespace just select that layer go back to the tool box click on the move tool go anywhere in that layer and then click and drag where you'd like to move that to you then select the white space in the background layer to get rid of the lines around there and I don't like where I've moved that so you could either go up here to edit and you can select undo move text layer a shortcut key for that is ctrl + Z and it moves it back to where you previously had it before you moved it now I'm going to show you how to create a rectangle circle or oval in your image so let's go back to layers click on create a new layer click OK go back to the tool box you have the options here for a rectangle select tool or the ellipse select tool let's do the ellipse click in it go back to your image go outside of it let's do look let's do upper left-hand corner click and drag around your image if you need to resize it there's all these yellow boxes surrounding the oval and you can take those and drag them out if you need to to try to make them as perfect as possible and if you want to fill this space with a different color and then gray go back to the bucket fill tool select a color now we'll just leave the color is black click OK and click anywhere within the oval right here and to see this without any of the lines clicking on the white space in the background doesn't work for this one so go up here to select and select none now I'm going to show you how to use the blend tool so let's go back to the tool box click on blend tool and you have different options down here for opacity and in which colors you want to use several options here you can click any of those if you want to I'm gonna leave it with this one now you can either go from the left to the right click and drag and then let go so let's undo that by hitting ctrl Z or going to edit and selecting undo or let's try it from top to bottom see how that works yeah that's a little bit better so we'll leave it that way once you're completely satisfied with your image and you decide that you don't want to make any further changes to the image you'll want to go up here to file click on export as do not click on save or save as click on export as select where you want to save the image to and of course name your image and you have the option down here just select the file type you want to save the image as it's like it as a JPEG or PNG is popular and so on and so forth and once you're done click on export you have these options here if you want to change those I usually leave them as they are and then click on export and now the image is saved let's say you're not happy with this image for example I'm not happy with this image I would never save this image but if I wanted to work on it later on and make changes to the different layers you would go here to file save as name your file saves it as an x CF choose where you want to save it to and then click on save the last thing I'm going to show you is how to scale an image so go up here to file click on open find the file that you would like to scale so I'll select here the logo click open and there it is we'll make this a little bit bigger to scale the image go over here back to the tool box select the scale tool click inside the image if you'd like to make it smaller you can put in predetermine numbers here for width and height or you can select the up and down arrows right here you see this lock leave it locks it scales proportionally we'll make it smaller once you're satisfied click on scale and now the image is smaller if you want to make it bigger thatwas go the opposite way hit the arrow up and then click scale be careful doing this if you make an image bigger than it originally was it's gonna turn out blurry kind of like this and that won't look good so my advice is always to choose a large image and then scale it smaller as need be so it maintains the same resolution as it previously had is an awesome tool in fact I did the simplistic thumbnail for this video using I only scratched the surface of what you can do with the software but hopefully this gives you a baseline on how to use let me know in the comments if you have any questions about or if you would like to see me do more detailed project oriented videos about if you haven't done so already click on that subscribe button below this video for more tutorials and best of tech lists from tech gumbo

Channel: TechGumbo

Views: 1,846,062

Rating: 4.7654858 out of 5

Keywords: How to Use GIMP for Beginners, GIMP for Beginners, How to Use GIMP 2.8, How to use Gimp - Basics, GIMP Basics -Introduction + Beginner tutorial exercise (How to use GIMP), How to Use GIMP, Gimp Basics, Gimp Beginner, Getting Started with GIMP, Gimp Tutorial, Photoshop Alternative, Gimp, TechGumbo

Id: Q8C0LJPpr64

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2017