HOW TO USE GIMP - Complete Tutorial for Beginners 2020

hello everybody chris here and in this video i want to give you guys a tutorial for beginners inside of so the idea here is that we're going to be covering a bunch of the basic functions that you would come across trying to edit photos or graphics inside of what you see here on this little sticky note that's what i'm going to be trying to cover going down the list in order may come across some other things that we just kind of throw in there if it makes sense um and we'll try to keep it to a reasonable time so by the end of this tutorial hopefully you guys have a pretty good idea about how to use for editing photos or graphics at least at a basic level so before we get started i think it would be a decent idea to mention changing the theme of so if you boot up and you don't like the default look of the interface you can actually change your theme to a dark a gray or light theme by going up to the edit menu at the top left and going down to preferences and then you can go down to theme and you'll see dark gray light and system themes as options here it's also possible to find additional themes on the internet generally i just like to stick with the dark theme i find it to be easier on the eye so putting that aside when you launch for the first time you're going to be met with a bunch of windows scattered around the screen in the top left you have the toolbox window which will feature most of the tools that you use to work on your project inside of so if you're looking for something like a paintbrush a fill bucket the ability to scale or move around anything inside of your graphic then you're probably going to find that in the top left in the middle section obviously you have the display for the image you're currently working on you might notice that there are two tabs up here at the top left so it's possible to actually have multiple images loaded up into and if you don't already know to load up an image you can just go to file and then open locate it on your computer or if you have it open in windows file explorer or the operating system that you happen to be using you can just drag it into the program and that should also load it into this middle section so whenever you want to directly edit something in your image you're probably going to be doing that in this middle section here if you want to kind of pan the location for where this image is going to display you can hold middle mouse button down and move it around so i'm going to do that right there so that the sticky note isn't in the way of what we're editing you can actually see that there's five tabs here by default so this is a history of documents you've been working on the ability to change fonts here so when you start working on a text element you can switch fonts by double clicking on them here patterns which you can use for filling in spaces such as a rectangular select selection which you can left click hold and drag to create a box width when you have that selected so that's one of the most basic tools over there so just left click hold and drag and that's how you get a rectangular shape selection so let's go over here to brushes now so all of these brushes are also going to be seen when you're working in paint brush mode so in the top left you can see the toolbox the icon for paint brushes right here paintbrush tool you can see the hotkey to change to that tool by clicking a button on your keyboard in this case p switches to paintbrush mode without having to use the toolbox you can see also in this group n for pencil a for airbrush k for ink and why for my paint so i'll mention the difference between pencil and paint brush really quickly here so before we get into the difference between paint brush and pencil all of these brushes you can also access by clicking on this icon here and you'll see all the same icons so when you want to draw with a different shape you can come in here and switch to a different brush and then start using that instead of the default 75 hardness circular brush and actually worth mentioning most of the functions that you find in these top five windows you can actually just get in the toolbox when you have the right tool selected so you don't actually need to go to fonts when you want to change the font as long as you're using the title tool so i don't frequently actually use the windows in the top right so next the difference between the paintbrush tool and the pencil tool essentially comes down to the pencil tool not having any blurring around the edges so if i use the paintbrush tool here and i'm intentionally clicking outside of that rectangular select we created here so i'm left click holding down and then moving my mouse or drawing tablet around to create the stroke and then the paintbrush goes in that panel now there's two things you should note here real quick first off because we selected that area with the rectangular select tool the only areas which actually got drawn in were the areas that that rectangular select was in so in game you can never paint outside of your current selection so if you ever have a problem where you're trying to draw somewhere and you don't actually see anything appear you might have a selection already made so one way you can get that gone is to go back to the rectangular select tool which can be r on the keyboard and then just left click without holding and then that should get rid of the selection so now i'm able to draw basically any way i want okay the other thing and i'm holding ctrl and middle mouse wheel to zoom in so i'm scrolling on that middle mouse wheel and we go in really far you can see that there's a bit of blurriness on the edge of this paintbrush so when we get close to the edge of where we were drawing there is a decreasing levels of transparency until it basically has zero percent transparency so this creates kind of an anti-aliasing effect where if we zoom out it looks like it blurs together a little bit more and you don't see any hard edges so you'll get a smoother look if you're using paintbrush instead of pencil to demonstrate that let's switch back to pencil so pencil i'm just going to draw over here you can see it completely ignores the hardness of