Hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by
Davies Media Design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you 10 things
that I think every beginner needs to know. I'll be using GIMP version 2.10.20 which is the latest
version of GIMP at the time of this tutorial Before I get into that check out my website at
Daviesmediadesign.com. As always I have tons of GIMP, Inkscape and Darktable tutorials on here,
and free software Help Articles so definitely check that out. You can enroll in my GIMP
2.10 Masterclass: From Beginner to Pro Photo Editing on Udemy. You can enroll in any of my
Skillshare classes by visiting GIMPschool.com. And you can get more with a premium membership to
Davies Media Design. I'll include all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description
of the video. So let's start this tutorial off with the very first thing that beginners
need to know, and that of course is where to download GIMP. So GIMP can always be downloaded
totally for free at GIMP.org. Here I am on the homepage of the main website - so it's GIMP.org.
Come over here to the "download" button. That's going to take you to the download page. It
should automatically recognize the operating system you're using. This will work for Linux,
MAC and Windows. In my case, I'm using Windows. And if I click the "Download GIMP Directly"
button here that will download the latest version of GIMP. Don't ever pay for GIMP - it
should always be free to download as a software, no matter where you are in the world. And once
you've downloaded GIMP to your computer and opened it up it should look something like this. It may
look a little different depending on the operating system you're using and the version of GIMP you
have installed. But the second thing beginners need to know is how to open an image into GIMP
or create a new document. So that's going to be a pretty easy process here. To open an image
you can go to File>Open. That's going to bring up the "Open Image" dialog box. And over here on the
left side you'll see the "Places" section. This allows you to search through various locations
on your computer including the main disk drives and external hard drives that you have connected
to your computer, or commonly used photos here. So I'm gonna go with my D: drive, and I'll double
click on the downloads folder. And then I created this folder for this tutorial, and here you'll see
the photos you can choose from here. So whenever I'm clicked on a particular file you'll see that
the preview for that image will show up over here as well as some information about the photo. I'm
going to go with this photo and click "Open." So GIMP is commonly going to ask you if you want
to convert this to its native built-in sRGB color space. I do recommend converting this. And now
your image is opened up into GIMP. If you don't want to open up a new image - you just want to
create a blank document or a blank canvas - all you have to do is go to File>New, and the shortcut
key for this is ctrl+n. Here it's going to bring up the "Create a new image" dialog box, and you
could set the width and height of your image or your canvas, and then you can also change the
units here. So you can see there's a variety of units by default in GIMP. If you want some more
advanced options you can click this drop down. The "x-" and "y resolution" have to do with
printing. So this is how many pixels will display per inch. I have an entire tutorial
dedicated to image precision, so check that out if you want to learn more about this. But
all you need to know essentially as a beginner is that 8-bit is going to be the fastest, whereas
32-bit floating point will be the most precise in terms of displaying colors. I won't get into gamma
or color profile, although this is GIMP's built-in color profile as I just mentioned. But you can
fill your new document or your new composition with any of these options. So this is basically
going to be what your first layer is filled with. You can go with the "foreground color"
which in this case right now is black, the "background color" which is this bluish
color, you could fill it in with "white," "transparency" which means it'll be totally
see-through, or whatever your active pattern is. I'll just go with "white" as that's probably the
most common, and I'll click "OK." Now we have a new composition. Item number three that beginners
need to know is that tools are going to be grouped for GIMP versions 2.10.18 or newer. So if you're
using a version that's older than that, which is pretty common for MAC users since mac right now
is on 2.10.14, those tools will not be grouped by default. But if you're using GIMP 2.10.18 or
newer the tools will be grouped. So you can see over here in my toolbox I have my tools. Right now
these are pretty small by default. We're going to get into how to resize these and style them,
but if I hover my mouse over for example this first tool group you'll see it displays the tools
that can be selected from this tool group. And if I click and hold my mouse that allows me to switch
between the tools. So I can switch to my alignment tool if I want. If I don't want tool groups I
can turn these off pretty easily. So I can go to Edit>Preferences and then here
under the "Interface" drop down there's a section titled "Toolbox," and
there's a little checkbox here that says "Use tool groups." When I uncheck that the tools will
now be ungrouped and we can see each individual tool that's available to use inside of GIMP. I'm
not going to get into what all the tools are used for - they each have a different purpose and there
are a variety of purposes here for the tools. But that leads me to the fourth item on
this list, and that is that GIMP is highly customizable. So that includes the tools and the
user interface, as well as some other aspects of GIMP. So you can customize GIMP if you're not
comfortable with the way it looks right now. So for example I'm still inside of my preferences.
