How To Use GIMP 2.10 For Beginners!

hello and welcome to my 2.10 crash course for beginners this free to our course is perfect for anybody getting started with and there's a ton of information in this free to our course and I've included some free resources to use with this course which you'll find in the description below so what exactly are you going to learn in this course well first we're going to install and then you're going to learn about one of my favorite free plugins that will enhance the functionality of next we're going to start working on something you've been waiting to do your entire life and that is learning how to configure giimpse interface and setting up preferences alright it may not be something you've been waiting for your entire life and in fact it's quite boring but it is an essential part of getting started with and by doing so you will learn how to customize the interface by changing the size of the panels adding panels and much more then the benefit for setting up preferences is it will help work faster for your projects and help you be more productive ok once you've gone through that part the fun actually begins with the next few lessons which will show you several different ways to open files how to create new documents how to resize your documents the different file types for and the native file format for how to pan and zoom while working on your artwork how to save and export your finished artwork and much more next you're going to learn one of the most essential features of and the backbone of which are layers layers will help take your creativity to a whole new level you're going to learn exactly what layers are the four different types of layers and how to customize and use layers and I've even included an exclusive layers file that you can download from the resources in the description below that you can use to follow along with during the lesson on layers 101 it's gonna help you retain what you learn and better understand how layers work once you're done with layers 101 I'm going to share with you one of my favorite tools and and that is layer masks layer masks will take your creativity to a whole new level to help you achieve your creative vision then I've included two bonus tutorials from my premium courses that you can watch right here from this course for free the first bonus tutorial will show you how to create basic shapes and as you may or may not know does not have shape tools like Photoshop you're gonna learn the secret to creating shapes and then you're gonna have the opportunity to learn from one of my advanced projects and you're gonna learn so much just from this one project alone that you're probably going to want to bookmark this video for that alone so here are just a few of the things you're going to learn and that advanced project I'm going to show you how to create clipping masks and even though clipping masks are not a built-in feature in in case you're wondering what a clipping mask is it's a tool that allows you to clip an image to a shape and confine it to that shape this is a well-known and popular tool in Photoshop and you're going to learn exactly how to do it in this advanced project you're also going to learn how to place text on a path how to properly align your layers and so much more this free course has been put together from two of my premium courses for and if you're interested in taking your skills to a whole new level and learning a lot more about basics and by doing advanced projects then you're going to want to check out the links in the description below to receive my courses for up to 95 percent off so if you scroll down to the bottom of the description area you're going to find the free resources to download to use with this course as well as an outline for this course and then we have two links right here that will allow you to get these two courses for 95 percent off for my beginner to advanced and my 27 projects plus 547 templates and no code is required it's going to be automatically applied when you click on that link so even though you're going to learn a lot of information from this free to our course there's a lot more you can learn from my premium courses so if you're ready to get started on this free to our course let's do it hello and welcome to installing for Windows so we're gonna head on over to gimp.org and we're gonna click on this little button right here and it's going to recognize our operating system I have Microsoft Windows then go ahead and click on download 2.1 0.2 directly from here this orange button and they have made a couple updates since the 2.10 release and this has fixed some bugs that were included in the original release of 2:10 now this is one of the reasons why i do not upgrade my software until there's at least one or two new revisions to that software because there's always some kind of bug or bugs that will hamper your experience with the new software updates so based on what i've heard from other users this is now a much more bug free version versus the one two versions ago there still may be some bugs in there but i'm gonna go ahead and get started on this now so let's go ahead and download we're gonna click on run or save if you want to save it to your computer it's a fairly large file 149 megabytes and if you do have version 2.8 currently installed you can install 2.1 without having to remove 2.8 in fact i recommend not doing it so that any scripts or plugins that you've used in two-point-eight will not be deleted but the only problem is some of those plugins may not work with 2.1 else so don't worry about deleting 2.8 go ahead and start your download or run the software directly to get it installed so depending on the speed of your internet service will depend on how long it takes to download all right I'm gonna go ahead and click run we want to click yes choose your language click ok from here we can either install directly with the defaults or we can customize our installation which I want to do we're gonna click on next if you want to add or remove any of these options here just click on the box that you do not need installed for example you may not need translations I'm gonna go ahead and just keep everything at the default level for now this is the important information that you want to make sure you have selected I want to make sure that I have all different types of file formats available to use in so I'm going to select select all click Next I want a desktop icon and I also want a quick launch icon once you click install it's going to begin extracting the files and installing on your system so again depending on your computer will determine how long this takes in fact I think I want to run a timer just so we can get an idea of how long it's going to take so there we go it took about two minutes from downloading to installing and opening up 2.10 now your screen is going to probably look a little different than mine because I made my icons over here to the left SuperDuper large because my eyesight is not that good and your icons are probably in this little square right here so I'm going to show you how to change the size of your icons as well as customizing other options in so you can get the most out of it and set it up for your own personal use and your own personal workflow so as you can see it's real simple to upgrade or install a fresh install of so go ahead download install and we'll go ahead and get started on customizing in the upcoming lessons 2.10 or 2:10 has a lot of new tools and features that were not available in 2.8 and it's an awesome upgrade that has taken six years to come about the developers at have mentioned that new tools and features will be added to in the future and hopefully they will be done a lot quicker than previous updates that being said there is one type of effect that I love to use that is not available in 210 or even 2.8 for that matter and that is layer styles or layer effects so what layer effects allow you to do is to create drop shadows or you can add a stroke or both and there are many more types of layer effects that you can apply to your images shapes text and more and this is a list of all the layer effects now like I mentioned this is not pre-installed in 210 so I'm going to show you where to download and how to install this free plugin so you can take advantage of some of these layer effects first we need to download this plug-in at registry gimp.org forward slash node forward slash 186 it's called layer effects it's a little outdated it says January 24th 2008 but it still works with 2.10 so we're going to want to download this first option layer effects dot SCM once you do that you then need to install this plug-in into your scripts folder so go to your local disc Program Files your 2 folder share folder folder 2.0 scroll down locate script then drag that file you downloaded and place it inside of your scripts folder so here again is the folder structure that you need to navigate to in order to install this plugin or its a script so once you do that restart if you already have it open or start and then you're gonna find this drop down menu right here script - fu layer effects and then you can apply these different options to your layers now the only problem is these layer effects are not going to show you a preview of that effect before you apply it so here we have our drop shadow layer effect we can adjust the opacity the contour we can add noise to it we can add a different type of blending mode to get different effects we can increase the spread and the size of that drop shadow the angle we want to apply to our layer so I have 120 so that's gonna come from the top left damn and then the distance how far away is the drop shadow from that layer item and as you can see we cannot see a preview of it so this is important right here we have two options we have merged with layer which is going to take this layer drop shadow and merge it with the layer above you don't want to do that you also do not want to select this option here layer knocks out drop shadow because if you do then it's going to cut it out and you're not going to be able to move that drop shadow to another location so let me show you what I mean so I'm gonna go ahead and click OK and it's going to apply that drop shadow on a new layer so then we can manipulate that drop shadow from here to make adjustments to it we can drop the opacity on that particular layer we can actually move that layer so we can adjust the angle from which that drop shadow is being shown from and also the distance so if you want it further or closer away you can do that by adjusting the layer itself and not going back into layer effects and trying to figure out exactly the angle and the amount of opacity and everything else you can just do it from this layer here that is created and that's why you don't want to merge the layers because then you don't have that option so that's just a quick tip on that particular layer effect I highly recommend downloading and installing this particular script because we will be using it quite often because you will find it a very useful and handy type of effect that you can apply to your artwork all right so here we go we are first going to learn how to set up our interface to be more user friendly we're gonna rearrange the windows we're gonna save some tool options and much more now I'm going to be using the Windows version if you're on a Mac no worries it's pretty much the same thing except for your file menu is going to look a little different so when we come across something that's different on a Mac I will make a note of that for you alright so the first thing I want to do is I want to combine all these individual windows there's three of them one on the left one in the middle one on the right and make it one single window instead of having three different types of windows so to do that we're gonna go up to Windows and select single window mode and now all three panels are combined into one this just makes it so much easier and the layout is a lot easier on the eye and I find this particular layout to be much more productive when you use single window mode now some of the other things we can do is we can rearrange these individual panels so that we can resize them and sort the individual panels that we use most often for our own personal workflow now you may not know what your workflow is yet and what you're going to be using for and you're not sure about all the different panels so I'm just going to give you some tips on how to resize and rearrange the individual panels and I will give you my recommendations based on my workflow but later on you'll know how to change them for your own personal workflow so we have our tool bar over here on the left and then below that we have a tool options what I want to do is I want to move that panel over here to the right so that I can make this tools bar a lot more compact now one of the things that you can do is you can make this panel on the left and this panel on the right much wider so to do that you're going to come over to the edge of the panel until you get this little icon right here and then click and move it to the left and you can make that panel larger but the only problem is if you go too far than that window for the file is much smaller we can also increase the size of this one as well just