LEARN GIMP IN 1 HOUR - Complete Beginners Photo Editing Guide

hello everybody Chris here and in this video I wanted to explain the basics of to you guys in a complete tutorial for beginners so this won't cover absolutely everything about him but there should go a long way and getting you started and understanding the program and most of the things you can do within the program so if you don't already know sense for the GNU image manipulation program it's more or less a free alternative to Adobe Photoshop in that you can use the program to edit graphics and photos using a variety of tools in a layer based editing fashion so when I'm referring to layers and I'll explain more about this later I mean that you can take the changes that you make across the time that you work on an image and keep them separated from each other so that if you ever wanted to undo some of the changes stuff you did on one layer it would not affect the other layers so by working the layers you're able to reduce the destructiveness of the modifications you make okay but before we really get started with anything I want to show you guys how you can change the color theme within so you can see here that I use the dark color theme because I generally find it to be much easier on the eyes so if you want to adjust your color scheme you can go up to edit and then preferences and then in this list you can see interface and then there's a category for theme here so you can select one of the themes that are default to your computer so you have dark grey light and system it is possible to install other themes which you can find online some people have made a few of them but in this video we're going to just stick to the default themes so I'm using dark if you want it to look just like it does for me so inside of the default layout of the three most important windows are the tools box over here on the left that's where you see all of the basic tools that you can use with them such as the paintbrush tool for drawing onto your image and the vecten gular select tool for selecting part of the image document in order to make changes to specifically that region below the tools window is the tool options so whenever you select a tool like the paintbrush you're going to see a bunch of options associated with that tool down below in addition to those two boxes you have the layers window in the bottom right hand corner so whenever you want to switch the layer you're working or you want to create a new layer to have changes be separated from your other work then you'll do the majority of those type of changes in this layer window you also notice that in most of these dr. areas that there are other tabs such as right next to the layers window you can switch over to the color channels window and then the paths tool becomes relevant if you start using the pen tool to draw Bezier curves up in the top right you have windows such as brushes which gives you a full view of all of the brushes that you have installed on your computer so this selection is effectively the same as the tool options for the paintbrush you can see you can select those same brushes here from this drop-down the difference between each brush is that they will allow you to draw in a different shape so the basic brush would be a circle with some softness on the edges you can see it says hardness of 50 the higher the hardness setting is the less softness you get on the edges so if you want it to be very very soft you would want a hardness of 0 and if you want it to be completely solid then you would have a hardness of 100 so we can draw it hardness 50 and you can see there it's got some blurriness around the edges so we could either manually set the hardness higher like so or we could actually just select the default hardness 100 brush from the brushes window or using the brush select and the tool options either way we get the same result there's also the hardness 25 but you can turn that all the way down to 0 if you do that manually so you have 0% hardness up here at the top 25% 50% and a hundred percent at the bottom now the other brushes usually give you some kind of pattern that you're drawing with so if I was to click here this hatch pin you can see that it will kind of show you can see it'll show you as you hover over the image the shape that it's gonna be drawing so you can left-click press and hold and drag that brush in order to create strokes across your document and you can see that by using that brush pattern you can get a result that will look completely different than anything you can draw with the basic brush so another example might be the sponge brush over here you can see that it kind of spatters a little bit of ink everywhere when you draw with this brush so I accidentally changed the color to brown there but that actually brings up a decent point here we can actually change the colors in this box over here in the tool selection so the first color in the top left is your active foreground color and then the active background color is the one that sits behind that you can switch between those two colors at any time by hitting X so you see I hit X and it swaps them immediately and you can select the color you want by clicking on the box and then changing your foreground color and you can see as I move it around that all of the values will adjust automatically over here on the right such as the levels of red green blue and the luminance value down here you can also click on these individual values such as the lightness if you want to move it without actually changing the rest of the values for the color so as I increase the lightness the base color stays the same but it would just become darker or brighter sometimes you may need to copy a color from into another program or you may find a color you like online and often those colors will be stored in a HTML notation so you'll be able to recognize that because it'll usually have six digits which can include letters up to F and numbers 0 through 9 sometimes you'll also have the HTML color have two extra digits at the end which is a representation of the Alpha so the Alpha of a color is how transparent it is so if you had a 50% alpha that would mean that it is 50% transparent and to put things simply you would be able to half see whatever is behind that color when you start drawing with it there's also this color history box down here at the bottom so you can see the colors that you've recently selected here and if you want to take a color that you're currently selecting and put it here in the history so that you can use it in the near future you can click on this little button here to add the color into this list of history colors so that can be useful if you want to add a few colors for your future selection kind of like a temporary palette so I could go here select a new green color add that end there and once you have the color you like you can just select it and hit OK so now when I draw with this color we obviously get a different result there so on the tab next to brushes there's patterns as a slide in here so you can use patterns for things like filling in an area that you have selected so if I take the rectangular select tool in the top left hand corner and let's just say I wanted to grab this area of the image and I wanted to fill that in with the pattern it can select the leopard-skin right click on this area go to edit and then choose fill with pattern you can also see the hot keys