I can rearrange the tool groups. So I can either reorder the existing tool groups like so just by
clicking and dragging these. I can even reorder the group itself. So I could put the select
tools above the move and alignment tools and that will rearrange the order of the tools here
in my toolbox. I'm going to hit reset and click reset again to reset back to the default values.
So you'll see that the tool groups are now turned on again. I do like keeping these on but if I
wanted to adjust the size and the colors of my icons here I can do so under the "Interface"
drop down up top here under "Icon theme." So by default this is set to "Symbolic" if
you're using one of the newer versions of GIMP. You've got various other options here.
I like to go with the "Color" option. For me it looks slightly better than the "Legacy"
option, which is actually the original icons for GIMP. So the styling for these is a little bit
better in my opinion and it makes it easier to differentiate the various tools here. You can also
come down here and by default this will be set to "Guess icon size from resolution." If I wanted
to make the icons larger I can change this to "Custom icon size," and now I can use this
little slider to increase the size of my icons. So you have "Small," "Medium," "Large," and
"Huge." I typically go with the "Large" option like so. That's also going to affect
the size of the labeling here. And aside from customizing the way the tools
look you can also customize the theme itself. So by default this will be set to a dark theme.
You could change this to a slightly lighter "Gray" theme or an even lighter "Light" theme.
And then you also have the "System" theme which is basically the legacy theme. So this is what
GIMP used to be by default, but now they go with the "Dark" theme here. And this is actually what I
prefer now. So once you have all the settings the way you like them you can come over here and click
"OK." And now we have a slightly different look there for GIMP. Item number five that beginners
need to know is the way GIMP is structured. So this is going to be the GIMP layout. So the
main layout is going to be your "Image Menu" at the very top - this is the main menu inside of
GIMP that contains a majority of the features in GIMP - pretty much all the features in GIMP. Then
on the left side you have your "Toolbox" - this is of course where all your tools are located as
well as your foreground and background swatches, which you can always click on and that's going to
allow you to change the color you have selected. These colors are used whenever you're using
something like a paint tool. Below the "Toolbox" are your "Tool Options." So these are going to
update based on the tool you have selected. So for example right now I have my alignment tool
selected, and you can see it says "Alignment" here for my tool options, and that's going to
give me the settings for the Alignment tool. And by the way my tools are still set to that
custom order I created so I'm going to go to Edit>Preferences and just rearrange those back
to the default. So let's come over here to the Toolbox and just move this original group up top
and click "OK." So this is back to the default. If I switch over to the move tool my Tool Option
settings change to the Move tool settings. And one last example - the Paintbrush tool
is going to have different settings here. Then to the right of the Tool Options is going
to be your "Image Window." So this is going to display whatever composition you have open. That
might be a blank document like in this case or, if I come over here to my image composition,
it's going to display my image. On the top and left side of your image window is your rulers,
and you can see there's little triangles that follow your mouse pointer around. Also you can
click and drag guides from your rulers and this just allows you to more precisely place things
like layers, text and other objects. And you can use the alignment tool with the rulers here.