by clicking and dragging it left or right and what I want to do now though is I want to move this panel over here so if we click on this little tab and then drag we can drop it into a new location and it's now free-floating so I can move this around anywhere on my interface whatever is easiest for me personally I like to have everything confined into one panel and then I can access the different panels that I want via the tabs either here or the panels up here as well so we can add this panel to either up here or over here or on the side so if I click on this tab and drag it over to the edge you're gonna see this little grey line from top to bottom once I release its then anchored to the right side with the other panels and it's it's own free-floating panel now but I prefer to have them inside so to do that we're going to click the tab and then drag either up here or down here release and then that panel is automatically added with the other panels you can also rearrange the order of the panels by clicking the tab and moving it to a new location so we've now moved it to the first brushes are now second patterns ingredients if you want you can move these panels out just like we did with the two options as well and then if you find that you're not using specific panels and you want to remove them you can do that by simply selecting that tab and then clicking on this little icon right here to the right and it says configure this tab so we're gonna click on that and select close tab now that panel is gone but if we want to add that one back or other panels we have a bunch more panels to choose from click on the configure tab again select add tab and you'll see a list of all the different tabs that you can add and this is the one that we just removed so we can add that one back or a different one if we want to now sometimes you may accidentally move a tab based on the mouse actions that you use and you can actually lock that tab so it can't be moved in the future so just select lock tab to dock and then you won't be able to move that tab whereas this one we can the histogram is like I can't move it so we're going to go ahead and unlock that we can also change the tab style right now we have a font next to a icon for that particular panel and we can change it to either the icon or just the font so select the tab click on configure tabs select tab style and then choose icon current status text icon in tax status and text if we do icon there's just showing the icon and not the text if we do just the text then it removes the icon and then you just have the name for that particular panel so I'm gonna put it back to icon and text because that's what I prefer alright let's go ahead and set up some options for our tools I'm going to go ahead and move this panel to the left so once you have a tool selected if you go to the tools options you're gonna see different options for that specific tool and there are default settings that have already been selected for you but there are some options that you may want to change based on the way you work and I'm gonna give you some of my suggestions on the tools that I use and how I have them set up for the defaults and then you can always go back and you can change it to something else later on as you begin to use more so for the move tool which is this one right here I like to have move the active layer selected and that just simply means when I have multiple layers selected I will just move the active layer and none of the other layers will be moved just the active layer and that's going to make more sense once we get to the lessons on layers and I'll show you more on how that works the other one is the eyedropper tool which is located right here we're gonna select that and I'm gonna select the sample average option I'm gonna leave it at a radius of 3 next we're gonna set up healing and I'm gonna select sample merged and alignment we're going to set to aligned all right now let's set up our crop tool which is right here go ahead and click on and then we are going to add some guides I like rule of thirds so go ahead and select that option all right let's go to the stamp tool which is located right here and let's activate sample merged and select aligned all right now that we have our two options set up we need to save them because if we quit now and come back then these settings would be reset to the default so to save them we need to go up to preferences which is edit preferences and if you're on a Mac you're going to go to preferences alright let's save our window management setup first since we have our panels and the order that we want them we are going to save them by clicking this button right here save window positions now now they are set up as the default when we restart they will be in the same position next let's go to input devices and we are going to save the tool options that we just setup by clicking this button here save input device settings now once you do that then all the options will be set as your default if you want to reset them in the future just click this button right here and then they'll be reset to the default settings alright congratulations you are now done with configuring the interface in the next lesson we are going to take a deeper look at the different preference settings in and we're going to set up the different preferences to help streamline our workflow and make easier to use so if you're excited and ready to get that done we're gonna get that started in the next lesson hello and welcome to the moment you've been waiting for your entire life that's right editing your preferences in alright that may be a little far-fetched but it's something we need to do in order to help help us because by setting up our preferences for our workflow it will help us work faster within and we can customize different options within to visually see things better to work faster and much more so let's dive right into preferences get this set up and over with so we can get to some more of the fun stuff so head on over to edit and select Preferences if you're on a Mac you're going to go up to file and you will find Preferences from there alright so the first option we have here is system resources and there's a lot of options here that will help you speed up based on your particular computer setup so I'm going to give you some suggestions on what to set up and why and then you can always go back and fine-tune these selections for your computer system so this first option has to do with the number of undo levels so every time you do something in you add text you add a shape you add color you add a stroke a drop shadow whatever it is you may do will record that step and you can then go to your undo panel and undo what you did previously so as the default we have 5 undo levels so I can do five things in and go back in time five times when I do a sixth step then one of those will disappear and then I can go back in time to that particular point in time because I'm only allowed five right now we can increase this to any number we want but it's also dependent on how much memory you allocate to undo levels so right now if we switch this to megabytes we can see we have one megabyte of memory available for our undo states so we want to change both of these numbers for me personally I like at least 100 steps so I'm going to type in 100 and then I'm going to increase this to 8 megabytes so I could probably increase this number to much higher if I need to depending on the project that I'm working out if I know I'm working on a complex project and there's going to be a lot of steps then I may want to increase this to 500 and then it may want to increase this to 16 megabytes this is all going to depend on how much RAM you have for your computer now you don't want to max this out I have 32 gigabytes of RAM and I wouldn't want to set this at 32 because I have other software running as well and it could freeze up the entire computer and then I'll have to restart so you can either do megabytes or gigabytes actually I think it would prefer to do gigabytes I want 8 gigabytes dedicated to the undo memory so you're gonna set this based on the projects that you're working on and how many resources you have for your computer so you could always start off with 100 and then if you find that's not enough then you may want to increase this and increase the memory size as well you may want to increase the amount of cache size as well which will help you increase the speed and how performs as well but I would just set this at the default and I wouldn't go any higher than this unless of course you're working on a large image and you're not really working with any other programs then you may want to set this up higher based on the size of that particular file that you're working on and here we have the maximum new image size that you can create so if you create something larger than this then is going to give you a warning that your new image size is more than 128 megabytes in size and then next we have the number of threads to use so this is base on the number of processors your computer has if it has eight processors then you want to increase this to eight and that will help speed up the workflow and and how fast it's able to process the work that you're doing in and the filters and the effects that you're adding to it it's going to process that information a lot faster now depending on the type of video card you have this option right here will also help increase the performance of overall so I would go ahead and turn this on and if you're finding that is now becoming a lot more sluggish or it's slower than it was before then just come back and undo this because it can have the reverse effect if you don't have the proper video card installed size of your thumbnails so by default we have 128 by 128 I like very large thumbnails so I'm gonna set this at 256 and then again we can set the maximum file size for thumbnailing I just leave this at the default of 4 and then we can also tell whether or not we want to keep a history of the files used in the recent document list so this is a permanent record of all the files that you use in depending on your hard drive space you may want to turn this on or off and this is just a text document so it shouldn't really take up that much space I'm just gonna leave it set to the default which is turned on next up we have color management so if color management is critical to the projects that you're working on you're going to want to go through and set up these preferences there's a lot of different options and a lot of the information is well beyond the scope of this course so I'm just gonna go over some real basic information you're gonna have to delve into this a little bit more if you need to do critical color work so a lot of the default settings are just fine for if you're just doing this for a hobby then you really don't have to worry about too much the only thing would be the file open behavior and based on the file that you bring into you can ask to do three things you can ask it what to do based on the color profile of that photo or that image file or that document that you're opening up do you want to keep the embedded profile or do you want to convert it to a preferred RGB color profile for most purposes I would just do embedded profile you want to keep that profile that was added to that particular file if you want to convert it to a preferred RGB color profile and you know what you're doing then you're going to set that and then you're going to set up your RGB profiles from here because you have to actually import a file from your hard drive so if you're outputting this to a professional lab they may have a specific type of RGB profile that they prefer the images to be in before you submit the order they're gonna give you this file and then you can import that from right here if you're going to send a document out to a 4 color press because you're printing up a brochure or Flyers or business cards or whatever that may be then you may want to get the CMYK color profile which is the four colors of a print press so we have C for cyan M for magenta Y for yellow K is black and you're gonna also want to work in this profile if you're going to create your documents and and then output it to that CMYK press everything else I would just set at the default although you may also want to set up your monitor profile if you color calibrate your monitor with an external device in that case once that device creates the monitor profile for you you can then import that file from here and all of these options are just giving you more options for managing your documents in order to accurately depict them while you're working with them and then giving you accurate files to output to whatever device that you're using in the image import and export option we have some default settings and typically I just find these are fine so personally I'm just not going to change any of these but if you want to remove the XF metadata by default then you can turn this off and that would be if you're posting images to Facebook and you don't want your geolocation or other information that is recorded in the metadata to be attached to that file when you post on Facebook or other social media sites then you can go ahead and turn that off and you might want to turn the