for any of these commands next to it so that could be control semicolon on your keyboard and if you fill it in it'll take that texture and keep applying it until it fits the entire region generally speaking I find that the default textures are kind of on the weaker side you can bring in other people's patterns from online sites like deviantART would be could be sources for finding those kinds of things if that interests you at all then over on the right to that you have fonts selection so any font that you have installed on your computer should in theory show up here somewhere in the fonts list if you install a font while you're within you'll have to restart for it to show up properly I'll really use this window as well because when you use the text tool for creating titles and that sort of thing you can select the font in the tool options as well and then the history window over here will show you the files that you've been recently working on so these might be just PNG images but they may also be the dot xcf files so whenever you save a document and you want it to be editable later on you would actually save it as a dot xcf file it's a standard file extension for the advantage there is that you can open it up and it will still have all the layers intact but once you actually export a image to jpg or PNG it's impossible to go back and edit it in terms of layers if you try to load up a PNG or JPEG image into again it would all be one layer and none of the changes would actually be reversible so just note that before you do your final export and you may want to save your documents in xcf format if you want to change them in the future now if you want to do change history you can see over here next to the tool options there's a little tab here for undo history as well so you can see the recent changes that we have made on our document here so we have the most recent changes at the bottom and the earliest ones at the start so if you want to reverse back to an earlier state in the document you can either hit ctrl z to make undo changes and you can see in this window it'll automatically move up one level every time I hit ctrl Z and you can also move one change back up the list by hitting ctrl Y so control Y is you redo key and ctrl Z is your undo so control why does the rectangular select and then ctrl Y again does the fill pattern you can also scroll up on this list and if you wanted to go all the way back to the base image you just need to left-click it once but note that until you make a new change from this point you can still go back in the history if you want to pick a new spot to continue working from but as soon as you revert back to a point in your image and you make a new change such as if I was to do the brush stroke here you'll see that it's now on a different undo redo timeline and all those history changes that we had before are not reversible even if I hit ctrl Z we can't see them anymore so be careful about that there's also a few more windows that you don't see here so if we go up to the menu at the top and do Windows dr. ball dialogs you can see all of the windows for including new ones that they've added recently like symmetry painting so if you wanted to have symmetry while you're drawing on your document basically you want to draw the same thing on the left and the right side of your image you could open up this symmetry window and do mirror and then choose I believe vertical symmetry will make everything on the left reflect to the right so if I draw here then you can see how you get perfect symmetry across the axis now I'm gonna turn that off though we don't really need them so now I think it would be best to talk a little bit more about layers so as we saw earlier I was drawing a bunch of different things onto the base so as we saw earlier I was drawing a bunch of things with the paintbrush straight on to the image that I imported into to work with so if I make these brush strokes like this maybe changed to a different brush and you know draw all of this on there then after these changes I'm making or drawing directly onto this imported lair which just has the name of the image that I brought in but now if I ever wanted to erase these parts I can't actually do that in a way where we can get the data from the original image back once you draw over anything on a layer then you can think of everything that was there before as having its color replaced and it no longer it really exists so using the eraser tool you can see that the brush is still applied but generally you'll use more of those default hardness brushes the ones that are just circular what we get when we erase here is a white color now the reason we get white instead of transparent is because this layer has no alpha channel so if I add a new layer here and I'll put it in the background I will fill it with say the foreground color using that drop-down at the bottom so we can see this is a purely green layer and I pull that behind the image layer we can't actually see the background layer at all and that's because the top layer has no transparency whatever has no Alpha Channel so it does not support transparency so the eraser tool gives us white instead of transparency if I right click on a layer I can add an alpha channel by clicking on the Alpha Channel button now when we do that this is still white the eraser tool row over the colors that were behind it with with a white color and if I recall I think that the color it actually a vase is to is depending on whatever your background color is so let's actually go ahead and test that real quick I'll go back here reverse to the eraser history so we don't have the layer there and there's no Alpha Channel and let's change the background color to something and now if we erase yeah it erases with the background color okay you just wanted to confirm that so now we need to add in the layer again so I'm going to create this new layer I'll call it test background and use the foreground green we can see that that's completely green if I put that as the bottom layer that means it's hiding behind the top layer so we can't see anything because nothing has any alpha yet but if i right click and add the Alpha Channel back in again now how the eraser tool will work is that it will remove the Alpha from the color we draw over with the eraser tool so that will make it look invisible non-existent and we'll let the background show through so if I draw over here with the eraser tool it looks kind of like I'm drawing green but actually what it's really doing is letting the background show through so if I take the test background layer and I actually turn off its visibility with this eyeball icon what you'll see is this little checker box showing in the background of the first layer so this is what you'll see when you have transparency and nothing solid in the background sometimes you would actually want this if you want your exported image to be partially see-through every image that you export from a program like is actually going to be a square you can give it the illusion of having a different shape by having parts of your image be transparent such as when you want a drawn character to show but you don't want any background you just want the background of the webpage you're viewing to show through instead of a background that's actually part of the image itself now to note about that if you don't know the difference between JPEG and PNG it's essentially that a PNG