LEARN GIMP IN 30 MINUTES | Complete Tutorial for Beginners

hello everybody Chris here and in this video I'm going to be showing you get the GNU image manipulation program and give you a basic understanding of how to use the program for things like editing images and photos so we're going to keep the focus of this video on the most important tools inside of and we won't cover everything but you should get a good idea of where you can go from here so first off if you want to start on a new image document inside of him there's the mini bar up at the top like many other programs if you want to start a new document you can go to your file and then new or you can hit ctrl n at the same time as a hotkey combination and when you do it it's going to give you this create a new image window so by default you're gonna have image size width which is talking about the distance in terms of pixels from this side to this side and then this gonna be height which is bottom to top now this can be measured in pixels which is generally what you want to use if you're only worried about digital formats but if you need to print anything out later you may prefer to do something like inches and then customize the pixels per inch so if we go to Advanced Options here you can see that you can change the pixels per inch which you might want to make something like 300 if you're trying to do a very high quality print out of an actual image for instance let's say you're making a poster that would be an example of when you need to change it from pixels to inches or if you're on the metric system centimeters or meters but here we'll go back to pixels for now and we can return the image size to something more reasonable so for instance I often do things at 1920 by 1080 pixels because that's the standard 1080p resolution for video but also thumbnails that you might see on a youtube video also in the Advanced Options you may notice that the default fill is the background color which is going to be whatever color you have selected here and this tool sidebar so the color that's behind is always the background color so that means if I create this it's going to be created with background color white so if I hit OK here we get a new image document with a background layer and that background is white so if she just wanted a different background color you can either change it before or after you go ahead and create your new document also one thing that's very important here is that there is a switch button so if you ever want to change the foreground and the background colors you can just hit this little tool right here so up here in the top left we have a bunch of very useful tools this is the tools window by the way which if it's ever missing you can go up to the menu bar at the top and open with Windows dockable dialogs tool options or if you've closed it recently you can also find it and recently closed Docs so we'll try to spend a good portion of the rest of this video going over some of these basic tools but before we do that let's go ahead and import a image into this document so that we can start editing it now before we do that let's talk a little bit about how documents work and importing an image in tecum so if we were to go up to the file menu and save this document it's not going to be saving as a image but instead what it's going to be saving as a dot xcf file now the reason you would want to save as a dot xcf file and not a PNG or jpg image is that these documents will store information about things like the different layers you have in your document so that when you open it back up you can edit the image having all of the changes that you made previously not compiled into one image but actually kept on separate layers which is really important if you ever want to make any changes because let's say you add some text to an image and then you export it to a PNG changing the tax on that image without ruining the image becomes very difficult and that's why layers are so important so here we'll just save this document as it's a tutorial and save it so now all the information you're seeing on screen right now has been saved into a dot XTF file which is just the format for these documents now if we ever want to export what we currently have showing on screen to a new file an image file we would inset go to file and then export so when you do that you can use one of many diff and for maps generally speaking you're gonna want it to be a dot jpg if it's going to be an image that does not require transparency and you want it to be confessed to the smallest file size possible or dot PNG where your image may have transparency in the background and you want that transparency to be stored in the image file so that if you were to say put an image up on a web page it wouldn't be a square shape it would instead only show the areas that aren't fully transparent so that technically the file is a square image as all images on the computer are but you can give the illusion of it just being whatever shape you have inside like a local for instance for now I'm just gonna cancel here because we don't really have anything to export yeah now you might notice that in the file menu there's not really an import function so how I usually import files is that I would go to a location on my computer and Windows Explorer or whatever the equivalent is on your operating system and to grab the image and just drag it in so let's see which one might we want to work on how about this Church image gotten from pixabay by the way if you want free images to work on pixabay is an amazing free source for that so now we have the image inside of our document note that the size of this image is different from the size of our canvas you can see this white area down here below and the white area up above if I was to