XMP metadata off as well and possibly the IPTC all depends on the data that's in there and the information that you do not want people to know because if you have your address and your phone number and the metadata for whatever reason maybe you put that in there for your own personal use you may not want to share that with other people so you can turn these off so that they're not added to the files on export alright let's take a look at tool options again I just leave these set at the default except for the move tool which is an option to set the layer or the path as active depending on how you work within you may want to turn this on or off we can also set this in the tool options I currently have the move tool selected and I have move the active layer so when I click on my document it's going to move the active layer but I actually prefer to pick a layer or guide when I click that way I don't have to come over to my layers panel to select that layer I can actually select it from the document and it's automatically going to select that layer based on what I click within the document so this is something that I would set up by default personally you also have the option to reset the default grid I just leave this as the default there's really nothing that I need to change in here unless you want to change the line style and the spacing that's entirely up to you then our interface we have some theme options so right now your theme or the color of your interface may be different from mine I like to have dark selected and you can come in here and choose different options so we have default gray light small and then system and as you can see whenever you select one it will automatically update that theme so you can just scroll through each one and find out which one that you like alright so there's one option in the icon theme that I like to have set up differently from the default and that is our icon size for our tools over here in the left panel so we have three options we can let automatically size based on the resolution of our monitor we can use an icon size from the theme or we can customize the icon size with these options here so we have medium large and huge personally I like huge so I'm gonna go ahead and leave that at huge so just pick out whichever one you like yourself we can also customize some options in our tool box here we can remove the logo we have a logo right up here so we can turn that off which I'm going to do we can also turn off the foreground and background color which is these two options right here and I definitely like having that available because it makes it easier to access the colors as I'm working you can also select to have the active brush pattern and gradient listed here as well which is a nice visual help and you can also have the active image so whichever document that you're working on you're gonna get a little thumbnail over here I'm gonna turn that one off the other thing you can do is you can remove any tools that you don't use from the toolbox so you can clean this up and just have it set up to show the tools that you use and there's additional tools down here at the bottom as well so if we scroll down here we can see we have curves we have levels I like using those two tools so I'm going to turn those two on and then if you're new to and you've never used it before you may want to just leave all of these turned on for now so you have easy access to them and then over a period of time if you decide you know what I don't use let's see the airbrush tool I never use the airbrush tool we can turn that off so it's right here and once we turn it off it disappears I'll go ahead and leave that on for now dialogue defaults I just set to the defaults I really don't change anything through here you may want to go through these different options and see if you want to change any of these but personally I just leave them as is and help system you can show tooltips so when you hover over a tool or an option you get a little message there that gives you some information about what that tool is and then right there it says Shift + L that's the keyboard shortcut to quickly access that tool and then if you have show help buttons activate it as well if you click that little help button you can go to the user manual and you can use either the online version or if you've locally installed a copy of it you can access it from there as well so I'm going to leave these two turned on and leave everything else set to the default next we can adjust some options for our display so when we have a transparent background you can change the style of the checks in that transparency and the size of those checks again I just leave these at the default settings and we've already talked about the window management options in the previous lesson and there's really nothing we need to change in image windows at least not for myself I just leave all of these at the default you can go through these and decide if you want to turn on or turn off some of these options that's entirely up to you and we're also going to skip folders I just like that stuff all set up as the default the last thing I want to discuss is the input controller because we want to set something up in this option here if you have a mouse wheel on your mouse so what we're going to do is we're going to set it up so that when you scroll with that mouse button when you have a brush activated it's going to automatically increase or decrease that brush size so let me show you real quick so I'm going to grab my brush tool with the letter B and right now I have to come over here and adjust my brush sighs by making the adjustments and the two options right here and going back and forth between different brush sizes is a little bit time-consuming if you had to keep coming back over here and readjusting your brush size based on what you're trying to do and the artwork that you're trying to create with that brush so a quicker way to resize our brush would be with our mouse wheel and we have to set that up in preferences so come over to mouse wheel double click on it and you're going to get an input controller so you want to locate scroll down which is right here and scroll up now both of them have alt and parentheses next to it so that means you have to hold down either your alter your option key depending on if you're on a Mac or PC and then you can scroll with your mouse wheel to increase or decrease that brush so to set it up all we have to do is double click on scroll down go to tools click on this plus sign then we have to scroll all the way down until you see tool size decrease by one you can also increase or decrease by ten I like one personally click OK and then that action tool size decrease is added to it so before it was blank like scroll up so we need to go ahead and add the action for scroll up as well double click tools scroll down till you find tool size increase by one click OK close click OK in preferences and then you can hold down your alt or option key and increase or decrease your brush size how cool is that I love it all right so that was the most fun exciting part of this entire lesson and guess what it's over yay all right setting up your preferences is all done you may need to go back and make some final tweaks or adjustments based on your computer system or based on your own personal workflow and how you want to set it up but you have an overall general idea of the different options you may want to set up so go ahead and play around with those if you want to fine tune your preferences hello and welcome back all right I want to go ahead and share with you a tool that can help you save one hour for every eight hours worked and universities have actually done research and Studies on this tool and they did indeed discover that you can save up to one hour for every eight hours worked it doesn't matter if you're a professional and amatuer or just working in as a hobby utilizing this tool will allow you to work faster versus not using it so getting in the habit of using this tool will ensure that you will continue to use it in the future and then when you do become a professional for whatever it is you want to do whether it's a graphic designer a professional editor a photographer you're gonna be glad that you did utilize this tool even if you don't have a desire to be a professional graphic designer or photographer this tool can still be used in other software as well it's a very powerful tool and I highly recommend using it so what is so powerful and can be used across different software and will allow you to save one hour for every eight hours worked drum roll please keyboard shortcuts I know it's not very mind blowing but learning them now regardless of the profession you go into you will have a distinct advantage over other prospects for that position or for that work it's a very competitive world out there and there's a lot of competition for work so any advantage you can have over someone else will give you that edge that you need to succeed and I believe using keyboard shortcuts is one of those tools that can give you another advantage over someone else as a graphic designer myself I can take on more work because I finish my projects faster and I contribute being able to work faster by using those keyboard shortcuts so in this lesson I just want to share with you some of the most used keyboard shortcuts that I use and then I'm also going to show you how to set up to work more like Photoshop because unfortunately uses different keyboard shortcuts versus Photoshop and I think if you want to eventually upgrade to Photoshop if you set up your keyboard shortcuts to match those in Photoshop it's going to make that transition much easier so for example if I want to select a brush in Photoshop I would use the letter B that same tool in would require the letter P so why is this important well like I mentioned if you get used to a keyboard shortcut in and then eventually decide you do want to upgrade to Photoshop well you're going to be accustomed to the keyboard shortcuts in and then when you switch to photoshop it's just gonna make it a little bit harder so I'm going to show you how to make the change in preferences to set up the keyboard shortcuts and to match Photoshop now there are a lot of different keyboard shortcuts that need to be changed and we're not going to go through all of them I'll show you a couple and then you'll know how to make those changes for any of the other keyboard shortcuts that you want to set up now also included in this course is a PDF file that I've put together that lists a lot of the keyboard shortcuts and the Photoshop equivalent so you can print out that particular PDF file for reference as you go through this course because I will be using keyboard shortcuts a lot and if I'm using a keyboard shortcut that is different from what you have on you can use that file or the printout of it as reference to see what the keyboard shortcut is and and then you can decide if you want to change that for future use now I also want to mention that throughout the course I'm going to reference these keyboard shortcuts as I'm showing you how to do something and I will mention both the windows and the Mac version so for example command or control + V which is the place command so the command key is for Mac users and the control key is for Windows users and then another one would be alt or option and the letter Z which is the command for alternating between zooming in or zooming out so the Alt key is for Windows users and the option key is for Mac users so just keep this in mind as you listen to the lessons and know that you're not going to be looking for both the command or the control key just whichever one refers to the computer that you have there's also going to be a pop up at the bottom of each one of the lessons when I do mention a keyboard shortcut at least in most cases that's going to list that keyboard shortcut for both Mac and PC and it's going to look like this all right let's take a quick look at our keyboard shortcut PDF file and on the Left I've listed the keyboard shortcuts for and on the right we have Photoshop then in the middle is a brief description of what that keyboard shortcut does I've also listed these for PC users and then if we scroll through a couple of pages we will then find the keyboard shortcuts for Mac users so I recommend having this particular file handy as you go throughout the lessons or just print it out for easy reference and I've also put together a top 11 keyboard shortcuts for both PC and Mac users so this list includes my top used keyboard shortcuts in and their Photoshop equivalent so throughout the course I'm most likely going to be referring to the Photoshop keyboard shortcut so you may want to update your preferences to match the keyboard shortcuts that are going to be used the most throughout the course it's just going to make it a little bit easier if you do not want to do that that's fine you can just print out this particular file for easy answer just have it handy as you watch the tutorials alright to change our keyboard shortcuts we're going to go up to edit preferences click on interface and then click on configure keyboard shortcuts now there's a lot of tools and options to choose from here so the quickest way to find a particular tool to change