image will allow you to keep that alpha transparency layer when you export it meaning that it can have the transparency and let the background of the webpage of whatever you're viewing show through in place of that space of the image but if you export to a JPEG image then all of the transparency is completely removed and that would be placed with a default color the advantage of a JPEG image is that it will have a lower file size so you don't always want PNG if you're actually exporting a rectangular image and the entire image should have some colored data there then a JPEG would usually be what you'd want but if you need that transparency because you want to fake a shape that's different than a rectangle or a square then you would want a PNG of course there's other image formats out there as well but those are pretty much the main two to know about for right now so now that we have two layers there's a lot of nifty tricks we could do for instance I can erase the data from the top layer and let whatever is the background layer show through as the new background for the final image so right now the test background is pure green which means anything I draw over with the eraser tool is going to show that green through right so at this level we could just draw green over the top layer if we wanted but we would run into pretty significant issues if we ever needed to change something when for instance if we were drawing a background that was more complicated than just one solid color like this and we ever wanted to change it then we need to spend a lot of time to manually redefine the colors or draw in the patterns while carefully not amazing anything like this computer screen because if we draw on the same layer then everything is destructive to whatever is on that layer but by having the test background layer show through we could simply just change the test background which is one solid color that applies to everything that has the transparency and what we'd be able to do is change the background color for the entire image by just doing something like a fill bucket tool on the background layer so if I hide the Home Office layer here and then I go to the fill bucket tool maybe I'll swap the active foreground and background colors so we're now selected with this kind of maroon red color I can just left click here and fill the background with red so in the final image we don't want the entire image to just be one solid color but if I really top layer here what you can see is that the background layer can show through anywhere that there is that transparency so as long as we cut out the area of the top image that we want to have the background show through we never have to redraw over the top image if we want to change the color we simply need to fill bucket the background and we can define where that background should be with transparency on the top layer so we could just select the top layer again with a left-click and take the eraser tool and keep drawing over this until we have the shape we want and that wouldn't be too bad of a solution for getting the background to go in there but we could also say that you know we want this laptop to be isolated but if we already know the shape of what we're trying to keep in the top layer for instance if we wanted to isolate this laptop then we can use selection tools in order to draw a shape around it so for instance if we have something that has a pretty well defined edge like this that contrasts well against the background and the same layer and we can use it to all like the scissors selects tool in order to define some shapes and then cut away anything that's not part of this laptop computer so I can left-click here which will set a point and let's switch back to the tool options window here from the undo history so that we can see the options here in case we need to change them I'll turn on interactive boundary so that if I left click press and hold to set the next point that we can see essentially where it's going to be making that selection on before we actually let go of the point so it gives you a little bit of preview information and we can let go over here for a roughs for rough selection we might also want to turn on feather edges here if you want it to have a little bit of softness when we finally cut away this laptop and what this is err select tool does really well is it figures out the areas that should be between the two points you set as a part of your object selection so if I left click over here that's a pretty straight line so it doesn't really show much but if I left click again down here you can see that it tries to intelligently make this curve around the edge there now didn't do a perfect job so we can just left-click in between those two points and set a Third Point to give it more information to kind of manually define where those points should be and as long as you give it enough points it can make a pretty good approximation of the shape of the object that you're trying to cut away without even knowing anything else about the object so we can left-click and hold to get that interactive boundary and just keep doing that while trying to get decent results on the edges of this computer anytime that the interactive boundary goes off like where you see that black line it's trying to trace the black line you can just move the point up a bit and get a better result so usually the scissors tool is going to be pretty good the black line just kind of throw it off a little bit so sometimes you do need to be careful other times you'll get very good results without actually having to put much work in at all and then here's another good example when the scissors select tool works well so there's this curve here so it knows to select the curve without me telling it anything just by following where the colors continue onwards and then we can add in more points down here just essentially following along until we get a good selection of the laptop when you get to the end of using the scissor selects tool remember to left-click on the final point to complete your circuit around your object and then you can select that object everything inside of it by left clicking once inside of your scissor selection and now you can see basically the shape of the laptop has been selected we can cut this out to a new layer which is generally a good idea working with more layers is usually preferable to be working with less so if you want to make a cut of your selection you hit control X on your keyboard now you can see that the laptops been cut away it leaves it with transparency because this layer has alpha which means that that currently the test background is going to show through but but we actually want to paste what we cut away into a new layers so we can do that by hitting ctrl V which will create a floating selection pasted layer in if we hit the create new layer button this will now be a separate layer from what's below it and this is really nice because as long as we aren't drawing on this layer we can do anything in the background layers without affecting the laptop layer again and we can see if we use the move tool up here or M on the keyboard we can take this whole new laptop layer and move it around the screen unfortunately you'll notice that because we did a lot of modifications to the original image before we cut this away to its own layer that those changes we made are kind of permanent unfortunately so if you have made