hide both layers you can see the full canvas which when nothing's showing is totally transparent because there's no actual color anywhere on the canvas so you have to keep that in mind when you're exporting you're not just exporting this Church image we import it in but you're actually exporting the entire canvas and all of the layers over here on the side as one image so just keep that in mind as we go forward so I guess now would be a good time to demonstrate one reason why the layers are so useful so we have a background layer which is obviously white right so if I hide the church layer over here on the right the image hides but we saw at the background layer even though the Church image is completely over the background for the areas that it's in the background still exists there so what we could do if we wanted to change the entire background without changing the church is we could go over here to the Paint Bucket tool that's on the top left if you've ever used any tool like Microsoft Paint you probably know exactly what the Paint Bucket tool does so we can select these color selectors the foreground color and the background color the bucket failed by default paints with the foreground color of course and then we can just select a color here so we have a lot of different slider bars that we can use to choose a color usually I just use this tool here and this kind of scroll wheel in order to pick out the color that we want so what would be a good background color here and general I think the colors that are a pretty dark so something like orange or that would be pretty solid honestly I'd probably make it black usually but just to make it a little bit more interesting let's take the paint bucket tool now and if we hover over the main window of Kempe we can see that the paint bucket tool is selected and when we hit left-click it's going to paint with that paint bucket tool on the layer we currently have selected so if I click here over the church image it's actually going to be painting the background even though it looks like I'm clicking on the church but not really because what matters is what layer you're actually on and you can select the layer just by left clicking over here on the layers window by the way the layers window you can also close that and you might not see it so if you're ever missing it you can always find it in dockable dialogs or recently closed dialogues so currently our canvas is set to 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels the church layer here is in fact 1920 pixels wide a little bit less like 1000 40 pixels tall but we can always check our canvas size if we go up to the image layer and check canvas size so you can see the size of the actual canvas also note if you wanted to change it here you could do that unchecking this link if you want to have the change but if you want the ratio to stay the same while you increase the wealth basically you increase the width you also increase the height then just make sure that this link is checked but I don't want to actually change the image size so I'm gonna hit cancel here so let's talk about some other basic tools you have available to you the pencil tool right here in on the keyboard if you want to select it using hotkeys will give you a hard edge when you draw so let's just zoom in a bit somewhere not too amusing to the eye and let's say we wanted to draw with some kind of blue color just because okay and we have some tool options down here below the tools panel whenever you select a tool it's going to give you tool specific settings so in this case for the pencil we can increase the size of the pet basically the pencil hat so more size is going to make this a lot bigger as you can see 700 pixels is ridiculous diameter so let's lower that way back down to something like 15 pixels you can also change the brush stroke for whatever tool you have selected now no even though it says 50 hardness here and if I went over to the next tool the paintbrush tool and it says 50 hardness the way that the pencil tool works has completely Howard edges so if i zoom in here and I left-click and I start drawing a little bit you can see how there's no smoothness to it at all the edges end up with a hundred percent of the hardness anyway but if I was to use the brush tool in the same manner you can see that on the edges it gets kind of blurry and if we zoom out it ends up looking like the brush stroke is a lot more natural in many ways but the pencil tool really stands out so if you haven't needed to know which one you want it's whether you want completely hard edges or if you want this blur that will help you determine which tool to use err okay now let's talk about adding text into your image so with the text tool which is this a ladder here you simply left-click somewhere that you want to add text and it'll give you this little tiny box with four corners these corners basically represent the boundaries of your text box so if I use the bottom right boundary and I drag this it's gonna extend the textbox now generally when you type in text to this box it's going to automatically adjust the size of the textbox anyway so in many cases you won't actually have to worry about it but you can use the corners and also the sides to manipulate the size of your text box and determine where it's going to go on your screen now as far as changing things like the font color the font size and the font type is two places you can do that one when you have the text box selected you can change the values of the text you have in this box for a one time change by say typing in the name of the font you want changing the font size or clicking here for the color selector but that will not apply to the next text box you create it's only this one you're currently working on or the text that you