the brush so there is no blurriness whatsoever as we get to the edges but it's very pixelated which in some cases might be good if you happen to be working on pixar you'd probably want to use the pencil tool not the brush tool now speaking of the hardness of a brush you can see back in paint brush mode there's actually a slider for this so even if a brush says 75 hardness you can decrease that manually and then that just changes the presets on that brush and then this will give you a different result than the defaults for the brush you can also click on the brushes and there are four levels of hardness set by default so 100 is over here you might notice that this looks kind of similar to the pencil tool except uh not entirely there's still a little bit of this edge blurring it's not really true 100 across the board with just having plain black pixels but rather uh you can see if you zoom in that there's just this like one pixel uh blurred edge but if we switch down to 25 hardness then it's going to be very obvious this blurriness so whatever level you need it set up you can customize that setting as well as many other settings that we're going to kind of gloss over here for the sake of time so next up i wanted to talk about the bucket fill tool and the gradient tool so in order to demonstrate this let me go ahead and use the rectangular select tool so you can hit r on your keyboard if you haven't already and i'm going to left click hold and drag a box so with this selection we can fill that with the paint bucket tool so to get to the paint bucket tool i'm going to click over here shift b is the hot key and i can just left click inside our selection to fill it completely okay so now we've actually run into a minor issue which is that the bucket fill is filling based on the color that i clicked on so if i hit ctrl c and i left click again you'll notice that wherever i click on it's the similar colors that are filled not everything inside of the box it's easy to make it actually fill everything in the box and i'll show you that in a second but if you're ever wondering why when you click it doesn't fill in all the color or fills too much color for any tool you can look at a threshold setting so if i set the threshold to zero that's going to mean that it will only accept exactly that color for the click and you'll notice that because we're dealing with the sky the color of the blue does vary a little bit so it doesn't go very far at all and if we bump the threshold up to something much higher then it may just actually fill everything inside of that so a threshold of 140 is obviously very high but if you want to make sure that it just fills the box completely you may actually want to work on another layer so we were going to touch on this in a bit but hey why not mention it now it's relevant layers are super useful and and any other photo editing program so it's something you're definitely going to want to know so in the bottom right hand section we have the layers panel as well as channel and paths but layers is definitely the most important so for now if you want to create a new layer you can click on this icon down here so i'm going to do that and in this new layer dialog box we'll call it top layer and you'll notice that it sits above the image layer so now in this top layer there's no colors for it to interact with with the threshold so even if we set the threshold to 0 if i click inside the box it's going to fill everything so if i hit ctrl z i can show you what actually happened there a little better if i hide the image layer that's the image we actually brought in to start editing so i'm going to hide it with this little eyeball icon and now you can see the only thing left showing is the top layer you'll notice this checker pattern whenever something is partially or completely transparent meaning that there's actually no color information for the pixels where this background is showing on any of the visible layers and because there's no color the fill bucket is actually just free to fill everything inside of these bounds so if i left click on that we get a perfect fill regardless of the threshold setting uh so for that reason oftentimes if you just want to have something sit above the underlying image and instead of trying to edit things directly onto the underlying image you can separate stuff into separate layers and it helps for many different reasons one is that it makes it non-destructive in the sense that if you want to completely remove all the changes you did to one layer then you can just delete that layer or go into that layer and edit part of it out so i can just select with the rectangular select box here and i can hit ctrl x with the top layer selected and what happens is it only actually modifies that layer which i'm currently active on but earlier on we didn't have a separate layer so when we drew with the paintbrush strokes here these are basically permanent at this point unless we were going to undo a bunch of the changes by either going up to the edit menu and hitting undo or just pressing ctrl z until enough changes weren't done that this change hadn't been made yet but if for some reason you run into a change where you're unable to edit it anymore like this um you can draw a box around it hit control x but you'll see that also cuts out the background so it just becomes much more of a pain when you try to do everything on one layer it's a bad practice so try to get in the habit of creating different layers for uh different parts of the image you're working on as long as it's still within so next back to the difference between paint bucket and gradients and one other thing i want to point out is that in the modern version of a lot of the icons up here are actually turned into drop downs so if you were used to old versions of you might have seen a lot more icons here but they've just been nested down in grouped categories so if you right click on one of these icons that has the little drop down arrow here you can see all the other related tools inside of that drop down so for instance you don't find the gradient tool up here you find the paint bucket tool and then you right click and switch to gradient once you get used to where