permanent changes that you don't want you may need to kind of start over by Rhian porting your image and unfortunately now you can also see that the edges here are really harsh and that looks good it that looks bad once you try to separate them so if we actually go to the undo history and we move up to about where we have the scissors selection tool so scissors there and then if we click on the scissors tool there's an option here called feather edges so if you want to make the edges soft instead then you're gonna want to use the scissors tool with feather edges checked and then I add a little bit of softness whenever you cut away a selection much in the same way that using the paintbrush tool you get these soft edges with a hardness that's below 100 now I think for the feather edges to work you have to have that checked before you actually make the final selection clicking inside of the boundaries of your scissors select tool so how can we do that real quick by drawing the scissor select tool around our object I'll just go much quicker this time and I'll just get a rough selection here of the laptop so this time if we select it and we cut it away to its own layer it should have a little bit of softness around the edges so I'm going to hide the home-office layer whatever remains and you can see that the selection now it has that softer edge often having feather edges will make things look a little bit smoother than if you just had a raw hard edge pixel by pixel selection so just gonna keep that in mind as you go forward and that also applies to any other tools that use feather edges or any tools like the paintbrush that will have a hardness value setting okay so now that we've separated the laptop onto its own separate layer what's really the advantage of doing that well basically as long as it's on its own separate layer it's safe from any changes that you're gonna make on other layers so we still have the background layer here from the original image and we might want to edit that more so and we can just take the eraser tool and as long as this was the only thing we cared about keeping in the final image then we can just take the eraser tool and draw over it with basically no regard for the laptop itself because the laptops already been separated to its own layer so it's safe and you can see that there no matter how much I draw no matter how reckless I am here whatever is on that separate layer is going to remain intact also it's really powerful if you want to combine images so you might take an object from one image and you want to put it onto a separate image so for instance I'll drop in this image that happens to have a frog let's take the layer and move it up to the top so it is the top layer let's try to take this frog and put it on the table from the original image so if I hide these layers you can see that the original home-office layer is in shambles just REM point that I'm going to delete that layer completely and from my desktop I'm going to drag that image back into a new layer is created so now we just need to combine these two images so if I want the Frog to be on the table we need to cut the Frog out of this image using any selection method we want so the scissors select tool is a really good option you can also use paths create a path using Bezier curves and then create a selection from that select bicolor is a good way when the object you're trying to select is basically one color or very similar colors such as the background if I wanted to take this green background and kind of filter it out I can right click and do add alpha channel on that layer and by left-clicking you can see that you get a selection that's similar to the color you are clicking on and if you decrease the threshold it'll be more precise in the color selection doesn't work super great with the greens here because the Frog also has a lot of greens and you can also see that the Grays also don't work so great because the Frog also has some great colors so on some images it won't work as good as others but on some images the colors will contrast enough that you can select part of your color and either cut that away or delete it and you'd be able to get a good result without having to manually draw around a border so you can see here clicking on these greens if I select that it selects everything within the threshold I can hit control X to cut that away and that would allow you to do things like remove some of this background area so I already showed you guys the scissor selects tool let's try doing it with the paths tool it's actually very similar to the scissor select tool except that with the paths tool you do everything manually you can either draw straight lines or draw and curves and whenever you create a path it all be semi permanently stored over here it'll be permanently stored over on this paths window so you draw the paths once and later you can make the selection from a path you've already created on your document the paths don't show up on your document but the information for the paths will always be there unless you delete them in the paths window over here so if you want to draw straight lines with a path tool then you just left click and then you left click to make your second point if you want to make it into a Bezier curve then you press and hold and you can see that when I do that you get these handles which affect the shape of the curve now drawing with the curves is a lot more complicated you may have to work harder to get it just right by pulling on these handles and then when you left-click your next point the points that come out of a path point that has the Bezier curves will also have the Bezier curve at least on the left so you see that the the right handle affects the Bezier curve to the right of the point and then the left Bezier curve affects the point to the left so this can get kind of complicated but one of the nice things about the path store is if you have a go away from it like if you switch to a different tool you can actually always go over to the paths window right click on a path and hit edit path so the information of your path will always be there available for you if you ever need to edit it or make a selection from your path so if we want to add more points to the path now we can select one of the points and then at left click to add in some more points I'm not going to be super precise about this I'll just left click to add straight points because that's quicker and simpler but you can spend as much time as you want when you're making your selection so generally it will take a bit longer to use the paths tool manually to make a selection around your object but if you add in enough points you can probably get it a little bit better result than if you just use the scissors select tool and like before when you want to complete the circuit you need to manually click on the last point in this case actually you have to hold ctrl down in order to get that little linking symbol so this will create the end point and now our path is one closed circuit around this frog we can see the shape of the path shows up on the paths window as well so now anytime we want to select this shape in this spot from our layer or any of our layers really we can right click on the path in the paths window and choose path to selection so you see when we do that we get a selection around the frog and we can move that to a new layer by hitting ctrl X and then ctrl V to paste in