So let me get rid of those. On the right side of your Image Window you're going to have your
"Brushes, Patterns, Fonts and Document History." So these are all Dockable Dialogues, as is the
Tool Options dialog, and you may have noticed there are other dialogs to the right of the Tool
Options - more on that in a moment. But these are self-explanatory. So these are all the brushes you
can use with your paint tools. You can add custom brushes into GIMP if you'd like. You also have
the patterns that are available by default inside of GIMP that can be used with paint tools and
you can add custom patterns or create your own. These are all the fonts that are available
that you can use with your Text tool and the Document History is just a history of all
the documents you've opened up inside of GIMP. Below these dialogues is another set of Dockable
Dialogues, and these are your "Layers, Channels, and Paths." I'll cover the Layers tab a bit more
momentarily, but the Channels tab is going to display the color channel. So because GIMP works
in RGB color spaces, it's going to be Red, Green, and Blue for your channels. You can also add an
alpha channel to your image, which is essentially saying that we're adding a layer of transparency,
so whenever you erase something on your image it'll reveal a transparent layer below. So for
example if I come over here to layers, right click and go to "Add alpha channel," now our image has
transparency. And when I come over to the Channels tab you'll see an alpha channel here. If I grab
my eraser tool - the reason this is important is now when I erase you'll see this
gray checkerboard background here. That indicates transparency, which means if
anything was below that you'd be able to see it. I'll hit ctrl+z to back up. And to the
right of the Channels tab is the Paths tab. So paths are a way to draw Bezier curves. Paths
are very useful for a variety of reasons. I have an entire tutorial dedicated to the paths tool,
so check that out if you want to learn more. I'll come over here back to the layers panel.
So item number six that beginners need to know about GIMP is something I alluded to
a little bit earlier in this tutorial, and that is that GIMP contains Dockable Dialogues.
So as I mentioned all of these dialogues here are "Dockable Dialogues," and same with over here with
the Tool Options and the dialogues to the right. So for example these dialogues are "Device Status"
- this tells you what kind of device you're using, in my case I'm just using a mouse pointer - that
shows up as "Core pointer" here. To the right of that we have "Undo History" - so you can see all
of the actions I've taken on this photo during this tutorial, and we can always jump back to an
earlier action if I want to, which in this case is basically just adding the guides and then coming
over here to the eraser ,or I can come all the way back to the base image which means we're undoing
everything that we've done so far and just coming back to the original image we opened up here. And
to the right of that you have your "Images" tab. So this is just showing you what documents you
have open - in this case I have my image and then I have my blank document I created here - so I can
cycle between those. So because these are Dockable Dialogues you can perform a variety of actions
on them. You can move them around to different places inside the GIMP user interface. This allows
you to customize the GIMP user interface based on your personal preference. You can also close these
tabs out - so for example I'll close this tab, it's not super useful. So come over here to this
little triangle menu, and I can come over here to "Close tab." I can also click and drag these
tabs, and you'll see that when that happens these little blue highlight areas will show up.
These indicate new locations where I can drag these. So for example if I wanted to drag the Undo
History to the left of these Dockable Dialogues, I can hover my mouse over this highlight area
and release - and now the Undo History tab is right here. And I actually like to do that for all
of these Dockable Dialogs underneath the toolbox, and you'll see why in a moment. But now my Devices
tab is over here. And finally I can move my Tool Options. I can also release this tab and you'll
see now it's just a floating Dockable Dialogue. So you can always go with this option here if
you prefer, but I like having everything docked. So for example I can come up top and release my
mouse, and now the tool options are located up top above the Undo and Device Status tabs. And the
reason I like having a setup like this is now that there's no Dockable Dialogs underneath
the Toolbox, what I can do is hover my mouse over the far right portion of the Toolbox
and I can bring this in to the left, and as I do that you'll see the Toolbox will now
turn into a single column Toolbox. And this just helps clean up the user interface and give you
more room to work on your image. If I wanted to ensure that this was my saved layout once I
closed out GIMP, I need to go to Edit>Preferences and under "Interface" once again you'll see
something here called "Window Management." And under "Window Positions" it says
"Save window positions on exit." Make sure that option is checked and click "OK,"
and the next time you close and reopen GIMP it will look like this again. Important item number
seven that beginners need to know about GIMP is that GIMP, like a lot of other photo editors,
uses a layer system. So I've already pointed out the Layers tab here - let me just adjust
these columns here of our Dockable Dialogs to give us more room. So here under the
Layers tab, which is one of the more important Dockable Dialogues, you're going to have
all of the layers of your composition displayed. By default your first layer will always be either
the first image that you import or the brand new document that you create over here. So if you
do create a new document the very first layer will just be labeled "background." And let's come
back here to our image composition. I can create new layers inside of an existing composition. So
we have our image composition - if I wanted to create a new layer for this I could come over
here and click the "Create a new layer" icon. So this allows us to create a new layer with a
variety of properties. I'll just name this "New Layer." You can add a color tag, and you've
got a variety of options here which I go over in my "How to Create a New Layer Tutorial" on my
channel. And you can fill this with a background color, which can be transparency - which is the
default for new layers - or you can fill this in with a solid color if you wish or a pattern. I'm
going to go with "Transparency" and click "OK." So now you'll see we have a new transparent
layer, and that is indicated by this gray checkerboard background. And by the way you
can increase the size of the thumbnails here using the triangle menu here, and go over
to preview size and, for example, we can increase this to "Large." But you can create a
variety of different layer types - so there is the transparent layer which we just created here.