everything's at it's a little bit cleaner it makes sense so let's switch to the gradient tool here the difference between gradient and fill is that well one gradient can fill with patterns and secondly with a gradient you're usually transitioning from one or multiple colors into other colors as the gradient progresses so i'm going to click on the top layer so that we can undo these changes later i'm going to use the rectangular select tool oh actually no let's use the ellipse select tool so i'm going to right click and we'll go down to ellipse select difference here is that it is an oval shape instead of a rectangle shape and now i'm going to left click and drag it out to get a selection on this patch of ground by the way you'll notice that once you've made a selection you can actually change it with these controls on the top and corner of the oval shape so you can customize this until you get exactly the right shape and now we need to set up the gradient so gradient tool we can click on this button here similar to selecting a brush and change to one of the gradients that are set here by default so you'll notice that the first five or so say foreground to background or fg to bg standing for foreground to background and that is referring to your foreground and background colors so that's set up here so the easiest way to get a two color gradient that has exactly the two colors you want is actually to customize them up here so i'm just gonna select a color and what i'll do is i'll hit x and then i'll click on the background color here and we'll change it to something else um let's say something like a light blue and now if i click on the gradient drop down you'll see that these foreground and background color options have changed so if i want a hard edge gradient as in there's no blurriness between the first color and the last color then i can choose that or we can go down here to fg to bg rgb which would be the standard one where you want it to actually fade a bit between the two colors so it'll transition so let's select that so let's select that and now i have the gradient tool ready to go so what i need to do is left click where i want the starting point for color to be hold it down drag it out in the direction that you want the gradient to fade so you'll see that because i'm going left to right the fade line also goes left to right and then when you position the end point to where you want it to be where you think the gradient looks good you can let go you'll have the preview for the gradient made uh you can still left click on these points and change them before you make your final edit you can also left click on the points if you want to change the color so if we decide hey maybe we want a darker color gradient we can select that and hit ok and then when we're ready to commit the gradient we can hit enter on the keyboard and now we have a gradient and it's drawn within the shape of whatever we had selected so if you wanted it to just gradient everything on the layer across the entire screen you would just have nothing selected and then you can do the gradient so that could give you a very simple looking background for instance i'm going to hit ctrl z to remove that and let's actually select this stuff from the top layer and go ahead and delete it so i'm going to use the rectangular select tool draw a box and i'm going to control x to cut it away now technically when you use cut like that with ctrl x it's still in the buffer so if you ever wanted to paste it in somewhere else you can hit control v and then you can move it around by left-clicking inside of the area and you can just put it wherever you want it to be so if you wanted to move something from one side to the other that's one way you could do it pretty easily but let's actually select that hit control x and forget about it we don't need it anymore so let's talk about a couple other useful hotkeys so i'm going to go back to the paintbrush tool to demonstrate this we already changed our foreground and background color so whatever is your foreground color is the one that you're going to be drawing with with let's say the paintbrush so if i left click and i drag this around the screen you'll see that it uses this red color so the easy way to switch to this other color currently the background color is hit x on the keyboard so when i hit x you'll see that the blue and the red swap to places and now i can draw with the blue line i can hit x draw with red line and x draw with blue line so you can see if you want to go back and forth between two colors it's a very fast and easy way to do it the manual way of switching the color is to go over here to this little icon that has arrows going in both directions you can click that but honestly if you can learn the hotkeys it's just going to make things a lot faster another super useful hotkey is control i which inverts your selection so let's say we were using the rectangular select tool and we wanted to put a box around this person right so we roughly have the person selected but what we actually wanted to do was to cut away the background so rather than drawing separate boxes like one from the top left to here and cutting it away one from the right side to the bottom and cutting that and then the bottom left to the bottom right and cutting that basically creating four boxes what we can just do is invert the selection so if i hit ctrl i on the keyboard now we have everything outside of this person's space selected and i can just hit the delete key first we actually have to be on the right layer so um click on the suitcase layer in this case or whatever your image is called and then hit delete so basically whenever you do a change it affects the layer you currently have selected obviously okay now in this case uh the background turned red so that's because our active background is set to red and because this was imported as a jpg or jpeg image it does not have an alpha channel so the background can't be transparent if you ever run into that situation where you do want to completely remove the background what you can do is right click on the image go down to add alpha channel add that in there and now with this same selection i hit connect delete again and the