as a new passive layer hit the new layer button and if we hide the background layer we can see that the Frog is now completely separate from the image that it was originally in we can click away from the paths tool and the path will still technically be there so we can always select it with right click Edit path and we can just discount that for now switch to another tool and continue editing our image so I said earlier I wanted the Frog on the desk we could technically say that it is on there right now but it doesn't look quite right so what we can do is use the move tool to reposition it a little bit and maybe we want the Frog to be shrunk down a lot because right now it's giganto size although admittedly sometimes leaving it gigantic size is a fun trick that people like to do when editing photography so if you take a close-up of an object in one image and pull it out to an image where the shot is much further away you can make something look way bigger than it should be but for now let's scale it down using the scale tool so that is Shift S on your keyboard or you can click over here and now we need to go to the paste layer 1 which double click on the name on to rename two frog and I will left click on the layer to get these scale markers so now we have these corners which we can scale it in from if you want to make sure that your aspect ratio for the object is maintained so that it doesn't stretch weirdly vertically or horizontally then make sure that the link is checked up here for the scale value you can manually type in a pixel value if you like or you can click on each of these corners or sides to scale the object inwards so if we want to decrease its size we just fold this corner inwards until it has a size and shape that makes a bit more sense for the photo and then you hit scale and it will adjust now if you think you might later decide that that's too small and you want to scale it upwards a better idea of scaling a small image upwards would actually be to keep a copy of this original sized image you can duplicate a layer for later by right clicking on the layer and hitting duplicate layer so with this broad copy layer we can just hide it and maybe call it frog back up and now we can scale the visible lair without losing the detail of this big frog if we ever decided we want to go back also one more thing if you want to have the scaling occur without actually changing the main position then you can old control down to scale around the center which will scale inwards from all directions scaling it from one corner down to the opposite corners so let's scale that down there and if I show the Frog back up layer at any point in time you can see that we still have that there hidden in the background if we need it later on so one of the minor problems we have when we use the pen tool in order to grab this frog from the other image and bring it in if you look at the very edges of the frog image it doesn't blend very well with the background there especially in these lower areas the black parts that kind of came over from the Frog image really contrasts harshly against the table surface so one way that we can get around this is to have the outside of this image be stroked with the eraser tool to kind of smooth out the edges a little bit and add a little bit of transparency towards the outside similar to if we were using the paintbrush tool you can see the soft edges there but when we use the eraser tool instead of drawing with the color we draw with transparency basically so what we need to do is to right-click on a layer the Frog layer and do alpha to selection so this works with all kinds of layers it's really useful if you want to add things like drop shadow because you can do a perfect selection of the object that you're trying to apply in effect to drop shadow by the way is a filter and we'll touch more on filters later but you can find it up here in filters light and shadow a drop shadow well for right now what we actually want to do is stroke the edges of this frog with the eraser tool so to do that with the selection already made we right-click and we go to edit and then stroke selection down here at the bottom you can also stroke a path if you have one made so stroke selection we're going to be stroking with a paint tool and the tool we want is the eraser tool so this will use whatever settings you have on the eraser tool so you can see here brush size of six if you make a very large brush then that will evasive bot of the edges but in this case we just want to smooth it out a little bit so you are going to want to use a small brush size using the hardness brush of 50 is a decent option because that will have that kind of smoothness same as drawing with the paintbrush basically the closer the pixels are to the center of this image the more we want them to be faded in and then slightly beyond that we want it to fade out a little bit more with the transparency so I'm gonna stroke it here with the eraser tool and when you do that you can see that all of the edges kind of are brought in a little bit if I was to unselect things then it should look a little bit smoother than it did before I'm gonna undo this though because possibly six pixels might be too much so you can adjust it maybe bring the size down to four pixels or something like that and retry it with alpha to selection all right click stroke selection using the eraser tool from the drop down menu so let's drop that so that's the after and end before and control Y to make it after again just makes it look a little bit smoother not exactly perfect just a simple trick to make it look a little bit smoother there so now we can reposition this kind of where we want it on the table and if we zoom all the way out it's not too bad okay so one more thing we can do for the Frog layer is to kind of bring in some of the lighting from the background image the one with the laptop and to kind of add it to the Frog to make it look a little bit more like the Frog actually belongs in the image giving kind of the illusion that the two are lit in a similar fashion so what we can do to do that is to put the frog in a layer group so layer groups when you have effects such as a color composite mode which are the options you see here will only apply to other layers that are in that group so clicking on the Frog if I click create new layer group in the layers panel here I can call this frog group drop the frog in and also duplicate this Home Office layer so that we can put a copy inside of the Frog group now temporarily I'll hide that see the idea is that if these two layers are in the same group together then the top layers will only apply to layers that are beneath it within the same group so if I rien a below office image you'll see that by default it covers everything behind because it's the top layer image and it has no transparency but if I change the color composite mode from normal to something like overlay then what it's actually gonna do is apply the lighting from the image to lower layers rather than actually having the image itself be on top of things so this is taking the bottom layer and creating a fusion of two layers the home-office layer and the frog layer to create a final look inside of your image now there's different modes we can play around with here that will actually affect the lighting of the frogs such as soft light or hard light you'll see that it gives you a different look depending on which one you