The top of the tool box contains a Drop target area, you can drop images from other places on your harddrive to open them in GIMP. Some of the default keyboard shortcuts are given as well. For a much more detailed description of the tools, refer to the gimp manual's entry on the toolbox. We will not explain all the options for each tool, but you should at least know which one is which and roughly what it is for. To close GIMP you can either close this window or close the tool box (or use the menu File->Quit). It starts out small, but it will resize to hold your image when you create or load one. In the center you find the main dock window (Formally this is actually called the Empty Image window). All brushes, patterns and gradients can be modified and customized by the user. Gradients produce transitions between colours in various ways. Patterns create seamless mosaics of structure (you could for example use a pattern to paint a checker board). There are two more tabs in this dock, these show lists of patterns and gradients respectively (click them to see). They can be used to emulate actual paint brushes, but also be used as "stamps" for creating nice effects, as well as be animated. Brushes are, quite like their real-world counterpart, things you use to mark down things on the canvas. All these are useful, but we will not delve into them too much in this tutorial.īelow the layer list, another dock is attached, containing the list of brushes usable by GIMP. You also see that there are a bunch of tabs in the upper part of this window, clicking these will bring forth other functionality. We will explain the use of layers a little later. As we start creating a new image, this list will start to fill with layers. What we see at the moment is the empty Layer list To the far right we have a dock that contains several things in one. In the image we see the tool options for the paintbrush tool. This shows the settings for each tool and thus changes depending on which tool is currently active. You are wise to learn most of these by heart if you want to be effective.Īttached to the bottom of the tool box is the Tool options dock. These tools are in fact so often used that almost all of them also have default keyboard shortcuts for even faster access. This contains the most commonly used functions of the program, quite literally the artist's box of utilities. The default setup is pretty reasonable, but we will tweak it a bit later to be even more convenient.
#GIMP MAC USER GUIDE WINDOWS#
The areas marked in green as Dock attach strip are places where different windows can attach and merge with each other (we will try this below). You can add and remove windows from it as you like. The operating system shown is Linux Debian, so the window decorations (window bars, close buttons etc) might not look familiar to WIndows/Mac users, but the program should nevertheless work the same under all systems.įirst of all it should be remembered that GIMP's interface is extremely flexible. This tutorial image is from GIMP version 2.6.1 which will be used for this tutorial. When you start GIMP for the very first time, something like this will greet you. Starting GIMP for the first time - a quick orientation This tutorial will not go through the installation, follow the instructions given for each operating system. Once GIMP is installed, you can see what version you have in the menu Help->About (to find the menu see below).
The current stable versions are 2.6.x and this tutorial will not be fully correct if you are using an older version than 2.6.0. GIMP exists for many different computing platforms, including Linux, Windows and Mac. Whereas this tutorial is mainly aimed at complete newbies in GIMP (and to computer graphics in general), also veteran users might find a useful tidbit or two. From then on you can head on to more advanced tutorials, all of which often assumes you know the basics.
#GIMP MAC USER GUIDE INSTALL#
The idea is for you to get going with a quick run-through of setting up a vanilla install of GIMP, followed by you doing your first little image in the program.
So you have just started with GIMP, and now you are completely lost as to what to do next? There are windows and buttons everywhere and nothing makes sense? If so, this is the tutorial for you. Beginning with GIMP - Starting Tutorial for new users