You can also create a painted layer, a text layer, an image layer, etc. So for example on my new
layer if I grab a paint tool like the Paintbrush and I change my foreground color to this blue
color, now I can paint on this layer and this gives us a painted pixel layer - and that's going
to be my terminology there. So you can also create a text layer. So if I grab my Text tool and I type
GIMP up top here. And I'm just going to hit ctrl+a to select all the text. I'm going to quickly edit
this text. I'll change the color to black and let's increase the size of the text, and grab the
move tool. So here you'll see we have a text layer and that is indicated over here in the layers
panel with this little text layer icon, or this text layer thumbnail. You can also open up a new
image as a layer by going to File>Open as Layers, and we can select a different image. Double-click
on it to open it or click the "Open" button. Convert this to GIMP's native color space,
and now we have an image here as new layer. Sometimes the layers are going to be smaller
than the original background layer depending on the size of the image. It could also be
larger. I'm not going to fully get into layers right now as it is a lengthy topic and I do
have a tutorial dedicated to the subject on my YouTube channel which I'll link to this video.
So I'll come over here and delete these layers, and you can see I did that using the "Delete this
layer" icon. So GIMP is primarily a raster-based image editor, and that basically means that it's
designed to edit or manipulate photos and it's doing that using a pixel-based system. So that
brings me to item number eight on this list which is that you can apply a majority of the image
adjustments to your images using the Colors menu. So as I mentioned towards the beginning of this
tutorial the very top menu is known as the Image Menu. Right here is a menu item labeled "Colors,"
and the first 10 items on this menu are going to be the main image adjustment tools. There are a
variety of other adjustment tools including auto adjustments, some more advanced mapping tools
here, and then some more obscure effects - and I just mean obscure as opposed to the more
commonly used image adjustment tools here up top. But the first five menu items here under the
colors menu have to do with adjusting the colors of your image. And I'm not going to go through
each one of these in-depth individually. But to briefly describe what they do: the "Color Balance"
is going to balance out the colors of your image. "Color Temperature" is going to add warmth
or a more cool look, which basically means it'll make it more orange or more blue. "Hue
Chroma" allows you to adjust the overall color, which is going to be the hue, or the purity of
the colors, which is going to be the chroma. "Hue Saturation" allows you to adjust the overall
color of the image, which is the hue again, or the saturation which is the intensity
of the colors. The "Saturation" slider is just going to adjust the intensity of the
color - so only the saturation of the image. Let's click on that as a demonstration. So
if I increase the scale here it'll increase the intensity of the colors, and you can see
that happening here. If I turn the preview off, there's a before - turn it back on, there's an
after. So that just gives us more intense colors. I'll click "OK." So coming back to the
Colors menu - the next five items have to do essentially with luminosity or brightness and
contrast. "Exposure," "Shadows/Highlights," and "Brightness/Contrast" are going to exclusively
deal with luminosity and brightness and contrast. Exposure essentially allows you to brighten or
darken your photo based on shutter speed stops. So for those of you who are familiar with
how the exposure concept works for cameras, this is essentially trying to emulate that
same concept. Shadows/Highlights is going to adjust the balance between the shadows of
your image and the highlights of your image. So you can rebalance those areas of the image. And
then Brightness/Contrast is simply going to darken or brighten your photo and add or remove
contrast. The last two items here are going to adjust both the luminosity of your image and
the brightness and contrast, as well as adjust the colors of your image. So these are sort of a
combination of the top tools and the bottom tools. If I click on levels, for example, this is going
to give me a histogram. And I do have an entire tutorial dedicated to this tool, but you can see
here I can adjust the brightness and the contrast of this image and then I can change the channel
here from "Value," which adjusts the brightness or contrast, to a color channel. So I can go