background color will be completely removed it has an alpha channel so the background can be transparent and at this point you could bring in let's say another image or add a new layer so i'll just create a new layer here put this down below the suitcase layer so that it's on bottom whatever's on top shows on top whatever's in bottom shows on bottom of course uh so let's use the gradient tool here and i'll just make a really quick gradient and just like that i created a background that is on a separate layer from the suitcase layer so pretty handy and what's even better is that because we're using separate layers if we decide hey we don't like this gradient well we can just delete the layer for the gradient altogether and have it not affect the original image so once again layers are a great thing okay i'm going to hit ctrl z a few times and we'll go back to before we deleted the character here so next is layer masks so a mask is basically when you want to hide part of your layer from being visible or used in certain ways um so the basic way of using the mask is you want to hide part of the background without actually removing it it's just that the mask doesn't allow it to show through so to add a layer mask to a layer we right click the layer and choose add layer mask and we're going to initialize this with full opacity so you can see the color white means it's visible full opacity and the color black means it's fully transparent so you don't actually draw colors on a layer mask but you draw different shades of white or black so i'm going to initialize it with full opacity and because everything in the layer mask is white that means everything in the layer mask is going to be visible so now if i change to the brush tool so you could draw with the color on the layer mask and in that case in a sense it's going to be looking at the brightness of that color so a color that's closer to black will hide more if you draw on the layer mask with it and a color that's closer to white is going to allow more of the original image to show through but because it just over complicates things i would definitely use a shade of white or black just so you know exactly what you're getting and you don't have that uh color kind of getting in the way of things so if you want something to be more transparent then make it closer to black over you and if you want something on your layer mask to be more visible then bring it up here to white in the top left-hand corner so i will draw with black for right now so we're just gonna use 100 black html notation zero zero zero zero zero zero so now if we take this paint brush and we can also set the harness that is relevant since the edging will always have that blur we can draw on our image to hide stuff so i'll just take this brush and stroke it across the image and we can kind of go crazy with this as long as we want to be hiding stuff so you see as we add black to the layer mask more of the image hides and it's not actually removing it from the image if i right click and i let's say disable the layer mask then you can see the image is still there so this is another way to add it non-destructively which is handy right so if i wanted to show it again i can switch to a white color so changing this to the background color hitting x to make the background color active color so we can switch between black and white using x once again like earlier and now i'm gonna use the paintbrush to show more of the mask again so if i just stroke back over this then we can take the mask and make it visible again so pretty handy there so next would be a decent chance to talk about the paths or the pen tool depending on which program you're used to so paths tool is over here it's b i think they use the key b because it's referring to bezier curves as in you can add handles to each of the points to curve the shape rather than having straight lines i'll show you what i mean there in a minute and what we can do with the paths tool is to draw a shape and have more control over it so it won't just be a simple rectangle or a simple circle or ellipse but it's actually more of a custom shape that we set many points on and what we can use this for is actually cut the girl out of the original photo and one reason we might do that is we want to combine her inside of another photo maybe not the most realistic thing initially but it's a pretty simple photo operation so let's go ahead and use the paths tool so path tool uh stay in design mode over here i'm gonna zoom in control middle mouse wheel and you can left click to add a point so this will be one of the points for our shape and you can left click to add another point so by default it's a straight line and you can keep left clicking to basically draw a shape around and it's one way that you can separate a character from everything else in the graphic you can see that these are all straight lines but there may be cases where you'd want to actually add a curve shape to it so this is where the bezier curve thing comes into place so when you left click to add a point actually hold it down and if you drag it away there will be these handles that pop out and depending on the position of these handles they will control the shape of the curve so rather than having a straight line between two points you can get something more of a curve that might make more sense with the head because heads aren't squares they're much more circular or oval shape and um once you add the point you can actually adjust these handles individually so you'll see the left handle affects the shape of the curve on the left side and the right handle adjusts the shape of the curve on the right side you can also left click on existing points if you hold ctrl down and you left click on it you'll you'll basically add the curve handles to it so this one coming out on this side and then i'll click on it again and we'll add the extra handle coming out of the right hand side now when we want to continue editing our shape i'm going to left click on the end point here and then we'll left click and you might notice the little plus sign there indicating we're adding a new point and i'll continue adding the next point and you'll see that even if we um i'll hit