select so I'm thinking for this case something like soft light it's probably gonna go the least overboard with it so you can see at 100% opacity which is the Alpha of the layer how much of the layer you want to show through it doesn't look too crazily different from the original the colors do change if we hide the home-office layer the duplicate one and we should probably rename this layer as well so I'll call it soft light layer but we're not gonna have it at full value we're actually going to lower the opacity down so that more of the original color shows the rule for the final frog so hiding the soft light layer and showing it you can see the kind of shifts everything a little bit more towards the brown color so it's kind of a cheap way of manipulating the color on a lower layer we can lower the opacity down a little more and just hide the soft light layer whenever you want to see the image knowing compare it to the newer version and you can get an idea of how that might look now we might also decide that you know this bottom area it's still a little bit overly dark it looks a little unnatural it's not very smooth so we might want to erase a little bit of this away so we open now to do that using the eraser tool and also using the stroke method let's have one more option in which is to do with layer mask so layer masks allow you to take part of a layer and prevent it from showing through though the information from the original layer still exists so basically a mask hides part of an image that you don't want to show through in the final product so you can add a layer mask to any layer or lair group by right-clicking on it and doing add layer mask so by default we want to initialize that with white color full opacity you could also initialize it with black which is full transparency so the idea is when you draw on a layer mask black means it's going to be invisible and white means it's going to be visible by default we want to leave everything about the frog visible because we only want to take a little bit off so I'm gonna initialize it as white so we do that and you'll see that this little layer mask has been added to the right of the layer itself so now when we click on this layer we have to select on the left the actual image if we want to edit that or the layer mask on the right so now if we use the paintbrush tool and draw with black so know I have black selected as my foreground color we can essentially draw black on the layer mask to hide part of the underlying frog but if we ever deleted that layer mask everything that we had would come back so this is another way of non destructively modifying your image so layer masks can be very very handy when you want to hide something but not permanently delete it just gonna come down here a little bit with the paintbrush tool at 50% hardness and smooth out a little bit of these black edges because I think having it be black doesn't make a lot of sense when the underlying table is kind of more of a brown so by making this partially transparent it'll take more of the color from the table for the edges around the Frog and that just makes more sense okay and the nice thing about the layer mask like I mentioned it's not permanent changes is that you can also draw with Y if you want to bring something back so using the color selection tool I'm selecting white and right here I may have gotten rid of a little bit too much so I would be able to return the mask with the white tool unfortunately it looks like when I was selecting the frog I maybe cut out a little bit too much so to show that it works you can see here you can bring back anything that's been masked out with exactly the color I had before but this part right here possibly missing a little bit of information it's obvious when it's close up so not ideal and that just kind of demonstrates the point that when you edit your image less destructively you can do things that better because then you can reverse changes that you've made so things like layer masks are really helpful so that you can decide when you want to hide something or show it okay now let's go ahead and show off the text tool writing text on your document or creating a title is gonna be pretty important especially if you're like me and you make thumbnails all the time so let's actually just go ahead and take this image and give it a title so you can see here when I have the text tool selected we have a font in the menu here your font probably won't be big noodle titling that's when I installed from online to font come if you like the font but you can select any font you have installed on your computer by clicking on this box here and just selecting from the drop down menu it'll give you the same selections that you have in the font window over here so either way you want to do it you can just find a font that you like to use in my case big noodle titling is pretty good as is baby snowy - free fonts that can install so if you click anywhere on your document you'll get a pop-up window with some information it's gonna by default contain the same settings that you have over in the text tool options over here the difference is if you set a setting up here and the tool options that'll be permanent until you change it here again but if you change the settings when you get this little pop-up menu that will only be for this particular text box that you're creating let's go ahead and start typing something in so I'll say tutorial here for right now you notice that when I type in information we have these four corners which you can drag so this is kind of like dragging the size of the layer it'll determine things like when you're typing when the newline will automatically start so will try to make your text fit within the box you've created so you just need to click on the sides or the corners in order to drag that and you can position it wherever you want note that by the default the text is left-aligned so you have justified tools over here you can Center it if you want if you don't like having to manually adjust the box you can change the box mode from fixed to dynamic so what that'll do is as you start typing it will expand the box instead of moving to the next line so basically the box will always kind of fit whatever you type in rather than the text fitting the box but you can still manually adjust it if you need to expand it so once you've created text if you want to change the settings of text within the box you actually need to select all the characters and then change the value on it if I don't have anything selected and I type in something like 200 it changes nothing so you select your text so left click and then drag until you see these yellow boxes around all of your characters and then you can change the font size so you can scroll up on the middle mouse wheel if you want to adjust it in increments or you can just type a value in like 200 so let's adjust the box so that it can fit the text more properly and maybe we increase it even more than that so I'll make it like 250 there at this point we'd probably want to Center the text especially if it's a title so one great way you can do that kind of thing within is to use guides so to create a guide which is basically a vertical line that you can snap to by moving objects or images around your screen is to go up to the image menu go down to guides here towards the bottom and you can do a new guide by percent or you can do it by pixels usually I'll do it by