Welcome to Meet the GIMP.
My name is Rolf Steinort and I am recording this in Bremen, Northern Germany.
The GIMP is a very powerful image manipulation program.
In this first tutorial, I want to give you a small tour of GIMP and its features.
I will briefly demonstrate you how to prepare an image for the web.
I will give detailed explanation in future tutorials.
To open an image, I will just drag and drop the image on to the tool box.
And here it is!
Let’s have a look at this image.
I want to make this image ready for the web.
Let's see what I can do with it.
First, the image is tilted; so I have to rotate it a bit.
Then I want to crop it to remove this part - the back of a person.
The 3rd thing I want to do is to bring in more colors and contrast.
I also want to re-size the image because now its nearly 4000 pixels wide which is far too much.
And then I want to sharpen it and save it as a JPEG image.
Let’s start with rotating.
I zoom into the part of the image where it is most obvious that the image is tilted. You can see it here.
By the way, you can move around in the image by pressing Space and just moving the cursor.
And now I choose the Rotate tool by clicking here.
In the Rotate tool, there are some options set by default, to values suited for graphical work and not for photographic work.
So, here Direction is set to Normal (Forward) but I will set it to Corrective (Backward).
I check if I have the best Interpolation. So, that's fine.
And in the Preview, I choose Grid instead of the Image.
I shall increase the no. of grid lines by moving the slider. You will see it soon.
Now I will click on the image and get a grid, overlaid on the image.
This grid is straight.
And I can rotate it and GIMP will rotate the image in the same direction in the Corrective mode so that the grid is straight again.
Let me demonstrate. I will rotate the grid like this.
I will check the other part of the image to make sure.
Looks good to me.
Now, I will click on the Rotate button.
This will take some time since the image is about 10 mega-pixels.
And it is done! The image has rotated.
Let's have a look at the whole picture. Shift + Ctrl + E brings us back to the image.
Next step is Cropping.
I chose the Crop tool by clicking here.
I want to keep the aspect ratio of the image as 3:2.
For that, I check Fixed Aspect ratio here and type in 3:2.
Just clicking to come out of that box.
And now, I can start cropping.
I want to include the feet of this person here but exclude this part of the image.
So, I start here at this point and pressing the left mouse button, I drag upward towards the left to select the area.
Note that the aspect ratio is constant.
And now I have to decide how far to drag.
I think this is quite good.
Let’s check the borders.
We have excluded this part. There is a person sitting here.
I think there is enough room here for the person to be in the picture.
So, I will leave it that way since it looks nice.
There are windows here, on the top.
And there are enough of them in the image, to see them as windows.
But I think there is not enough room around here, at the feet.
So, I'll just click on the image, and drag it a bit down.
I think this is good now.
But now there are not enough windows seen here and the person seated here is very near to the border.
So, lets make the image a bit larger.
We are running into a problem hereC. Perhaps you can see it.
This happened during the rotation.
There is a small part here which is transparent now.
I don’t want to include that.
So, lets go back to Crop tool.
I want a bit more room here; so I am dragging this up.
Not so far.
I think this is quite good.
Now just click on the image and here we have the cropped & rotated image.
Shift + Ctrl + E brings us back to the full view.
Next step is to boost the colors & contrast a bit.
There are several ways here. I could use the color levels - here it is, the curves or some sliders.
But I will try doing this with Layers.
I simply make a copy of this layer here.
And change the Layers mode to Overlay.
And you can see, its a very strong effect. I don’t want to have it that much.
So, I slide the Opacity slider down to a value where I think its looking good.
Little more perhaps.
Ok, I think this is good enough.
I can always change that unless I right-click the mouse here to go to the channel list and say 'Flatten image' or 'Merge visible layers'.
Then all the changes become permanent
except if I go into History here and go back and undo the history.
But we’ll cover that later.
Next step is Resizing.
I will click on the Image menu & select Scale Image option.
Here, I will just type in 800 pixels
and I get the value for the Height automatically.
When I unlock this link here, I could distort the image while re-sizing it.
Interpolation. I think I will choose Cubic. I found that the highest layer here gives some art effects with brick buildings. Its strange and I will have to check that out.
Now, click on Scale.
And we’ll look at the result.
Shift + Ctrl + E gets us the whole image.
And when I press 1, I get 100% zoom.
Now we can look around in the image to see if we have any really disturbing or distracting stuff. But I personally think it worked out well.
Next step is Sharpening.
My lens is quite good and my camera too. But we have manipulated the image. So it has to be sharpened a bit.
I will select Filters
and click on Enhance and here is Sharpening. I could also use the Unsharp mask which is very powerful sharpening tool. But for now, Sharpening is enough.
This tool has basically only one option which is the sharpness slider. It can be adjusted and its enough for such an image.
This is the unsharpened image and when I drag this slider, the image gets sharpened more and more. You get a very funny effect if you slide it too far.
I think for this image this value is good.
The hair looks clearer now but here you can see some blending or distortion.
So, we will slide it down and this is better.
I would like to go for soft effects rather than have any distortion in the image.
They are the proof that you have manipulated the image.
So, let's look at the result.
It looks quite good.
And now the last step is Saving this image.
I will go to File and click on Save As and just change the original file extension ‘tif’ to ‘jpg’
and click on the Save button.
I get a warning that the JPEG can't handle images with multiple layers. Ok. So we have to export them.
I think 85%is a good standard value for this image.
So I have saved this image as JPEG image here.
You can look at it in full screen.
This is it. The first tutorial of Meet the GIMP. In future tutorials, I will cover topics like how to set up GIMP, how to draw, convert, etc. and tools and many more.
If you want to send a comment, please write to info@meetthegimp.org
More information is available at http://meetthegimp.org
I would like to hear from you. Tell me what you liked, what I could have made better, what you want to see in the future.
This is Hemant Waidande, dubbing for the Spoken Tutorial project.