Gimp tips

Komete

I'm looking for some basic tips for working with gimp. Maybe some tips in the right direction to get me manipulating pictures for online posts.


I played with various adbobe products before, even made a ut2k3 video where the ut players had light sabers with sound effects, so I'm not exactly starting from ground 0. But that was with photo shop and after effects and a few others. But sadly it was a few years ago and I don't have photo shop anymore.


But gimp is free and from what I can tell is powerful.


1 tip I need badly, is a fast way to crop out a back ground so I only have the item I want and the background is white. The only way I can do it now is to use the paths tool, then select it, copy it, and past it in a new window and export it from there. There should be an easier way.



If anyone would like to share some tips or point out some cool things to be done Gimp, I'd really appreciate it.

Snarkasm

Khaos should be coming along here shortly with an article about this very piece of software. Look for it soon!

kryyst

There may be an easier way but that's always how I've done it in gimp. Use the path tool select the forground image then either paste it into a new background or reverse the selection and just hit delete if you don't need the background at all.

Komete

Snarkasm wrote:

Khaos should be coming along here shortly with an article about this very piece of software. Look for it soon!

Look forward to it. I hope he does a few examples and maybe a few easy how-to's.

kryyst wrote:

There may be an easier way but that's always how I've done it in gimp. Use the path tool select the forground image then either paste it into a new background or reverse the selection and just hit delete if you don't need the background at all.

How do you reverse the selection? I haven't had much success in my attempts or maybe I didn't realize I had the revers (the back ground) selected.

Snarkasm

You can "select inverse" in one of the menus.

Khaos

Komete wrote:

1 tip I need badly, is a fast way to crop out a back ground so I only have the item I want and the background is white. The only way I can do it now is to use the paths tool, then select it, copy it, and past it in a new window and export it from there. There should be an easier way.

I'm sure there's an easier way to do this, but I still crop old-school when it comes to cases like this... I copy the whole layer, or image, into a new, duplicate layer and then go to town with the eraser so that I end up with a reasonably anti-aliased crop. That also affords you the ability to go in on your final pass and sort out the edges on a pixel-by-pixel basis.

For the rough crop, I usually just use the magic wand selection method (free select), then select inverse and hit the delete key which works the same way in GIMP as it does in Photoshop.

As for the GIMP article, it is forthcoming as soon as we figure out a publishing schedule for OSE and as soon as I recover from a nasty infection that I caught from shwaip.

Srsly, I pulled a shwaip on Monday and had to go to the doctor who, after doing some blood work, said I had the highest white blood cell count she had ever seen and promptly put me on enough antibiotics to rid China of yellow fever. That's a lot of antibiotics. Also, it's a good thing I don't have AIDS. Like shwaip. Or I'd probably be dead right now.

Hopefully I will be tip top by the end of the week and then I'll get crackin' on the GIMP article.

As a matter of planning the course, I think I will keep the article to a review/compare format and perhaps post a couple of how-to's and other such useful information in a series of blogs.

Alright, back to the death bed for me. Carry on. =]

Komete

" I pulled a shwaip"....lol

Khaos

Komete wrote:

How do you reverse the selection? I haven't had much success in my attempts or maybe I didn't realize I had the revers (the back ground) selected.

I think I have my hot-keys setup as the defaults, but for me Select -> Invert is mapped to Ctrl+I. It is, of course, also found under the Select menu.

You can customize your shortcuts to be more like Photoshop in the preferences. I know I found a few key shortcuts missing, such as one to restore the zoom level / perspective to 100% / 0deg (Ctrl+Alt+0 in Photoshop). GIMP has such a command, but no keybinding for it. These are the little things that I think tend to throw off an experienced Photoshop user, but more to follow in the full article (Which will probably end up being too long for its own good).

Komete

Khaos wrote:

I think I have my hot-keys setup as the defaults, but for me Select -> Invert is mapped to Ctrl+I. It is, of course, also found under the Select menu.

You can customize your shortcuts to be more like Photoshop in the preferences. I know I found a few key shortcuts missing, such as one to restore the zoom level / perspective to 100% / 0deg (Ctrl+Alt+0 in Photoshop). GIMP has such a command, but no keybinding for it. These are the little things that I think tend to throw off an experienced Photoshop user, but more to follow in the full article (Which will probably end up being too long for its own good).

Thanks for the tip bud, I will use it. Every couple of months I have to write a technical how-to at work. Then I have to give a class about it. I know what a pain it can be to explain features.

Anyways, looking forward to your Gimp review.

Khaos

Right on. Also, I think that was the bacteria talking earlier when I said magic wand select. I really meant lasso select, which is free select. My bad.

In other news, I am feeling less and less like shwaip by the day. Tomorrow I may make a full recovery.