it is to simply type in the name of the tool in our search box here I'm going to type in brush and then we just need to scroll down to the tools option and locate paintbrush and we can see right now P is the assigned shortcut so to change it we're just going to click on it and then press B and that will automatically assign the new keyboard shortcut to paintbrush now let's do one more we're gonna go to the path tool just going to type in path scroll down to tools right now it's disabled but we want to set the letter P for paths now one more thing real quick make sure you close out of that and then click on save keyboard shortcuts now otherwise it's not going to save those updates that you made and then click OK and then those keyboard shortcut updates will be completed hello and welcome back alright so in this lesson in the next few lessons we're just gonna go over some basics for working with files in so when you start on a new project the first thing you need to do is create a new document which you can do with the keyboard shortcut which is command or control and the letter n or you can come up to file and click new so at the very top we have some pre-made templates precised and you can select different sizes from here or if you know the exact size that you need you can input those numbers here and then you can choose the measurement pixels inches millimeters etc and then under advanced we have some additional options here here we're going to input the resolution of the file and 72 is default which is perfect for files that are going out on the Internet if you're going to send this out to your home print to be printed or a professional lab then you're going to need to refer to the documentation for your in-home printer to find out what resolution to put in here it's usually 240 or 300 and the same with a professional lab depending on the lab they're going to either request 240 or 300 and I usually just go at 300 just to stay on the safe side then you need to decide on your color space RGB probably the majority of the time unless you want grayscale then you need to decide what color do you want to fill your canvas with you can choose the foreground or background colors in case you have something pre-selected over here white or transparencies so there wouldn't be any color on your canvas it would be transparent and you would use that for any type of files that you want to export as a PNG file which again would be something for the internet so for most of my projects I just stick with white and then once you have all your suctions just click OK and your new document is created for you now at this point you start working on your document and you decide you know what I made the wrong size for this particular file and I need it larger well what you can do is you can go up to image and select scale image and then you can increase the size of the image and the canvas and everything inside will scale up to the new size that you selected but the problem is if you're working on graphic elements when you scale them up they're most likely going to become pixelated and it's not going to look very good the same thing with photographic images if you start off with a small file and you scale it up to something larger then you're gonna end up pixelating that file and it's gonna look fuzzy and it's not gonna look very good so always start off with the highest size image or file or document that you can and then if you scale down later on it's not a problem because when you scale down you're not going to lose the quality of that image or that file now another option is if you are working on a document and you decide you know what this should be 1000 pixels wide because that's the width of my blog what you can do is you can increase this canvas size without losing the quality of any other items that you've already created on here by going up to image and selecting canvas size I can now type in 1000 on layers and click resize now the only problem is it's created a black background so let's undo that with command or control + the letter Z then you want to make sure white is on the background then go up to image canvas size we're going to type in 1000 all layers and click resize and now we have matching white going all the way across 1000 pixels wide and that's how you increase the canvas size of your document so here's another cool thing we can do I'm going to drag new image into this file and we're gonna create a new layer by doing that and then if we go up to image we can crop our canvas to fit this new layer by going to image and selecting auto crop image and now our canvas has been resized to this layer okay now you decide okay I set the resolution of this file to small I actually want to increase this to 300 dpi for print what you can do is go back to image and select print size and then type in the new resolution size here of 300 click OK and now the file has been resized to 300 dpi and then finally we have some options to rotate or flip the canvas in case we need to change the format a little bit so right there I just turned it upside down I'm gonna undo that with commander control and the letter Z and then we can also do flip horizontally and then you can also rotate it as well all right so that's it for documents and canvas in the next lesson we're going to go over some of the different file types that you can use in and we'll also go over some ways to open your files and as well hello and welcome back alright so in this lesson we're gonna go over the different file types we can use in and then I'll show you a couple of different ways to open your files and so does support a wide variety of different types of file formats but there are four main file types that you're gonna use when you're creating graphics or working with your photographic images and so let's go over those real quick so JPEG is universally the most used type of file format and you can see the file format on this file right here dot J pg4 JPEG is the most common type of file format that you're gonna need to use and you're going to need to export your files from into this format in order to share your files online or to have photographic prints done or whatever else you're gonna do with the image if you're gonna have them printed in some way jpg is the file format that you're going to need because JPEG is not the native format for as you can see right here we have three files and they have the file extension of dot X CF which is the native format for and you cannot use this file as is to share your photos online or to have prints done from them you have to export your image or your file to a jpg file in order to share the file or to have it printed so anytime you work on a new document and save it it's going to be saved in this xcf format and then in an upcoming lesson I'm going to show you how to export your files for jpg or for other use likes let's say PSD files now a PSD file is a native file format for Photoshop so if you're working what they client for example let's say you are building a website and you built the page for them and you created all these different layers and they want to see these different layers because maybe they need to send it to the developer which is the most common part of building a website is first having it designed in a graphic program like or Photoshop creating the different layers and then a developer will take that information to code the website so what you would need to do is export this file into the PSD format because most likely the developer is going to be working in Photoshop in that since Photoshop is much more popular and it's the standard software for creating websites and other types of graphics and for other uses as well the other file format that you will typically use a lot are PNG files which is dot PNG and PNG files are created with a transparent background and then you can export this as a PNG file once you're done with your project so that you can share this online so a transparent background would be necessary for example let's say that your website has a graphic background or some kind of a texture to the background and you want that texture to show through because if you had a solid white background then that's not going to look very good on your website because you're gonna have a white rectangle around the graphic and it looks a lot more natural and pleasing to the eye if that textured background or that pattern the background can show through in these areas in here and here and elsewhere in our graphic now real quick I want to share with you a way to get rid of this gray color on the background because it's kind of hard to see the graphic and what we're going to do is we're going to clean this up so that it's much more clearer than it is now so to do that we're gonna go up to edit select preferences then go to display go to check style and select light checks that's cleared up the gray background and it's now more crystal clear than it was before and we can better see our logo versus the way it was before we can also change the size of these checkers as well we're going to go back to preferences display and choosing the checker size right here to small so that makes it a little bit easier to see our graphic versus the way it was before now opening a file is real simple I'm going to go ahead and close these and to do that we can go up to file and select open or use our keyboard shortcut which is command or control + the letter O then you can navigate to the file that you want with this section right here by selecting the hard drive that you want to locate the file from or you can type in the location of the file right here if you want and then if you want to narrow down the selection of photos you can select the file format to narrow down your search from all images to specific files for example if you just want to locate files you can just select us here and then it will only list the files with that file extension for so once you click on one and open it up you will then have access to the file now another thing you can do is you can open multiple files at the same time and let me show you how to do that and let's say I wanted to open all these files well all I have to do is select the first one and then hold down my shift key and then click on the last one and that's going to select all the files and then it will open all of these files in individual tabs if I just want to select specific photos what I can do is hold down my control key and then click on multiple files to open and then I can randomly choose the individual files that I want to open up click on open and then all those files will be opened up in new tabs ok I'm gonna go ahead and close these with the keyboard shortcut which is the ctrl key and the letter W and we can also do that dragging and dropping multiple photos into the canvas area as well if you want to open them up that way so again I have multiple files selected and then I can drag and drop onto the canvas of and then it will open all those files in individual tabs now let's say you opened up five images but you forgot one well if you go back to your folder and you pick out a new photo and then you click and drag it it's not going to open it in a new tab instead it's going to add it as a new layer and you can't do it that way so you would have to go back to file open and then navigate to the folder to open up another image in conjunction with all the other ones that you've opened up alright so that's it for this lesson and the next lesson I'm going to give you some additional tips for working with your files and we're going to look at guides previews zoom and pan and the history panel hello and welcome back all right so in this lesson we're going to take a look at some additional tips for working with our files so right now I have a very very tall image over 10,000 pixels tall so when you have a document this size it's not going to fit into the window very well or at least not to the point where you can see everything and make out all the individual pieces of that document so we're going to look at ways to zoom in and pan and navigate around our image when we have a large canvas like this so there's a few different ways we can navigate around this image so let me show you all the different ways and then you can decide on which method is best for your personal workflow so what we're going to do is we're going to go up to view and take a look at the zoom options so we have zoom out and the keyboard shortcuts are listed right here on the right side so we have the minus sign to zoom out the plus sign to zoom in then you have fits image and window and here's the keyboard shortcut for that Shift + ctrl + J and that is basically the way that it's set up right now it's fit to the window from top to bottom now if you want to zoom in so it fills up this entire interface area from left to right top to bottom you're gonna select the next option which is fit window so boom there we go it filled in this entire window with that option and I'm gonna zoom back out with our keyboard shortcut ctrl shift + J ok let's look at some of the other options here we have different ratios to choose from as well and the keyboard shortcuts for those so if you want one-to-one or 100% you can select that and it will zoom in 100% another option would be to select your zoom tool