percent it's the easier way to Center things because you don't need to know how big your document is so you can do Direction vertical if you want it to be a top-down guideline or you can do it horizontal if you want it to be a left-to-right vertical at 50 percent it's gonna put this guideline right in between the middle of our image now you can actually move these guides if you want by hovering over it and left clicking and dragging it while it is glowing red but what I actually want to do here is to take this text layer which by the way I don't actually want in the Frog group so I'm gonna move that out of it and we just left-click on it with the move tool and drag it to the center so when you move something you'll see the little anchor point in the middle so if that gets close to the blue line it's going to snap to it and if for some reason it's not snapping you can go up to the View menu and make sure that snap to guides is turned on one thing you'll notice about the text is that it's up particularly stand out and the areas that also have white in the background like where this laptop screen is sitting there so what we can do is apply the drop shadow filter to the text in order to add a black shadow behind it which will make the text stand out a lot more now before playing the drop shadow to the text one thing that you should make sure is that the text box has the text at least a little bit away from all of the edges of the text box because if you apply a effect like drop shadow to the box these lines you see here are basically the boundaries of where the drop shadow can go so if there was no pixel space between let's say the right side of this L and the right edge over here what might happen is that part of the drop shadow effect would get cut off and it would look bad so having extra space is a good idea so that your effect looks right when you actually apply it so with the tutorial text layer selected I can go up to filters and go down to light and shadow and do drop shadow so when you do that you should notice that there's a little bit of a soft shadow right behind the text immediately you can turn off the preview to see what it looks before and after my standard settings for what I want the text to really stand out is to put 10 pixels they support 10 for the X&Y size of the drop shadow to take the blur radius and drop that down to 2 so it's much less blurry and then to take the opacity and crank that all the way up to 2.0 so that the shadow is actually almost completely not transparent but you can see if you look at the edges that it's not completely solid because there's still a little bit of blur radius so we can hit OK there and that gives us a decent looking drop shadow for our image so now I want to show you guys one of my favorite tricks using the perspective tool so the perspective tool you can find over here it looks like a wireframe of a cube and what perspective allows you to do is to take a otherwise flat image and manipulate the corners of that image in such a way where it looks like you brought the image into the document at an angle so you can see in the background that the laptop screen has an angle to it so if we tried to drop a square image onto it it wouldn't make any sense because the four corners don't align perfectly in terms of their X or Y positions so we would need to use the perspective tool if we wanted to say add a wallpaper to the laptop background making it look like it was on so I'm going to drop in this other image and we're going to take this and try to make it appear on the laptop screen so the first of all I'm going to use here is the scale tool I will scale this way down until it is kind of a little bit bigger than the screen itself on its scale and then I'm going to reposition this over the laptop will also take this landscape layer and put it down there right above the home office layer the bottom one not the one in the Frog group so now we need to take this landscape layer and apply the perspective tool to it so I'm going to left click with the perspective tool and now it gives us four corners we can manipulate in order to make it look like it has the right perspective to fit on that laptop screen so what you need to do now is to take the four corners and match them to the laptops corners we can hide the text layer so that we can see what we're doing while we do this and we just need to take these and kind of position them at the four corners where the laptop screen is so there's the right two positions and then the bottom left and this one for the top left so if you get it about right you should get a good result you can hit transform and now just with that you've magically made that image that definitely did not belong in the original shot look like it's actually fairly convincingly what is showing on the laptop screen and as long as this layer is under the text layer when we add the text back in the text will properly appear above this layer so that'll be a really cool effect for you guys to try out a couple more useful tools I think we should cover on before we wrap up this giant tutorial would be the blur sharpen tool and the dodge burn tool so with the blur sharpen tool we can either blur out an area or take the pixels in it and make it have a sharper appearance now usually I think you would generally use this tool more for blurring a really common example would be if you need to blur someone's face out so just like with using a paintbrush tool or a pencil tool you can draw over an object or a person with this tool you need to make sure you're on the right layer for that so and we can try to kind of blur the frog here on the Frog layer make sure you don't select the layer mask but the Frog itself and then if you zoom in we can press and hold with this tool and kind of blur the face out a little bit now you see at these basic settings it takes quite a while of going over it to actually make it blow out all that much so if you want to make that go faster try increasing the force and the size of your brush and you should be able to get a blur much faster than before conversely if you hold ctrl down to talk out to sharpen or you change the mode and the tool options to sharpen then you can take these pixels and kind of remove some of the blurriness from it making the pixels stand out a lot more so you can see here that when we have the sharpen tool there the the colors stand out a lot more from each other it might not really be what you're looking for in a lot of cases but you may be able to find a use for that just make sure you don't go too overboard with the sharpening or it'll just straight up look bad so also worth mentioning about things like blur and sharpen is the ND filters menu you'll find other options for doing the same kind of thing but if you want to say apply a blur to everything in a layer then you can go down here to the filters to blur and Gaussian blur and that could take an entire layer and apply a blur to it equally all at once and you can increase the size of the blur if you want it to be more dramatic or lower down to be a more minor blur so it just depends on if you're trying to blur out an entire layer or just manually blur out a little part of it so with the Dodge burn tool you can lighten or darken part of your image so when you have this tool selected it still works like the brush tool by default you're doing Dodge which is going to lighten things so if we wanted to take like the frogs back and