with "Red" and adjust how much red is in here, and then come over here to "Green," and I'm just
quickly doing this, and then over here to "Blue." So there I'm adjusting the colors - there's
a before, there's an after - click "OK." And there's an example of the Levels
tool. As of the time of this video, GIMP's image adjustments occur directly on the
layers. That is as opposed to Photoshop which is going to use adjustment layers. So that's a
more non-destructive editing feature in Photoshop which GIMP does not have at this time. However the
GIMP team does say they are working on a solution and they will have adjustment layers sometime
in the near future. Item number nine on this list of things beginner GIMP users need to
know is that a majority of the effects you can add to your images or various layer types are
going to be found inside of the "Filters" menu. So if I come over here to "Filters" you'll see
there are a variety of sub-menu items here. Each one of these sub-menu items describes what
the filters inside of these sub-menus does. So for example all of the filter effects found inside
of "Blur" have something to do with blurring the image, and if I click on "Focus Blur" for example
you can see that's adding a blur to the image. And because this is a GEGL filter, which you can
tell because it has a "G" icon next to it, that means we get the live preview on the image as we
adjust this filter, and that just makes it easy to make adjustments to the blur before we
actually apply the changes to the image layer. So most of your filters will apply directly
on the image layer, so let me just adjust this like so - and I'll click OK. So there you can see
it's applied a little bit of blur to this image. So let's come back here to the Filters
menu. So you have your Blur filters. The "Enhanced" filters have to do basically
with sharpening the image or denoising an image. And you can see a lot of these have the "G" icon
next to them, which means they're GEGL filters. The filters with the gear icons mean they are
not GEGL filters. So these will not usually have an on-canvas preview of the filter. That can
make it a little harder to use those filters. These are legacy filters, that's why they still
exist here inside of GIMP. So I do have an entire tutorial dedicated to the top 10 filters in my
opinion found in GIMP, so if you want to learn more about the most popular filters you can use
with GIMP I recommend checking out that tutorial. That leads me to number 10 or the final item on
this list that I think beginners need to know about GIMP, and that is how to save or export your
compositions or images. So to do that you can go to File>Save and that's going to save this as a
.XCF file. So .XCF is going to be the native file type found in GIMP - it's the equivalent of the
.PSD file for Photoshop. So .XCF files are going to allow you to save multi-layer compositions. So
if I had five layers in this composition it would save all five of those layers, which I could then
open back up at a future date if I'm going to do another session. So the "Save Image" dialog is
where you save compositions as .XCF files. If you wanted to save this as something like a JPEG
or a PNG you actually have to go to File>Export, and this is going to bring up your "Export Image"
dialog. So here you could save as a variety of file types. You can always navigate to a different
location on your computer or go with a different file type, either by changing the extension
here manually - so I could type JPEG for example and you can of course change the name of
this file as well to something different. Or you can come down here to "Select file type by
extension" and you can scroll through the various file types that GIMP allows you to export to.
So you've got GIF which is a pretty common one, JPEG, you've got a Photoshop Image or PSD, and
a PNG image. So I'm going to come back up top here - let's go with the JPEG, that's pretty
common. And I'll just rename this because I already have one of these documents already.
And I'll come over here and click "Export." We can choose the quality of our JPEG. You
can change this to whatever quality you want. I'll come over here, click "Export" again,
and now our image is saved as a JPEG. Alright so those are my 10 things that
beginner GIMP users need to know about GIMP - at least in 2020. If there's anything I
missed let me know in the comments. Otherwise, don't forget to like this video and subscribe to
this channel. You can click the bell icon to be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial.
You can also check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video. But
thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.