which is right here or the keyboard shortcut is the letter Z once you have that selected you can then click anywhere on the interface and drag out and then it's going to zoom into that area once you release your mouse then if you want to pan around different areas of your document you can hold down your spacebar and then click and drag to another portion of your document now that's not as smooth and I don't really prefer that method and what I like to do instead is use the scroll button on my mouse and then I can scroll up and down fairly quickly that way all right let me show you another method I'm gonna go ahead and zoom back out and what we can do is we can select our preview panel or our navigation panel so if you're not seeing that go to windows select dockable dialogs and then scroll down till you find navigation and then that will be added to the right side of your interface and now we can see the entire image over here as well so it's kind of like a preview of the image and then down here below we have a slider that will allow us to zoom into our image this way all right so those are all the different ways to zoom and pan around your document now there's another cool tool we can use to help us with our document when we're creating our document and working on the project and that is guides so if you take a look right here we have a blue black dotted line here and another one here those are guides and they allow us to align different layers or elements of our project to ensure that they are properly lined up and to add them all we have to do is click either on the horizontal ruler or the vertical ruler click and drag out release and then a new guide will be added the same thing with the verticals and then if you want to move that guide later on you want to make sure that your tool options is visible select your move tool which is the letter V and then you're going to select pick a layer or guide you can then click on that guide and move it to a new location if you haven't moved the active layer then you're not going to be able to select that guide and instead you're going to be moving that particular layer that you clicked on and then lastly we have our undo panel which lets us go back in time so I can click on any one of these undo options and it will take me back to that state that I was in prior to all these other actions that I took so I highly recommend keeping your undo visible and we set up the amount of undo actions that are saved in here in the Preferences lesson alright so that's it for this particular lesson in the next lesson we're going to take a look at saving our files and exporting them for use online or for print hello and welcome back all right so in this lesson I just want to talk about saving and exporting your files I have a PSD file right here and I'm gonna go ahead and open that up all right so if you want to resave this as a PSD file you need to export it because if you go up to file and save it's going to save it in the X C F format which is the format now even if you do save this in the format it's going to save all the different layers within that file format as well however you will not be able to share that file with somebody that is using Photoshop so in that case if you want to share the file then you need to give that person a file in the PSD format and to do that we're going to go up to file select export as you can give it a name and then you need to choose the file extension so you can do that right here click on select file type then scroll down to PSD or Photoshop image and you can see the extension right here is PSD and then that will be added to the end of the file name so once you export it you will then be able to share that file with someone that is using Photoshop and not now the same is true for JPEG files PNG files and you can even export to PDF so if somebody is requesting a PDF file you can go to the export option and select Portable Document format which is the PDF file extension and then right here we have PNG so if you want to export a file to be used online and you need the PNG format you can select this option here or you can select the JPEG image extension right here and then if you decide you want to print to your home printer there is an option for that as well just go to the print option here under file which is ctrl + P and then you may need to refer to your printers documentation to set up the different options available in the preference settings of your print dialog box here and that's it that's how you save export and print welcome to the layers 101 in this lesson we are going to talk about what layers are the four types of layers and the four types of layer customizations so layers are an essential element to understanding layers will help you achieve your creative vision so I'm going to explain what they are and then we're gonna go over all those different elements of layers so you know how you can customize them for your artwork and more importantly how to work with them so what exactly are layers well I'm glad you asked well layers allow you to apply different graphics elements artwork paint whatever the case may be onto that specific layer so think of layers like an artboard or even a canvas so you're going to paint on that canvas and then you can add another layer or another canvas and then you can apply paint to that canvas and then you can stack your layers or canvases any way to show or create different types of artwork because all the layers are independent of each other and you can manipulate those layers in a way so that you can see through the layers so you can also think of it like a piece of glass you can paint on the glass and depending on how thick that paint is will determine whether or not you can see through it so if you apply a light coat of paint and then you stack another piece of glass on it with a different type of artwork then when you put the two pieces of glass together you can see through them and see the artwork underneath it so we can interact with our layers within that way so let me show you what I mean if we take a look at this image here we have two layers we have our image and then I have another layer up here that's not active we can turn on or turn off our layers as needed depending on what we're trying to achieve so that we can see the before and after so let's say I want to add some additional light coming from the top of the image well I have an overlay here that I've created that has additional light within that overlay and when I turn it on you can see that extra light so because of the way I have this layer set up and how I created that artwork on this layer it looks like more light is shining down from the top of the image and like that piece of glass I can put a light coat of paint on there or I can make it thicker or I can make it very very thin and we can do that with one of the tools in the layers panel and I'm gonna show and explain that in just a minute because it's one of the ways of customizing your layers in order to achieve your creative vision we can also add additional layers by clicking on this icon here and we can then see we have that extra layer above our sunrays so now I can paint on this particular layer so I'm gonna grab my brush and I'm gonna add some paint across the bottom here and it looks like I painted over the image but because I applied that paint to this new layer and not the image layer it's separate from the layer now I've added that paint to this image and I can't get rid of that paint unless I undo what I did simply by selecting edit undo or use your keyboard shortcut which is command or control + the letter Z and that will undo your last steps so like I mentioned all layers are independent of each other and then you can always stack those in a way to achieve a different outcome I clicked and dragged this paint of red below the image and I can no longer see it but I can manipulate this layer and way to show that paint coming through the bottom of it so let's go over some of the different types of layers that we can use in so there's four different types so the first one I want to mention is the background layer anytime you create a new document your first layer is going to be labeled background you can always turn this layer on or off as needed but I always like to have a background layer so I have a solid color to work with as I'm painting other layers so I can actually see what I'm doing now you can also paint directly on this background layer as well if you want to do that but I prefer to create new layers to paint on versus use in the background that way if I make a mistake I can always come back and delete that specific layer where I applied the paint to and I always have my background layer the next type of layer are grouped layers so if you take a look at this layers panel here we can see there's three plus signs anytime there's a plus sign like that that's letting you know that this is a grouped layer clicking on the icon will expand the grouped layer and will show all the layers inside of it so this particular layer has no icon next to it so it's just a regular layer this layer here is another grouped layer inside of it we have different layers as well so those are grouped layers grouped layers are a great way to organize your layers because as you work more and more on a project you may be adding more and more layers and can have 20 30 50 100 500 layers and it becomes much more difficult to find the layers you want if you haven't organized them and you also want to make sure that they're stacked in a proper order that way the elements that you want to show from that grouped layer are shown first so right now I have this topped grouped layer visible if I move that grouped layer below the other one then that becomes the top layer and the other layers below it are not visible and that's because I created a background layer right here to hide the other layers but I can also turn it off to show the layers before it so it's important to organize them in a way and stack them in a way to show what you want to show based on what's activated and what's not activated okay so those are grouped layers the next set of layers are pixel layers so a pixel layer is basically anything with paint or pixels so this image here is a pixel-based image and it C pixel layer so these other grouped layers also have pixel layers so all of these are pixel layers they're made up of paint okay so the last type of layer are text layers or type layers so that would be this particular layer right here this is a text layer everything else is pixel based and I know this for two reasons one we can see that the icons are different so we have a little a here in this lets you know this is a text layer and if I grab my text tool I can click and begin editing that text as needed if I click on this T letter here or this type letter which would be that type there if I try and click on it I can't manipulate or edit that text because it's a pixel-based layer okay so those are the four types of layers background grouped pixel and type now in addition to those four types of layers we can customize these layers in four different ways to help us achieve our creative vision so the first one is layer styles or layer effects now layer effects are not in native effect tool within itself we've talked about how to install a layer effects plugin in a previous lesson so if you want to add that you're going to need to go back to that particular video to learn how to download and install it so layer effects will allow you to do different things and I have the plug-in right here it says layer effects we have bevel and emboss cover overlay drop shadow and all these other effects so we can add a stroke around an image or a graphic we can add a drop shadow so layer effects are a great way to customize our layers another one our layer masks which will allow you to precisely edit your images or your artwork in a way so you can place that edit let's say in the sky only so I can make the sky black and white and the water and color or vice versa and I can do that with layer masks we're gonna talk more about layer masks and I'm gonna show you how to use them in the next lesson now the third way to customize our layers is with blending modes so blending modes are another type of effect that can be applied to our layers to create a unique look so our blending modes are located up here at the top of our layer panel and by default we have normal selected so nothing is really happening so if I turn on this blending mode layer here we can see it's a solid orange color but if I come up here and I choose soft light it blends that dark orange solid color and blends it in with the image below it to give it a sepia tone so blending modes allow you to manipulate your layers in a way to achieve a different creative outcome we're gonna talk more about blending modes in an upcoming lesson now the four type of lair customizations is opacity so you can take any one of these layers and you can adjust the opacity so you can see what's below it so I have this image selected right here and if I go inside of this grouped layer and select that image layer I can come up here to the opacity slider click and drag to the left to lower the opacity and then the layer below it shines through so here's your glass that you're painting