The GIMP project was started in 1995 by Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball, and is now maintained by a group of volunteers under the auspices of the GNU Project. The first release was in January 1996, The latest version of GIMP, version 2.6.1, was released on December 21, 2010. Available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, GIMP is free software; this means that everybody can download and use it.
Besides being free, GIMP is a high-end image editor for photo retouching, image creation and editing. Through the years, a huge user community has grown around the GIMP; hobbyists, professional illustrators, filmmakers, and photographers use it daily in their work. This user base not only use it but also contributes to expand and improve GIMP through plugins and scripts.
This book is a collection of tasks that will allow you to learn how to use GIMP from a basic to an advanced level. Also, you can experiment while you learn, and enjoy it. I will repeat this throughout the book. It's important that you don't stick to the tasks exactly. If your objective is to work as a professional, only through experimentation will you acquire your own technique and style. Drawing, painting, and designing should not be a mechanical thing, even if you took the job just because you needed the money!
Enjoy the book.
Chapter 1, Using Draw and Paint Tools, explains how to use the most basic drawing and painting tools that are available for anyone wanting to start as an illustrator/cartoonist.
Chapter 2, Image Filters and Effects, gives an overview on many of the default filters that come with GIMP, applied examples, and a description of their options.
Chapter 3, Text and Fonts, explains how to work with fonts. It teaches several techniques to turn any kind of text from a solid colors to brilliant effects like frosted text, golden text, or a rubber stamp.
Chapter 4, Photo Manipulation, starts with an explanation of the basic image editing tools. After that, there are a few advanced techniques to create high-quality effects with any kind of photo.
Chapter 5, Playing With Color and Sharpness, explains how to correct imperfections and erase objects or the whole background from any photo.
Chapter 6, Web Design Tips: Buttons and Blogs, starts with how to create Web 2.0 buttons, and ends explaining how to create your own blog template from scratch using photos and some drawing tools.
Chapter 7, Web Design Tips: Backgrounds, explains how to create different backgrounds for a website from scratch by using only GIMP tools.
Chapter 8, Plugins and Scripts, gives an overview on how plugins and scripts work in GIMP, and how they continually help expand the user experience and improve the software.
Appendix A, Beyond GIMP, takes us beyond the software and discusses other useful resources that may help the amateur and professional.
Appendix B, Release Changes, highlights the changes introduced in v2.6.
You need to download GIMP 2.6 from http://www.gimp.org. All the tasks in this book were created using GIMP 2.6 in a Linux environment, but as long as you are using version 2.6.x, you can complete any of the tasks in a GIMP installation on the operating system of your choice.
This book is for people who have general knowledge about using computers, and for beginners who want to start a professional career as illustrators, graphic designers, and image editors. My intention is to start with simple tasks, increasing the level of difficulty with each chapter, so at the end of the book, you will not only have a good base of using GIMP, but you will also have some pieces you can use to start a portfolio.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish among different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The resolution fields are useful when printing the image."
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