currently have selected inside of that box you can't have two sets of rules for one tax box so for instance if I type in some letters here and then I hit enter create a new line and I select this text and I change it to 40 pixels you can see that the font down here gets bigger but the original text stays the same because they didn't have everything selected I only had this and you can confirm that by seeing 18 and 40 if you want to change it for basically the remainder of this document any new text boxes you create then you should instead change things over here and tool options so I'm going to click on this button here to select the font and I'll just go to one of my favorites and keep it simple babies noise which is one font available for free off of dafont.com okay so is for fonts yes and let's also make the font size 60 and change the font color to white which is a far more normal font color and you can see that these changes are immediately reflected over here as well because we have obtained anything and yeah and if I choose a spot with left click to start typing I can go ahead and type with these new rules so yeah why not just say new rules and then click a new box and copies over here too so as long as we have set these values over here on the left and tool options it doesn't matter how many new boxes we create those would be the defaults inside of that box now we have a very common problem which is white text against a very white background which makes it very hard to actually read the text so one thing we can do with texts like this instead of changing the font color to a blue like that we can select this text and add drop shadow to it so whenever we create a text box it also creates a new layer over here so these are text based layers and I can right click on one of these layers do alpha to selection if I want to create drop shadow right behind where those texts are so by doing texture selection it selects the outer boundaries of the text itself making it the perfect selection to go up to filters light and shadow and drop shadow now in most cases I would uncheck allow resizing here before you add drop shadow in because if you allow resizing that means that the canvas of your document can be sized and usually that's something you want to manually do and not just let the system do for itself if you want the drop shadow to be more obvious you can increase the opacity you can change the color increase the blur radius just pretty simple settings there so I'm going to hit OK here and you can see that now we have drop shadow added behind that text it makes it a lot easier to read against that kind of background and we can also do alpha to selection on this text box go up to filters and since we just used the drop shadow effect we can copy that drop shadow effect one more time by hitting repeat drop shadow and we get the same effect on that text box too so I'm gonna delete this box down here and now we can start talking about some selection tools so the two primary ones you have for simple shape selections our rectangle select tool and ellipse select tool so as these icons might imply rectangular select tools can be squares but also other rectangle shapes as long as it has four corners where the length of opposite sides are equal and then yeah the ellipse select tool which can make a perfect circle but it can also make any oval based shape so let's say that we think that this text still doesn't show up well enough and so we want to put like a background behind it what we can do is go over to the layers window hit this new layers button for that selection and now with the rectangle select tool we can left-click and drag a rectangle box around that text and what we can do now is right-click it go to edit and then fill with foreground or background color and by doing that we basically take the selection and we turn it into an actual colored box for our document and this is on a new layer one thing to note here is that this layer is above the church layer if I was to bring this box black box layer below the church layer it becomes invisible because the church layer has zero transparency so you can't see it at all so note that the layer order really matters so let's do it one more time with the new walls using the ellipse select tool so with the new rules layer I'm going to move it using the move tool which you can select with M on the keyboard or it's right here in the tools panel and I'm gonna drag it to kind of Center it kind of with the text that's below it note that this leaves the drop shadow behind because the drop shadow was created on its own layer that's not really a problem though because we can just via add the drop shadow so I'm going to delete the drop shadow one which corresponds with the new rules I'm going to offer to selection and we will repeat the drop shadow and just add it back in so now with the ellipse select tool I can drag a oval around that text and I can also adjust the sides of the oval and the same way you can adjust the text box for text to kind of make it more evenly distributed on all four sides and we can go to new layer to create a layer where we actually want to put this on I'm gonna put it below the text because I want the text to show over this layer fill because I want the layer fill to hide behind the text and now let's actually change the color from white here for four grounds to something else let's make it kind of a darkish blue just something to make it different than the black box down here and we'll repeat the same process so right click at it fill with foreground color and now we have a blue ellipse where the text is sitting on top of and if we zoom in you can still see that the drop shadow is showing there because if the black box background is black and the drop shadow itself is black as well