ctrl z to undo that if i just left click here you'll see that there's a curve even though i'm not setting any curves on the right endpoint because there's still the curves from this left point that is actually controlling the shape of the right hand side so the curves on one point can affect both sides of the path tool and we can continue making it straight by not having any curves and we can continue just with simple straight operations by left-clicking after this making sure that none of these points have any additional handles if we just want to keep it as simple and straight and you know in general i just find it a little bit quicker to work with the straight lines but whatever you want to do depends on how precise you want to be and we'll just keep outlining the shape of the person as we go down here so let's keep going until we basically have it done okay so we've almost outlined the entire shape here to finish the last point we actually need to hold control down and then left click on the starting point so you'll see this little linking icon here once you connect them then you have a full path that outlines your object now this path is going to stay around even if you click out of it it's going to stay in this paths window over here on the right next to layers so anytime you want to select this selection you can right click on unnamed over here and do path to selection you also notice fill path which is the equivalent of using the paint bucket tool on this is also there and stroke path is also an option and so you can do a paint brush stroke automatically all the way around the outline of this person by using stroke path uh likewise if you right click with a path selected then you can go into the edit menu fill path and stroke path so it's also available there anyway what we want to do is uh select this path so i'm just going to right click on the path the path to selection and now we have a selection of just this person and if we want to at this point we could either next we want to make sure that we next depending on if you're trying to actually remove it from the layer or if you're just trying to hide it in the mask you can left-click on the actual image data or you can left-click on the mask data and then you can hit ctrl x to cut it away so you see that when you use cut on the mask it will leave a black silhouette and the mask which effectively hides it up to you which way you want to do that if we wanted to move the person to another document we'd actually need to select the image data layer and hit control x and then we can left click on our other image and hit control v and paste it in and you'll see that by using the path tool you actually get pretty decent results as long as you spent a little time to go around the outline another option back on the original image i'm going to hit control z would be to control i once you have the person selected so we're inverting the selection meaning everything that's not the person is selected now and then hit delete on the keyboard removing it from the graphic though currently it looks like there's still no alpha channel maybe i undo one too many so i'm going to right click and do add alpha channel and then i'm going to delete again and it's gone from the actual image yeah once again if we want to do that non-destructively then we can just have that same selection go to the mask layer hit delete and we effectively end up with the same result except we can hide the masking layer and go back to actually having the image data still so i guess masking layers would be superior in most cases the least the less destructive you are to your image the easier it will be to go back and fix any mistakes that you may have made so now we could add in a background as an additional layer so because our image is completely transparent minus the girl we can just load up any image here so i'm going to go to file open and let's load in this dark hedges file ah it actually loaded into a new image so in that case you can left click on the window hit ctrl a to select everything note the dashed white line hit control x to cut it away go back over to the other document i'm going to add a new layer and then i'm just going to hit ctrl v to paste it in so that's one way you can you know take another image and just drop it into whatever you're working on currently we never really talked about the scale or rotate tools so now would be a decent time so you can find scale up here in the toolbox shift s on the keyboard as well so the scale is going to change the size of your current layer and increase or decrease it so you may see this kind of stop sign looking thing so depending on what mode your transform is in if you hover over it with the scale tool you may see this stop sign or cancel sign looking thing next to your cursor meaning you can't actually scale it so in this case it's because there's no selection but if you want to scale the layer we can just go over here select layer mode left click on it and we can scale in whichever directions we want when you're scaling it's really important to maintain aspect ratio so you'll see here that there is a link between the width and the height generally speaking you want that to be set there so that when you increase the width the height also increases and it doesn't look distorted so i'm going to click on the corners over here to make sure that i am scaling with both of those equally so i'm going to left click on one of these square boxes in order to increase or decrease the size and you'll notice that by default it does keep that lock there so if you didn't want the scaling to be locked you could uncheck that and now you can stretch the image in ways which probably isn't going to make it look good but i mean if you really need something to be taller for some reason that would be how you do it you can also hold shift down which inverts the current locking selection so if you're locked and you want it to be unlocked just hold shift down while you add it and then you can scale it without the lock constraints so i'm going to control z a couple times i want to make sure that locking is there if we're going to be adding this image to the background by the way in this case the image is actually