kind of lighten it a bit we can draw over it with the Dodge tool and you can see that it will get a lot more great so we might decide that you know the shadows on the original frog were too harsh so we could actually dodge those areas and to make it a lot brighter like it was actually in a brighter lighting environment now that was pretty sloppy the way I just did that there but you can kind of get the idea you can take something you can make it lighter make it look like there's a lot more lighting and be in that part of the image and you can also reverse that either by holding ctrl down to switch to a burn or clicking burn in the tool options and you can start drawing over that so you could take these shadow areas and make them even harsher maybe you do that to many areas of your image to kind of fake that the lighting is darker than it actually is note that this tool by default works on mid-tones which are going to be the colors that are in the middle of whatever you're selecting with this dodge brush but you can also target the shadow so if you used shadows with burn you can make the darker shadows look even darker compared to the rest of the area so you see how that makes the blacks very very black but if you do it with the mid-tones kind of applies it a little bit more evenly and if you did it with the highlights it would be to take the brightest colors and make them darker so not really making it look like there's harsher shadows but rather that the whole thing is a little bit darker on average so speaking of shadows mid-tones and highlights there's a series of tools up in the color menu which you can use to affect how a layer looks so one of the ways you can do that is to affect the color balance of that layer and when you go into this menu you can see that you adjust either the shadows the mid-tones or the highlights individually so if you wanted to adjust the color of the shadows and that's going to be referring to the darker colors and whatever image or layer you're working on then you can adjust the color specifically to those shadow areas so I could take these shadows and make them red by increasing the red here but notice that the area where it affects first are the darker colors it doesn't affect these light greens as much however if I reset that go to the highlights and reset that as well and now I increase the red on the highlights you can see that it affects the wider areas and possibly some of the green areas I thought there's more of mid-tones first before it actually affects the other areas and then mid-tones I guess we can grab those greens the the colors seem to fall into the mid-tone range here so by targeting color ranges you can try to affect the shadows or the brightest areas of your image more so than the other areas so it just kind of allows you to filter what you're trying to work on so all of these tools you see in the color menu more or less work like that where you take your image and you are able to adjust the colors or the luminosity or brightness of that layer that you're working on so for instance I can go to the exposure layer and if I want everything to be a lot more shifted towards black I can lower the exposure down basically making it look like there was very little light in the shot you can also play around with the black level increasing it to make the shadows more dramatic and pulling inward you can combine that with a low exposure to if you wanted to take your image and make it darker if you want to make a layer more black-and-white or very very vivid you could go to colors and then saturation lowering the scale down to zero makes it pure grayscale and then if you increase it beyond one you can make the colors incredibly vivid much more so than they were in the original image now just to kind of recommend if you're going to be applying these color filters over one of your layers it might be a good idea to create a duplicate of that layer and then hide the original and work on the duplicated layer until you're sure that you want that to be the final look for your final result remember one of the things about working in that's really important is to be as non-destructive to your original materials as possible so you can always go back and make changes okay so one more thing I want to point out in the filters menu there are many filters in here but if you want to have even more options of these computer-generated effects that can get you quick results with very little manual effort then there is a really great library that there's pretty much no reason not to go ahead and grab for yourself it's called Demick so gimmick you can find at gimmicky you and this is basically a plugin that you can install the version you would want to get is the one that's specifically for if you have the latest version of that would be the 2.10 there's a Windows installer so you go ahead run that install resaurant and you'll see it in the filters menu so with gimmick so with the gimmick plug-in you can open it up and there are 500 plus filters currently 520 that you can apply on top of your image to manipulate it so for instance you can go through the different filters here they're all categorized and there's a lot to look through you can also type in and see if there's a filter that you want so you could try something like glow there's a few different options here for glow you can see in the preview window that you can take that original frog and so you can give it light and blurriness just by using one computer-generated effect and applying it to that image some other cool examples you might find in the artistic section so for instance if I go to artistic and I jump it down to hard sketch you can see that it makes it kind of look like you were taking a pencil and script and sketching it out on paper well you might go down here and look for something a little bit weirder like this row Delius effect so it just gives you a lot of really cool looks that you could apply to an image with without too much of your own personal manual effort and then of course the settings you can play around with on the right to increase or decrease the amount of that effect very similar to this standard filters except now you would get an extra 520 that you can apply on top of your image that you couldn't have before so that will just give you a lot more power when you're actually editing your images so that's pretty much going to be it for this tutorial giving you guys a complete walkthrough of the program of course there's more stuff that you can do within camp but as far as things go I pretty much shown you guys all of the basics you guys should understand layers now many of the important tools how to use filters the color adjustment options and the color composite modes layer groups layer masks and more so I hope you guys learned a lot I've been Chris thanks for watching and I will see you guys in my future video content

Channel: Chris' Tutorials

Views: 47,202

Rating: 4.9017682 out of 5

Keywords: Tutorial, How-to, Tutorial for Beginners, color corrector, design, designer, free software, freelance designer, gimp, graphic design, learn photoshop, photo, photography, retouch, tutor, tutorial, complete gimp, complete guide for beginners, gimp 2.10, gimp for beginners, photo manipulation, free photoshop, photopshop alternative, gimp guide, photo editing, photo guide

Id: Dm4_HojiKSA

Length: 57min 45sec (3465 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 02 2019