on and you're applying a thin coat of paint so you can see what's below it so opacity is a great way to adjust a specific layer so that you can blend it in or see the layers below it so those are the four customizations for layers and the four types of layers now let's take a quick look at some of the other options we have in our layers panel just below it we have an icon here that will allow us to create a new layer we can create a new layer group from this icon and then these two icons will allow you to rearrange the order in which the layers are stacked so whichever layer you have selected you will be able to move up one layer at a time or one layer at a time you can duplicate your layers with this icon here you can then anchor your floating layers which is a more advanced topic and we'll cover that in a future lesson and then this final one here will delete the layer alright so that's it for layers 101 in the next lesson we're gonna take a look at layer masks and then in the final lesson in this section we're going to talk about the different layer attributes for our layers panel so we can better organize our images as well as these other options down here in our layers panel will go over those at that time as well hello and welcome back alright so in this lesson we're gonna go over layer masks and how you can use them with your layers so I mentioned layer masks in the previous lesson and we talked about how it's one of the four layer types that you can use so what exactly is a layer mask well a layer mask allows you to precisely control where you place your edits so if you're going to increase the brightness or the contrast or change the hue and the saturation of your image you can control exactly where you want to put it on your image once you apply one of these types of color edits it's a global edit so in other words the entire image is getting that edit but let's say you want this background and the sidewalk in black and white and you want just the couple and color well you can do that real easily with layer masks and there's two advantages when using layer masks this way one it is non-destructive so you can save the file as a PSD file or a native file which is xcf and it's going to save all the different layers that you create including the layer masks so that if you want to tweak that edit next week next month next year you can come back and adjust that layer mask to update or tweak that edit for better results because maybe you made a mistake and you want to go back and make adjustments to it and the other thing is you can actually delete the layer mask if you decide you want that particular edit to be a global edit versus a precise local edit so let me show you how to add a layer mask in how it actually works so first we need to duplicate our layer so we can work non-destructively and apply our first edit to that duplicate layer so I'm gonna come down here and click on this icon here that duplicates the layer then I'm going to choose a saturation adjustment so I can drop the saturation down to zero to change that layer to black and white now we need to add a layer mask either through this icon here or by coming up to the layer that we want to add the layer mask to and right-clicking on it and select add layer mask we have a lot of options here in the most common is white so we want full opacity of white these are more advanced options but we're just going to go over the basics for now so we're going to click Add and we get a white layer mask and at this point nothing has really changed and that's because white adds and black removes so if I want to remove this edit from a specific location I have to paint in that location with black we also need to make sure that the layer mask is selected otherwise you're going to be painting on the image itself and not the layer mask so right now I just have the layer of the image selected and I need to click on this little area here to select the layer mask then I'm going to grab my paintbrush right here with the letter B and I'm going to make sure that my foreground color is set to black and then anywhere I paint will reveal the color from the image below so I'm just gonna paint over our couple here and we can see that the color is starting to come in how cool is that all right I'm not gonna make this perfect but you get the idea the other thing is if I go outside of the couple I get the green of the background and I made a mistake so how do I fix that well I can come over here and switch my white to the foreground because white adds the Edit black removes the edit so in order to add that black and white edit back to the image or this layer mask or this layer I need to paint with white and it removes it how cool is that I love it alright so that allows you to precisely control where you place your edits now let's take a closer look at our layer mask it looks a little different now we have black on the layer mask where I applied the black paint over here so black removes the edit white adds the edit I love layer masks because it gives you that precision and the controller that you need to fulfill your creative vision it's all about your vision not mine so whatever you want to do you can do with layers and layer masks to precisely control that specific edit all right so that's it for layer mask in the next lesson we're just going to take a quick look at our layers panel a little bit more and some attributes that we can apply within our layers panel hello and welcome back all right so in this lesson we're just going to go over some of the layer attributes that you can apply to your layers and there's a couple of different ways you can access them if we right click on a layer we're going to see all the different layer attributes that we have available in this menu or you can access them via this layer attributes dialog box and you can apply those attributes from here personally I just find it's easier to right-click on the layer and then select the attribute that I want to add so the composite mode and composite space and the blend space those are all advanced types of attributes so we're not going to really go over those right now instead we're just going to cover some of the basic stuff for example we've already talked about clicking on this icon to turn a layer on or off we can also link layers together so that you can move those layers at the same time versus just one layer at a time which just makes it easier to work with multiple layers instead of trying to group them and move them that way you can actually add a link to link those layers together we can also lock the layers in order to prevent additional pixels being added to that layer we can lock them in place so they can't be moved and we can see right here we have a warning that says that that active layers position has been blocked and that's because I clicked on this little icon right here and we can also lock the Alpha Channel so for any layers that don't have any pixels we can prevent that layer from being edited so it's just a way to make sure that no additional artwork is being applied to that specific layer and making sure that it doesn't move in the process of working on other layers and then our other attributes are the opacity slider which we've talked about before and then our blend modes we have a bunch of different options here which we're going to cover in the next section and there are two types of blend modes the default which is the new blend modes and 2.10 and then legacy are the blend modes that were available in 2.8 and there are actually many more modes in 2.10 now versus the last version so we're gonna cover that more in the next section another new feature in 2.10 is the ability to add a color tag to our layers which is awesome especially if you work on very complex projects where you have 30 50 a hundred layers or more and you have layers and grouped layers you can actually organize them by a specific color tag based on your particular workflow so for example you could have all your text layers with a blue layer and then you could add a green layer for all pixel based layers or maybe overlays only or specific types of graphics you can then have a yellow layer for layers that have a layer mask so you have a lot of different options here for creating a different color to help you organize and manage all your different layers alright so that's it for layer attributes hello and welcome back all right so in this lesson we're just going to quickly do an overview of the different tools in but we're going to go into more detail about the individual tools in upcoming sections and lessons we're not going to go into a lot of great detail of all the tools but most of the tools because some of the tools are very similar once you learn one tool you should be able to use another for example our pencil tool is very similar to our brush tool if you take a look at the tool options for both you're going to see that they're very similar so we're going to spend more time talking about the brush tool because we have a lot more options with our brush tool for example we can create our own brushes we can also download and install brushes we find from other artists as well so we'll spend more time on that tool versus the pencil tool so if we take a look up here we can see a list of three main tools now if you're upgrading from 2.8 to 2 point 100 you're going to notice there's something missing there used to be a color tools option available here and they've removed it from the menu and now instead of accessing it from here you're going to access those tools from this menu here and those color tools are in this first group right here so there are four main tools and selection tools paint tools transform tools and of course the color tools so the selection tools you're going to use to well select things in and you'll find yourself using these more on images than graphic design although you can use them for both I tend to use them more for selecting parts of my image so that I can edit a specific area of that image and we're going to talk more about each of these individual tools in upcoming lessons and then we have our paint tools which of course will allow you to add paint or pixels or colored pixels to your layers and your a variety of tools to choose from based on what you're trying to achieve so our bucket fill will fill an entire area next we have gradient which is formerly known as the blend tool but it's now rightfully called the gradient tool which will allow you to add paint in a gradient and then we have our pencil and paint brush tools which will allow us to draw on the paint that we want an eraser tool to remove pixels an airbrush tool that acts like an airbrush an ink tool which is just another way of adding paint like our bucket fill we have a my paint brush tool which is new in this version of we also have a clone heel perspective clone blur sharpen smudge and dodge and burn tools as well now these last six tools although they are in the paint tools I don't necessarily use them to paint with instead I use them for retouching so I'm not sure why place these in the paint tools section I think it would have been better if they created a new category like retouching tools and place those in there instead so throughout the course we're going to talk more about these tools as well and we're going to have a different section that's going to refer to them as retouching tools and not paint tools and then we have transform tools and there are some new tools in this group that we didn't have in older versions so first we have our a line tool which will allow us to align layers either along the edges top bottom sides whatever it is you need to do then our move tool will allow us to move that layer as needed we also have a crop tool again I would consider this a retouching tool because I really don't crop my graphic design projects but I do crop images we also have a rotate tool that will allow you to rotate that layer you can scale in other words resize a layer the shear is going to cut the layer perspective will warp the perspective of that layer and then we have a couple new tools here unified transform and handle transform and we'll talk more about these in an upcoming lesson then we can flip the orientation of our layers from horizontal to vertical or vice versa and then we have Kage transform and warp transform and these are new tools as well and we'll talk more about those in an upcoming lesson alright so underneath these three menus here we do have additional tools that are not placed in either one of these three categories or the color tools so we have a paths tool that will allow us to create vector images or to place text along a path then of course our text tool will allow us to add text to our documents gaggle operation is a new feature of and we'll talk about that in an upcoming lesson color picker will allow you to choose a color then we have our measure tool which will allow you to measure your graphic elements so that you can make sure that your artwork is a specific size or the document that you need or the elements that you're creating our specific size and you can measure those elements with the measure tool so once you click and drag this out you will see a measurement down here and this one says two thousand five hundred and fifty one point three pixels wide