not tall enough to match the original image so i can either crop the background or if i do need the final image result to be as big as the canvas size which is everything you see in this window transparent space included then you might want to work with bigger base images in terms of their width and height so if you go to a stock image site or you take your own photos working with higher resolutions would allow you to basically fit the size of whatever document you're trying to work in without resorting to stretching and that would be ideal obviously bigger photos have higher image sizes so not always possible but in this case we'll just scale it to about here i'll hit scale so and we could use the move tool to actually recenter it but a better way might be to use this around center check box so if we check around center i'm going to hit control z and then we scale it it's actually going to scale from the center outward so that is handy there and you can see you can also toggle that on and off with control so if i hit control uh then it's going to invert the selection just like keeping the aspect ratio always shift so we could scale it just enough so that we need here to fit the height of the image but in this case i'm actually not going to use scale at all in the end but just demonstrating the tool there what we'll do instead is we'll crop away the canvas to match the image size so just demonstrating another thing here i'm going to left-click make sure nothing's selected here we'll go up to image and find crop to content so what crop to content is going to do is it's going to look at all of your layers and it's going to reduce the image size to match uh basically what it needs so crop to content and then the new document size matches the size of whatever was displaying on the screen now um if we disabled the mask for that suitcase layer you'll notice that uh the top and bottom actually did have information but if it's not showing it doesn't matter for the crop to content only what shows actually is relevant so image crop to content is a really nice and easy way to refit the image for the final document okay hopefully you guys are keeping up so far so uh one last minor thing i want to point out about the cropping away of a person from the background you'll see right here there's this little gap area and probably a few more actually where i was unable to really use the pen tool effectively so we could go into the suitcase layers and remove those we could either use the e for the or shifty actually for the eraser tool um lower the size here down to something like five zoom in with control middle mouse wheel and we can kind of manually get rid of this area and then we can go to the masking layer here and erase this area and then you'll see the new background will fade in for here so that is uh one decent way you can do it but you do have to be kind of careful with the pixels you don't want to remove anything that you don't actually need actually you could also just um use the paintbrush and black color and let's make sure that we're actually using a circle here um so size goes down to let's say four okay yeah the when you get to low pixel sizes the shape is going to look a lot more boxy no matter what you do so just be careful about that five pixels of the box and then four is kind of a cross i probably want to use more like four or six if you're looking at something this low uh so that's one decent way you can kind of clean up those edges one other way you can kind of clean up those areas is to go up to the select by color or fuzzy select tools so fuzzy select is going to select a color and try to find pixels around it that are the similar color and then select by color is going to and i think the difference is that with select by color it actually might expand to other areas that aren't directly connected so that's what it's referring to with fuzzy select by contiguous as in each of the pixels that are selected are directly adjacent to each other so um for this case we probably want fuzzy select tool and we want to do this clicking on the image layer not the mask layer for suitcase so i can just go in here set a threshold to increase the types of colors which are allowed to be matched with the color selected and then you left click and you should get a decent shape of those areas that have this similar color that are contiguous and now i can hit delete on the keyboard and remove them and now with that selected and now i can go over to the mask layer here and i could hit delete i believe when you do hit the delete though it uh uses whatever your background color is so i'm going to swap that to black here and now let's try hitting delete here ah yes okay and so uh those pixels have been replaced with black for the mask layer which means that they are invisible which is what we want so we can do it that way obviously you can see though it's a little bit crude so you may still want to clean up with a brush or eraser tool after that i guess the eraser tool is more appropriate here uh just make sure your pixel size is good for what you're trying to accomplish i'm gonna unselect everything and we'll just come kind of come in here with the eraser tool so now to quickly show uh one other thing that a lot of people like to do especially for things like thumbnails uh you might not be happy with the results around the edges of your cutout so like if you look up here especially with hair and that kind of thing you can see uh reasonably well that it doesn't exactly belong to the original shot it looks like there's something missing a little bit right so what some people like to do to get around that is to stroke the outside of the path of the cutout so you could either kind of make it blurry with like a paint brush and a low hardness setting and then going around the edge of it so uh using black color and then around the edges of course you can use a much smaller size so this is like one manual way you could kind of do it and just make it look a little bit more blurry on the outside another way that's easier is uh you could just choke it with a white color so i'm switching my color back to white we'll go to the path i'm going to right click on the path i'm going to