it's impossible to tell the difference because it's the same color okay so a few more useful tools might be rotate scale shear perspective these are tools for manipulating how a layer looks so we're just gonna focus on scale and rotate here because these other ones are kind of more for faking 3d looks like if you want to make a image appear on a computer screen you can do that with the perspective tool but usually you just kind of want things to be 2d so with the scale tool we can take this church layer and we can left-click on it if you hold ctrl down it will scale the same ratio so that the image keeps its form in shape but if you let go of control you can kind of scale it to whatever sizes you want so I'm gonna just scale it down here and shrink it a little bit when you're satisfied with the new size you can hit scale now we can move it a little bit more if we wanted to and kind of unintentionally I kind of created a border there so now the background layer is actually serving as a porter for this image that's kind of cool the rotate tool kind of similar we can left-click on a layer and we can spin it around until it's got the new shape and the new angle that we're looking for on this case I'm gonna hit cancel there no real need for that okay so let's see a couple more tools we can touch on gradients it's very similar to your fill bucket except that instead of one color you can have multiple colors and you can have multiple opacity levels so you have a lot of different gradients that are by default here but if you ever wanted to edit a gradient you can select you default from the list here and then you can hit this edit button over here where the gradient editor window will pop up over here allowing you to do things like change colors change center points and change opacity for different things but for right now let's just show how a gradient might work so I'm gonna hide the church layer temporarily and I'm gonna create a new layer and this layer is going to be a new background that sits on top of the background layer so currently I have the gradient foreground to background color selected so that means that the foreground color here is the color on the left and it will transition into the color that's on the right which is the background color of black let's say we actually make the foreground color this red here so how we can do that is with the color picker tool which is the top right tool Oh on the keyboard and just simply left-click where you see a color by default it will get the color from the layer you currently have selected so the background layer there but if instead you want to sample the complete color with all the layers combined you can check sample merged here but we just want that red color from the background layer so now I'm gonna go up to the layer two and let's actually start by copying the color from the foreground to the background so I'm gonna copy this HTML notation for the red color I'm gonna click on the background color and copy that in hit tab to make it update and now that color has been added in here but I'm gonna make it a bit lighter so now I can go ahead and hit OK here and if we go back to the gradient selector you can see that the gradient will actually painting with is very different than it was before because our foreground background colors have changed so now if we left click and we drag a direction it will try to create a gradient by default the shape is linear so from the starting point towards the end point will look something like this you can notice that's a little bit more interesting than just having one solid color in many cases but you can also have different shapes so for instance if you want a square shape where the center point will be where the foreground color is and then in all directions it becomes the background color on the outside that's one other shape that's available to you so if I draw it bilinear here at the center point it's going to have this line here and then on both sides it's going to start going towards the background color but in both directions not just one direction I think most gradients are probably linear though so I'll just go ahead and use a linear shape there note that the background layer the original background layer is being completely covered up by this new gradient layer and I'm just gonna leave it like that for now so now we can we hide the church layer you can see that the border here is a little bit more interesting by the way another way that you can add a border in pretty quickly is to go up to the filters menu d4 add border and then to choose a border color so I don't know we'll just go with this pink you for a second you can choose to give it a size so I'll make it 25 pixels for all sides and hit OK and doing this does actually increase the size of your canvas so that's one thing to keep in mind but you can see how it gives you a kind of an interesting border shape on all of the corners using that color it actually creates several different shades of that color but we're gonna hit control Z right now because we don't really need that so just a couple more tools really quickly here the free select tool if you ever want to draw your own selection by hand around some object that's in your screen you can do that just connect them at the end and then you can it control axe on your keyboard to cut it out completely obviously that's a pretty crude way of cutting things out so a better option would be the scissor select tool and with the scissor select tool you can just set these key points and will try to figure out based on the colors in your image where the borders of your object are so you cut around and especially if you go all the way around an object it'll be useful so if you make a complete selection around the object you can see that on areas