so it just makes it easy to measure your graphic elements zoom tool pretty self-explanatory and then a couple options down here we can change our default colors to black and white with the letter D or via this menu option here and you can also swap the foreground and the background colors with this option here these double arrows or the letter X so it's just going to change the foreground and background colors and it makes it easy to switch those in case you need to change those around alright let's take a quick look at the color tools at the top here we have a list of several different types of too that can help us edit our images now the one thing you're going to notice is when you select one of these unlike the other tools there are no tool options for this particular set of tools instead you're going to get a new dialog window like this one where you can make your selections for the different options so there's a whole list of them here and we're going to cover those in upcoming lessons as well and then below these color tools here we have some other options for more advanced type color tools and we'll cover some of these in upcoming lessons all right so that's it for the four main tools and in the next four sections we're going to go into more detail about these tools and in the next section we are going to start with our transform tools hello and welcome to the projects part of the course in this lesson we are going to learn how to create some basic shapes we're going to create a triangle a square a circle and a free-form shape as well we're going to use a few different tools to do that so if you're ready to get started let's go ahead and create a square first what we're going to do is select our rectangle square tool we're gonna click and drag out and then we're gonna hold down our shift key before we release our mouse button and that's going to create a nice perfectly square selection for us and to complete that selection or to activate that selection we need to hit the enter key or the return key on our keyboard then we're gonna grab our paint bucket tool with the letter G and we're gonna fill that in with the foreground color make sure in the tools section you have foreground color fill selected and click inside then we're going to go up to select and select none' and this is going to remove the selection or you can use the keyboard shortcut which is right here shift + ctrl + a now that selection has been removed and we are done with our square let's go ahead and use our move tool and I selected that with the letter V and then I can grab that and move that into a new location we're going to go ahead and create a new layer transparency is what I want for the fill type so I'm going to click OK and then we're going to add a circle again we're going to click then hold down our Shift key release our mouse button we get a nice perfect round circle we're gonna click Enter or return select the bucket tool again with the letter G let's change the color I think that'll look nice then we're gonna click inside and then with our keyboard shortcut command shift and the letter A we're going to remove that selection back to the move tool with the letter V and we're going to click and move this over here and maybe we want to move the square up over here so that looks good now if you're not moving the layers separately make sure you're looking at your tool options and you have pick a layer or guide because if you have move the active layer and you try and move the square it's not going to work because the circle is the active layer and you can't select any other layers until it's selected so I like to have pick a layer or guides selected on my move tool that way I can grab other layers on my document when needed to move them alright another new layer click OK and let's use our pen tool this time I'm going to press the letter P to select it and then I'm going to click to create an anchor point another anchor point to create that first segment and then I'm just going to click around until I get a nice funky shape and then we're going to close that path by holding down the control key and clicking on the first anchor points now our path is complete in order to add color to it now we need to select selection from path from the tool options select the letter G let's do another new color again let's try a dark blue and we're going to click inside and now we have our new funky shape filled in control-shift a to unselect it and let's move this one up and over here and let's select the first layer add a new layer click OK and now let's do a triangle this one's going to be a little bit more difficult and a little bit more complex than the other ones actually I'm gonna move this over a little bit more what we're gonna do is we're gonna use guides to help us well guide us in making our triangle so I'm gonna put one right here in the middle or at least under 1000 so I did 1,800 by 1200 on my new document and I'm gonna place the first one right here under the 1000 pixel mark and then I'm going to add another one 250 pixels away which would be under 750 and then on the other side as well which would be 1250 so now we have even amount of space between this side and this side ok let's go ahead and add a couple more guides I'm going to put one here and then one day on here for our tip now I'm going to select my path tool with the letter P and I'm going to click right here for the first Anchor Point then I'm going to click here another one here then I'm going to hold down my control key and click right here on the first anchor point to close out that path select selection from path the letter G again new color let's go with red then we're gonna fill it in control shift a to unselect it and then we can hide all the guides by going up to image guides remove all guides then I'm going to select my move tool again so we can get this shape back in here with the rest as well and there you go for basic shapes by using our marquee tools her pen tool and some guides to help us with our triangle all right so if you were creating these shapes along with me or if you want to do it after that lesson go ahead and keep this document open because I'm gonna show you how to add shapes to these individual layer shapes in the next lesson hello and welcome to project 12 in this lesson in the next few lessons coming up we are going to be working on our marketing material in this first project we are going to create a flyer now this lesson is going to be a little bit longer than some of the other ones so I'm going to break up this project and maybe two or three different video tutorials just to kind of break it up a little bit because I think it's going to be between 20 and 30 minutes to complete our flyer and we're going to learn some new things in this project as well to take your skills to another level so let's go ahead and get started on creating our flyer and the first thing we need to do is determine the size that we need so we're gonna use vistaprint again as an example for the specs and the size of our flyer so we're gonna go ahead and create something about eight and a half by 11 inches tall so let's find out the product specifications for that size of a flyer so we have a lot of different sizes here so I'm going to select eight-and-a-half by 11 and here's the final trim size it's a little bit less than 11 inches tall and the full bleed size the size we need is this size right here so let's go ahead and create a new document with those dimensions let's work in inches and we need 8.6 two for the width and 11.1 for the height with a resolution of 300 with white for the background okay let's go ahead and add some guides and we'll add them about a quarter inch from all sides which is about two of these lines so we're gonna create something similar to this and you can use your own images in your own brand identity colors and fonts for this custom design the only other thing we're gonna need is this little banner right here which is included in this course as well as a lot of the other elements that you've already downloaded so navigate to the folder that you downloaded and look for badges banners etc and then inside of banners you'll find a bunch of different banners to choose from so you can use this one or you can use any one of the other ones that you want to use so I believe this one is in banners five dot PSD so you can go ahead and open that up and then we'll go ahead and add it to our document as well so I'm gonna go ahead and open it up so we're gonna go ahead and add this element now it's this one here and I believe it's number fourteen so we're gonna grab this grouped layer and drag it to our new document and then just drop it into place and then I need to make sure I have a move active layer selected so I can move the entire contents of that particular element because it is set up on three different layers so you can stylize each one of those elements differently based on what you're trying to achieve but we're just going to keep it like it is for now so why don't we go ahead and just right-click and select a merge layer group so that it's all on one layer I'm go ahead and rename this banner alright so the next thing we need to do is we need to create a new shape to hold our image and we're going to use our path tool which is located right here to create that shape alright so before we add our path let's go ahead and grab our zoom tool and hold down your control key and click once to zoom out because we want to create our path on the outside of the document as well so that the selection we get from that path is confined to the edges of the document okay with our path tool we're going to click right about here on the outside of the document and we get little anchor point when I click over here I'm going to get another anchor point as well as a line that intersects those two anchor points now I'm still holding down my mouse key because when I navigate to a different direction left right up or down I begin creating a curved line so this is how you create your curved shape so I'm gonna place mine right about there I'm going to release and then I can place another anchor point out here and then I can adjust that curve to any shape that I want so maybe right about there and then I'm going to continue adding anchor points on the outside of the document and then we need to close the path to complete the selection process so we're gonna hold down our ctrl key and click on the first anchor point that connects all the paths because I can actually click on this and move it all right let's go ahead and create a new layer with transparency click OK and now we can fill in a color inside of that selection we want white so set the foreground to white then go up to edit fill with foreground color and here's the keyboard shortcut here command or control + the comma key so once you click that that's going to add the white color to the selection and the reason we want white is because we're going to be adding a photo to it otherwise we could just fill it in with any color we want and then add some content in there based on what we want to write for that particular flyer all right so to get out of that we're gonna select our move tool and then we're going to deselect everything and then we're going to drag and drop an image into our document so we can confine it to that particular shape so any image will do for this project it's just for practice for now ok now that I have my image I'm going to create a group layer and add my image and my new shape in that grouped layer I'm going to select the photo and then I'm going to change the mode to multiply ok so right now I only have this guy so with my move tool and move active layer selected I can click and drag that image into place so I can get a different part of the image inside of there it's actually a little bit too large and want more of the image inside of here so I'm gonna grab my scale tool I'm gonna click on my image and I'm going to do 8.75 inches for the width click scale my image is up here now so I need to grab my move tool and then I can drag it into place all right let's say that the shape that we created is too small and we want to increase the size of it well what we can do is we can rescale that shape layer so go ahead grab the shape layer if you want to resize that let me show you how to do that then we're gonna go up to layer and select Auto crop layer and let me show you why right now I have my layer boundaries turned off and we can see this yellow and black dotted line around the entire document that's the layer boundaries for this particular shape so we need to confine that layer boundary to the shape in order to rescale it the size that we want so to do that we need to go up to layer Auto crop layer and then that confined that layer boundary to the bottom portion of the shape okay so now we can go back to our scale tool we're gonna turn off our image click in this area to select that shape all right now to rescale it I only want to pull it down make it taller so I don't want both the width and the height to stay in proportion so I'm going to click on this icon to unlock the width and the height then I can click on this little square here and drag it down to make it taller hard to see because it's in wait so I'm just gonna go with that size there and click scale then when