stroke the path and we're going to use uh whatever line with however thick we want it to be in terms of pixels i'll just go for six i'll hit stroke ah okay wait so on layers make sure that you're actually selecting the image data and not the layer mask or else it's going to affect what gets shown and hidden not the actual color so let's go back to the paths window once again right click it stroke path and let's choke it so now we have a white border that goes all the way around the person and effectively what we've done is kind of turned her into a sticker some people like to do this for youtube thumbnails that sort of thing so if you're ever interested in that kind of thing uh that is one way you can do it i'll hit ctrl c for now and so at this point we're getting pretty close to the end but a few other slightly more advanced things we can touch on uh color tools so color tools we can go up to the color menu here and let's talk about a couple here so for instance saturation so when you want colors to be either very vivid or non-existent basically black and white you can change the color on a layer so if i have my layer here selected and i go to saturation we can increase or decrease the scale of the saturation to make the color more or less vivid so if i go down on the saturation towards zero person becomes black and white and once again this re-emphasizes how useful layers are because we're applying the saturation to a single layer so we're not destructively changing everything in the document only that what we're currently working on in that one layer and uh in reverse we can of course saturate the character which we might actually want to do here because this is a very very vivid background scene so we kind of want any imported people to kind of reflect that so let's increase the saturation to something like 1.134 and we can go ahead and hit okay on that all right so another option hot to cold so inside of colors we'd be looking at color temperature here uh so you can see the background layer has very very warm colors it would be kind of it kind of implies that there's a lot of warm sunlight maybe kind of more of a summer or fall atmosphere to what's going on there so in colors menu we can do color temperature to shift the person towards being in a colder climate or being in a hotter direct sunlight kind of climate so if you know the original temperature you can set that otherwise you can just kind of lower it towards the color otherwise you can just lower the intended temperature down to imply coldness uh you can see this shifts everything a lot more towards blue or in this case what we probably actually want we can shift it towards a higher temperature uh kind of giving us that warm fuzzy orange red feeling so if we bump it up there a bit hit okay and with those couple color effects it's a little bit more believable that the person is in the scene obviously there's still a lot of problems like the scale the position so we can use the move tool up here put it on the road maybe we want to scale things down so keeping around center okay i guess the scale is going to take a little bit to apply here because the original image and the layer mask need to be scaled as well and we can position around the road so obviously there'd be a lot more work to do here for instance she doesn't really have a shadow anymore um so there are other issues to correct but hopefully that gets you pointed at least in the right direction okay so inside of there are also some automated tools so uh obviously this is a really beautiful image and i got it off pixabay great source uh for stock photos and that kind of thing so this is some pretty nice artwork already but uh if we say wanted to make the colors a little bit more brighter here in this well-lit area we could go up to the colors menu go down to auto and color enhance so this is just an automated tool that's going to try to brighten up the colors a little bit so you can see here it made it even warmer in these well lit areas i can hit control z and you see the saturation goes down a little bit so if i go back and forth here hopefully you can kind of see how it brightens up everything and makes the lighting a little bit more obvious so you may not always like the results of the automated tools but there's a few in there in these later versions of so worth checking out if you have the time okay so i think we're at the last topic now which is filters so filters are basically effects that you can apply over a layer for your graphic um let's try to show off a few okay so vignette is where you basically have a shape typically like a iris or a circle or oval shape that goes around the middle and that would be where you'd want to focus your eyes on and then in these outer areas it darkens them by blackening them out as it gets to the edges so the vignette effect you can find under filters and then light and shadow and then vignette and you can see exactly what i was talking about here the center stays vivid but the outer areas are basically darkened and you can click on these control gizmos to affect which areas are going to apply with that so we can adjust the shape of the vignette and that can be a pretty cool tool when you want to have the person viewing your image kind of focus their eye on something so that's vignette and obviously there's a bunch of settings you can play around with here and i can get to each one another option is a drop shadow so i did actually forget text so let's let's do text so text tool here in the toolbox you click there and you have the ability to set fonts so click the font drop down and you can pick any font installed on your computer uh let's go ahead and i'll just use baby snowy it's it's a really good font um which you can pick up on dafont.com if you want for free um i'm gonna left-click here and that gives us the ability to start writing our text box here so like wherever this box is appearing that's where your text is going to go and i can start typing stuff in here so learn i don't know kind of random text there and you'll see the bounds of the box automatically expand to match your text it doesn't necessarily have to stay there though we can adjust the bounds which is also going to adjust