like here where you have the sky and the chimney it really does a decent job of actually making that selection a lot better than you'd probably get freehand so once your selection is made you can just click inside and it will convert all of those key points to an actual selection and we can hit control Z to cut it out by the way let's say that you didn't want to get rid of it but you just wanted to put it on a new layer well we can move it to a new layer by creating a new layer and then just hitting control V and now that part of our image is on a completely separate layer which is really useful if you want to make changes to this selection only but not the entire document so just for fun let's say that one of those ridiculous changes we wanted to make was to blur it out so the blur and sharpen tool if you want to make something less defined you can use blur which shift you on your keyboard is the hot key so I'm gonna drastically increase the size up here just so that you can really see what's going on here and because we created this separate layer if I blue here which I'll do by left-clicking now you can see it doesn't affect the sky in the background so you know having those separate layers is really really handy when you're working inside of gem and now you can see down here also the the bricks below not part of this pasted layer where we're currently working on also not gonna get blurred out now the opposite of that which you can trigger by hitting ctrl or by changing it by coming down here in the tool options now it kind of does the opposite it's gonna take an image which might have some blur and try to sharpen it of course it's not like an image commuity add detail that doesn't really exist there before so if you show up in things too much or beyond where they were originally it might look kind of weird so I don't honestly use that all that much so if you really want high detail in your images I would just recommend you get a really good camera and you take them at high resolutions to begin with so that you can decide how much detail you want to export that up but when you take them they have all the detail you could have won this module which is right to the right is similar except that when it kind of blows things out it's going to be changing the original position of the data where you're kind of smudging it to the side so not exactly the same as blue but does make it look blurry in a way and then the last tool we'll talk about in this video though there's obviously more tools available for you the dodge burn tool so when you dodge you're making something lighter than it was originally so I'm gonna dodge this area here and when you burn which is the opposite once again you can hit ctrl on your keyboard or you can change the type to burn it's gonna be making things darker what I've got to hold down ctrl so ctrl and you can make things darker note that you know because there's separate layers here I can't actually burn or dodge the areas over here unless ice changed specifically to the church layer which I could do so let's do that and then we dodge here a little bit and it makes it darker but you can see it's not darker in the sense that it's changing directly to black but it kind of keeps the color balance between the area's being dodged or lightened so let's dodge this a little bit just to kind of show off the difference and especially when you're working on something like a person space it can give you some pretty cool effects okay the very last thing we'll cover in this video is opacity so every layer has opacity and that is what percentage of this image is going to be see-through so if I change the opacity to 50 that means that the image becomes 50 percent see-through or at least the layer we currently have selected and what that means to have a partially transparent layer is that the layers underneath will start to show through so as this opacity shifts more and more towards zero it's becoming more and more completely transparent and the layers beneath start to show so you can see how the gradient from this layer to actually starts to show on the final image even though all layers are enabled for visibility so there's applications for that for instance if we take these black box layers and make that partially transparent you can start to see things like the sunset to show through this black box and so you start the black box though it now looks more grey and behind it you see the sunset so likewise we can do the same thing with this blue oval over here allowing the background to show through a little bit more and hopefully you can imagine some ideas for we're having partially transparent layers allows you to make your image a little bit more interesting so we've covered a lot in this video and I hope that this has given you a really good idea of what you can do inside of and how you can do many of those basic functions if you want to learn more about I would recommend checking out my full course which I'll put in the description for this video so in any case thank you for watching to the end I've been Chris and I will hopefully see you guys in my future video Compton

Channel: Chris' Tutorials

Views: 1,043,047

Rating: 4.8469753 out of 5

Keywords: Tutorial, Tips, Introduction, How-to, Help, Chris Tutorials, Getting Started, Tutorial for Beginners, GIMP, 30 minutes, complete, GIMP Tutorial, GIMP How to, GIMP Tutorial for Beginners, gimp tutorial, gimp 2, gimp 2018, gimp 2019, draw gimp, digital painting, gimp 2.10, gimp, gimp layers, how to gimp, gimp 2.10 tutorial, learn graphic design, photoshop tutorial, photoshop alternative, complete tutorial, full tutorial, complete guide, free guide, windows tool, gimp logo, quick

Id: IeABb8cwdUg

Length: 29min 49sec (1789 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2018