I turn the image back on it fills in the new height of that shape so I'm liking this size of that shape and the image now because I can see more of the image now the only other thing I want to do before we move on is move this banner above this layer group because it's being hidden by the new shape size so we can either click and drag up or we can click on these arrows to move it up or down all right so now would probably be a good time to save our file so go to file save as give it a name and then you want to make sure that the extension is x CF all right I think that's good for part 1 and we will continue the flyer design in the next lesson so far we have our image and a banner so now let's go ahead and place a headline in our banner something like let's say save 20% so we're gonna use our path tool to create a path that's going to match our banner so that the text will wrap along that edge as well so let's go ahead and start off by adding some text grab your text tool let's type out save 20% the color really doesn't matter because we're gonna have to change that in just a second and for the font size we're gonna do let's say 125 for this particular font you may be using a different font so just adjust your font size accordingly and the best thing to do is just to grab your move tool and put it inside that pennant to make sure that the text isn't too tall alright let's go ahead and grab our path tool we're going to go ahead and start off by adding an anchor point right about here we're gonna come up here click and drag so we can create a path that matches the banner and then let's go ahead and click right about here to add another path so right there should be good now we're going to come over to our layers and right click on our text layer and select text along path so that converts our text down here into a path and we know it's a path because we have all these anchor points on each one of the letters now and we can also see that it's starting to take the form or the shape of that pennant based on that path that we created so now we need to convert it to a selection so first we need to go up to windows dockable dialogues and select paths this will give you the pass dialog box and then from in here we're going to right click on path and select path to selection so that adds a selection around the text we're going to go ahead and grab our zoom tool click and drag around it so we can see that selection a lot closer it also removes the anchor points when you select a different tool now we need to go back to layers and put that path on its own layer so create a new layer fill with transparency click OK alright now we can fill in the text with the color of our choice so grab your paint bucket tool select your color and then just click inside one of the letters and that's going to fill all of them in let's go ahead and deselect then we need to go back to the past panel and turn off our path so it removes that outline around the text all right let's go ahead and fix the boundary of the layer by going to layer lot of crop layer and that confines the layer boundary around the text now ok I'm going to go ahead and zoom out and then with my move tool I can put it into place and you can see it now has that shape of the pennant all right so we don't need our text layer anymore so we're gonna go ahead and delete that and then we'll go ahead and zoom out alright next let's go ahead and add some content by adding a column of text here and another one over here we're just gonna use dummy text which is known as lorem ipsum so I'm just gonna grab some of this text here to fill in as the dummy text until we know exactly what we want to put in it when we're creating our own tires so if you want to do this you can go to lips um calm and then just grab some text copy it to your clipboard and then we'll go ahead and add it in a text box so we're gonna grab our text tool click and drag out and that creates a little box and then you can paste that text inside of there with commander control and the letter V I don't necessarily want it red or even this font so I'm going to select all and I'm going to change the font to something else and let's also change the font size down to 18 okay so the font size is pretty small but I'm gonna select all copy and continue pasting until I fill in this box a little bit more okay select all and I'm also going to change the color to a dark gray color as well okay let's go ahead and zoom in so this initial box is a pretty decent size we'll go ahead and keep it as is alright let's go ahead and adjust the text layer boundry go up to layer and select Auto crop layer let's go ahead and rename it column 1 let's duplicate it and rename it column 2 and let's go ahead and move the copied layer over just a little bit alright that looks pretty good alright I'm gonna go ahead and add a guide so that I can align these two columns at the top so that they are even with each other I'm gonna grab column 1 now and then let's move that up okay I'm gonna go ahead and put these in a group layer let's name it top content and put both layers inside let's go ahead and group our banner as well okay this just helps keep everything organized and easier to find everything as we're working on the flyer because maybe we need to make changes later on and it'll just make it easier to find what we need okay I'm gonna grab the top content grip layer I'm going to select my alignment tool click on it and then select align Center of target and that aligns it directly in the center of the document alright so the next step is to create our shapes that are going to hold the images in those three columns right here so let's go ahead and grab our rectangle select tool we're gonna click and drag out and right now these two columns are about seven seven and a half inches wide and we want to keep those three columns flush with either side of the columns so to do that we're going to need to create our image placeholders about two to two and a quarter inches wide so we're gonna go to our tool options change size to inches and let's select two point one two five just to be on the safe side for both the height and the width let's go ahead and change our foreground color to white and then we need to create a new layer again with transparency for the fill and let's name this layer image 1 let's go ahead and move this out and above all the other layers and then we're gonna go up to edit fill with foreground color and that adds that color inside of that selection so what I'm gonna do is I might actually fill it with the background color just so I have something visual to see as I'm working let's go ahead and deselect so for the content here we're gonna have bullet points with a check mark so I just did a google search and I located some free marks that you can use and I'm gonna use this one here because it is a PNG file and the background is transparent so I'm going to right-click and select copy image so you can use this one or you can use any other one that you find I'm gonna go ahead and paste with command or control and the letter V I need to right click on our floating selection layer to add it to a new layer and then I need to scale it it's a little too big so we're gonna grab our scale tool click on it and we're gonna make sure that the width and the height is locked and then I can click on a corner and drag in to scale it that way I'm gonna scale it go ahead and zoom in with our zoom tool still might be a little too big so I'm just gonna go a little bit smaller and then with our text tool we're gonna put one of our bullet points here I'm gonna rename this layer checkmark and we're gonna put them in a group layer now all we have to do is grab this group layer and duplicate it and move it into position I think I want to go ahead and add a guide as well so that we can keep everything flush along that guideline I'm gonna grab this group as well put it into place as well as my image now when I try and move the image into place it's not really snapping in there and that's because the layer guide is way out here so we need to go up to layer Auto crop layer and now we can go ahead and place that and it will snap against that grid I can also use my up or down arrow key to reposition at one pixel at a time so I'm just gonna move it up a couple pixels all right back to our headlines here and we're going to duplicate again so you can do as many of these as you want I'm just gonna do one more and I'm just using my arrow keys to move them down a little bit so that will work let's go ahead and add another group layer and we're gonna place all grouped layers inside of here okay again just makes it easier and keeps everything organized I'm gonna move the image layer above it and one more group layer we'll just name this column one and we're gonna put the image and the headlines in there okay now that we have that done let's go ahead and zoom out we're gonna grab this particular group to layer and duplicate it and we're gonna name it column two let's move it over and let's duplicate that one again rename it three okay so what I need to do next is I need to create a guide for this column this right here is the margin we don't want it against the margin so we need to go back to our top content and drag a guide over to that side okay so now we can go back to column three to snap it into place and we also need to create a guide for the top of the columns as well and then you can just go in and make sure that the top of the columns are snapping against that guide all right so the last step is to grab column two the alignment tool click on it and align Center of the document and now this ensures that we have equal distance between each column okay so we are almost done the next step is to create a couple more shapes down here and add some contact information so we'll go ahead and wrap up part two now and we'll complete our flyer in the next lesson all right just a couple more things to finish up our flyer we're gonna create a couple new shapes add some content and add our images so let's go ahead and add some images first any images will do just for fun and practice so we're gonna place each one of the images in the correct order that we want to place them in in the grouped content and we also need to select our image placeholders and change the color to white so we're going to grab our bucket tool and then click on each one of the layers next we're going to take our image layers and convert them to multiply and then you just need to move them into position I'm not going to worry about scaling them you already know how to do that so I'm just going to move these into position so that they fill up the entire square all right we're going to go ahead and zoom out grab your zoom tool hold down your control key and click once to zoom out grab your path tool and we're gonna create a new shape right here so I'm gonna click right here and maybe right about here and then I'm going to drag down to create a little arch right there and then I'm gonna go ahead and click on the outside of the document then we need to complete the path by holding down our control key and then clicking on that first Anchor Point we're going to go ahead and select our top layer here and create a new layer with transparency click OK it's actually placed inside of the group we don't want that so I'll just pull it out and then select selection from path from the tool options and then select your color and fill in with foreground color then deselect ctrl or command shift + a grab your move tool and then your first shape is added we're going to go ahead and create a new layer with transparency again so we can create another shape we're gonna go ahead and grab our path tool I'm going to start down here and then I'm gonna click over here I'm gonna make this one fairly large and then we're gonna go ahead and close it off hold down your control key click on the first anchor select selection from path choose a new color and then fill with foreground color deselect grab your move tool I'm going to go ahead and zoom in and then from here we can just grab our text tool and add some content so here maybe we want to add our phone number or website email address whatever it is you want to add I'm going to select all with commander control and a and I'm going to change the justification by clicking on this icon here to move everything to the right all right let's grab our move tool and let's go to layer Auto crop layer and then just move that into position and that's it that is our custom designed flyer if you have any questions about this particular project please post them in the Q&A section and I'd be happy to answer your questions in the next project we are going to create a custom brochure so if you're ready to do that let's do it

Channel: Parker Photographic

Views: 183,488

Rating: 4.8983049 out of 5

Keywords: how to use gimp for beginners, gimp for beginners tutorials, how to use gimp, gimp 2.10 for beginners, gimp for beginners, gimp 2.10, gimp 2.10 tutorials, GIMP Tutorials for Beginners, gimp beginner, gimp tutorial, getting started with gimp, how to use gimp 2.10, gimp tutorials, gimp basics, gimp 2.10 tutorial, gimp for beginners 2.10, gimp 2.10 tutorials for beginners, gimp

Id: 7LXyClky6A8

Length: 132min 54sec (7974 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 06 2018