the position of the text depending on where it's anchored and we can just stretch this text box over our image so controlling each of the corners uh with these outer tools so bottom is going to go down and up and the corners will go two directions at once of course if you want to align the text to one side of the box then you can use left justify over here in the toolbox so that pushes it to the left side of our text area all right justify puts it to the right and there's also filled i'm not 100 sure on that but it looks like a chase to fill out all the space in a sense usually i'll just use that centered and what i would actually do is use the move tool on the text layer uh note that whenever you use text it creates it on its own layer by default and then we can drag this around the screen so you can just position it wherever you need if you really need to position your text ideally then what you can use is a guide so if you go up to image and then guides do new guide by percent i'll do a vertical guide so going top to bottom direction vertical hit okay and now we can position that text perfectly in the center so guides super helpful uh likewise you can use a horizontal guide when you want it to be perfectly centered vertically um okay yeah but what i wanted to show was drop shadow so i uh drop shadow to text all the time probably gonna have it on the thumbnail for this video if you want to find the drop shadow filter go up to filters light and shadow drop shadow and i have a preset here so with effects you can actually hit the plus button and create a preset so you don't need to redo the settings every single time but if we zoom in here you can kind of see the drop shadow already there what i'll do is i'll hide the underlying layer so we can actually see the drop shadow itself you'll see it's not very visible and it's highly blurred so what i like to do is turn down the blur radius and then it becomes a lot more of a obvious silhouette and then i take the x and y and make it much closer to the original i also boost the opacity up so that it is much more visible so my typical drop shadow is something like this a blur of two pixels an opacity of two and then a relatively tight to the original text x and y coordinates then you can hit ok or in my case just create a preset and then every time i want to use it i'll just go to the drop down and choose it there so that's my typical settings there 2 1 and 10. and then i hit ok and when you do that though when you apply an effect to a text element note that it's no longer a text uh box it's actually just a layer so you can edit it like you can any other layer i could even take a paintbrush and draw on it so like that obviously you can't do that with normal text so if you want to change the text what you'll have to do on that text layer is to use the text tool click on it and you'll get this text box that'll pop up and it'll basically say that hey you're trying to do text editing if you do this it's going to remove all the modifications uh so if i edit there now it goes back to having no drop shadow no brush stroke through the center of it so just note that if you want to edit your text try to have it totally done before you try to edit it in ways like drop shadow or like brush strokes but generally you could just do that on another layer anyway so if you really want to draw brush strokes just create a new layer and do that on top of it then you can still actually edit the text and not have to worry about losing all your changes which is the idea of layers don't lose your changes and don't make mistakes that are permanent all right uh so we can go up to filters and you'll see repeat here at the top so whatever your last used effect is always going to be there so quick access to just add the drop shadow back in uh let's see water pixels okay so this is a fun effect if it's still working like how i remember it uh i think it used to be called watercolor not water pixels but if we go to filters and do artistic and then we go down to where is it water pixels let's change the super pixel size yeah okay so like doing a watercolor or paint by numbers it kind of pixelates the image in kind of a watercolor or acrylic painting style anyway it's just a really cool effect you can take something remove a lot of the detail from it and give it these kind of artistic looks whole idea of the artistic category and that can just be a really interesting look there so that is pretty cool uh lots of other filters here and the last thing i want to point out in this video though is that if you want even more filters then what you should do is go online find this plugin called gimmick it's free so that's g apostrophe m-i-c and uh you can open this up once you've installed it make sure you get the version obviously this this plug-in also works with tools like creta which is a free painting program kemp is more about photo editing and when you open this up you can apply these filters to your image layers so you can see here just under artistic there is so many more options you can choose from to apply to your graphics so if you like filters gimmick is going to be really handy for you so some pretty awesome stuff in there and then it's similar you just you know change your settings you can apply hit okay so on and so forth and let's actually see how that turns out pretty crazy there's some pretty fun effects i don't want this video to go on forever so hopefully you guys learned a lot about inside of this tutorial specifically for beginners i've been chris thanks for watching and i will see you guys in my future video content

Channel: Chris' Tutorials

Views: 267,609

Rating: 4.9265003 out of 5

Keywords: gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, gimp, graphic design, how i edit my photos, how i edit my instagram photos, photoshop cc 2020, photoshop 2020, gimp 2.10.20, how to gimp, gimp 2.10, gimp 2020, gimp remove background from image, how to use gimp, gimp photo editing, gimp 2.10 tutorial, gimp tutorial for beginners, gimp graphic design, gimp tutorials, gimp tools, remove background, gimp basics, video tutorials, gimp guide

Id: x6pXJ7Ijir0

Length: 49min 12sec (2952 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020